“Last year we graduated fifty-one students and over 75 percent of those went to Ivy League schools!”Ī burst of applause filled the room as the proud parents sitting next to their sons congratulated Nolan’s efforts. “In her first year,” Dean Nolan bellowed into the microphone, “Welton Academy graduated five students.” He paused. When the squeaking of chairs subsided, a solemn hush fell over the chapel. He watched silently as the boys around him shouted in unison, “Tradition! Honor! Discipline! Excellence!” His face was drawn and unhappy, his eyes dark with anger.
Sixteen-year-old Todd Anderson, one of the few students not wearing the school blazer, hesitated as the boys around him rose to their feet. The shuffle of feet broke the tense silence as the students rose to attention. “Gentlemen,” he bellowed, “what are the four pillars?” One hundred years ago, in 1859, forty-one boys sat in this room and were asked the same question that now greets you at the start of each semester.” Nolan paused dramatically, his gaze sweeping the room full of intense, frightened young faces. “Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished alumni, and students … This year, 1959, marks the hundreth year that Welton Academy has been in existence. “The light of knowledge shall be passed from old to young,” Headmaster Nolan intoned solemnly, as each boy lit the candle of the student sitting next to him. Slowly, he bent forward, lighting the candle of the first student on the aisle. The gentleman with the candle walked to the front of the audience where the youngest students sat holding unlit candles. The bagpiper marched in place at the corner of the dais, and the four banner carriers, lowering their flags that read, “Tradition,” “Honor,” “Discipline,” and “Excellence,” quietly took seats with the audience. The audience applauded politely as the older gentleman stepped slowly forward with the candle. “Ladies and gentlemen … boys …” he said dramatically, pointing toward the man with the candle. Headmaster Gale Nolan, a husky man in his early sixties, stood at the podium watching expectantly as the procession concluded.
The four boys who carried banners marched solemnly to the dais, followed slowly by the elderly men, the last of whom proudly carried the lighted candle. They heard the reverberations of the bagpipes as a short, elderly man swathed in flowing robes lit a candle and led a procession of students carrying banners, robed teachers, and alumnae down a long slate hallway into the venerable chapel. Inside the stone chapel of Welton Academy, a private school nestled in the remote hills of Vermont, more than three hundred boys, all wearing the academy blazer, sat on either side of the long aisle, surrounded by proud-faced parents, and waited.
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