Boston’s Latin School Thriving in 350th Year

On the Monday after the “Miracle in Miami,” Boston’s biggest upset of the enemy since the British evacuated the city, classics master Joe Desmond went to the blackboard and scrawled two words in the Greek alphabet.

Translated into Roman letters, they read: Phlouti polutropos .

Several of the bookish types in Boston Latin School’s advanced Greek class looked puzzled, but hands shot up among the street-smart, sports-savvy inner-city kids.

Phlouti Identified

“Flutie, Doug Flutie,” one correctly identified the former Boston College quarterback, now with the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League, whose “Hail Mary” touchdown pass in the last seconds beat Miami University.

“And polutropos , what does that mean?” Desmond asked.

“Turning.” Twisting.” Sly.” Answers came from every direction now.

“What about scrambling?” the teacher suggested.

“Yeah, that’s it, scrambling,” agreed a gangling Greek scholar in a multilayered Afro. “That Flutie sure can scramble.”

Boston Latin, America’s oldest public school, celebrating its 350th birthday on April 23, was once again lighting the way out of the deepest cellars of poverty and living up to the classical boast of its bumper stickers: Sumus primi --”We’re No. 1.”

Older Than Harvard

The school--begun one year before Harvard, which allegedly was founded so Latin graduates would have some place to go--has echoed with declamations, still required five times a year, and declensions of Latin nouns from such famous American thinkers and doers as Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Charles Bulfinch, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Ward Beecher, Wendell Phillips, George Santayana, Bernard Berenson, Leonard Bernstein, Theodore H. White and others too numerous to fit on the hallowed frieze in the assembly hall.

Like half and sometimes two-thirds of the freshmen who enrolled after him, Benjamin Franklin did not graduate. At Latin, legend hath it that he flunked out. But the sage whose image adorns the coveted medal for scholarship says in his autobiography that his father removed him for showing “no inclination for the clergy.”

“Most probably, some Latin master told him to go fly a kite,” said the assistant headmaster, Jacqueline Tibbetts, whose eminence on the 130-member faculty is in keeping with a historic change that came over the school in 1972. Girls were admitted then, and the maintenance staff had to hunt around for toilet facilities, there being only one ladies room in the half-century-old building, and the ancient languages department had to research female Latin first names to print on the diplomas.

Racial Quotas Imposed

Two years later, Boston Latin faced a far more difficult challenge when a U.S. District Court overhauled its admissions criteria, based on grades and S.A.T scores, and installed a 35% quota for blacks, Latinos and other minorities. Asians were not included in the court order--they always have flocked to this demanding, no-nonsense, six-year public prep school from Boston’s bustling Chinatown and lately from its Vietnamese and Cambodian communities.

Boston Latin, a decade later, has survived the storm over “deseg,” as the issue was called by impassioned alumni who rallied to defend the school against charges of “elitism” and won a compromise that ensured minimum entrance standards.

It is now Headmaster Michael Contompasis’ proudest boast that Latin “sends more minority students on to four-year colleges than any public or private school in the country.”

Nearly half of the 34 students answering the R-6 (sixth recitation period) buzzer for Desmond’s third-year Greek class were from minority or recent immigrant backgrounds.

Only Boston residents may enter this free public school. Today, slightly more than half of the 2,300 students are girls. Retention is still a problem in meeting the court desegregation order.

No Equality of Results

“We take in 550 a year and graduate 280 to 290,” Contompasis said. “The dilemma is we are committed to equal access of opportunity but can’t guarantee equality of results. One measure of our success is that 98% apply to go on to college.”

Of these, he says, 37 will be accepted by “some of the most competitive schools in the country.” Two dozen or so will go on to Harvard, wearing the power and prestige of what Boston School Committee member Kevin McCluskey (Latin ‘72) calls “the double old school tie.”

In Massachusetts, the Latin School contributed nine governors, four presidents of Harvard, five signers of the Declaration of Independence, four mayors, one cardinal, three bishops and both founding fathers of the Kennedy clan: John (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald (1880) and Joseph P. Kennedy (‘08).

The Latin connection means you can get almost anyone of any importance from the sheriff of Suffolk County (Dennis Kearney, ‘68) to Doug Flutie’s agent (Bob Woolf, ‘45) to Olympic and now pro hockey player Jack O’Callahan (‘75) to return your phone calls.

“Did any school anywhere do as much for a city?” asks Cardinal John Wright (‘27), who, when the old alma mater was under siege by modernists wanting to substitute bookkeeping for Latin, prayed “as fervently as I can pray for release from any plague that Boston might be delivered from the influence of such politicians and educators.”

Survived Progressivism

Over the years and centuries, the school has had to defend its classic tradition and the mandatory teaching of Latin from charges of being irrelevant, outmoded, elitist, not career-oriented. It survived the progressive educators in the 1930s, who ridiculed its rigid teaching methods, and the “Sputnik scare” of the late ‘50s, when science was the educational panacea.

Boston was only 5 years old when the Puritan settlers at a general meeting agreed “that our brother Philemon Pormort shalbe intreated to become scholemaster for the teaching and nourtering of children with us.” The date by modern calendar reckoning was April 23, 1635, or MDCXXXV, as they render it in the red brick Latin schoolhouse.

Two years later, Pormort was run out of town as a heretic, and Boston Latin ever since has mirrored the politics and population of the city, while demanding the best from its brightest.

Cotton Mather went off to Harvard at age 12, speaking seven languages, built the largest library in the colonies and helped found Yale in a fit of pique at being passed over for the presidency of Harvard.

Old boys Samuel Adams and Thomas Hutchinson, the royal governor, differed vociferously over the meanings of loyalty and freedom, which led to some tea being dumped in the harbor.

Latin lads accustomed to coasting down Beacon Hill to the school that gave School Street its name staged this continent’s first student demonstration. They marched on the headquarters of a British general whose servants were ruining the sled run by dumping cinders in the street. The general caved in, saying that he had trouble enough with the men of Boston without taking on the boys.

‘Lay Down Your Books’

On the 19th of April, 1775, while Paul Revere was clattering off to Lexington, Headmaster John Lovell made the dramatic announcement: “War’s begun and school’s done, deponite libros (lay down your books).”

Lovell, an ardent loyalist, disagreed strongly with his rebel son, James Lovell, the assistant headmaster, and they thundered opposing views from benches at opposite ends of the room. When the British evacuated Boston, both sailed off to Halifax, the headmaster as the guest of Adm. Richard Howe, his son a prisoner in irons.

Anti-slavery leaders Wendell Phillips (1828) and Henry Ward Beecher (1832) made Boston the hub of the abolitionist movement.

Future philosopher George Santayana (1884), first editor of The Register, Latin’s still-thriving student publication, had to apologize for a parody of Virgil that was deemed “destructive of the teachers’ dignity and holding them up to ridicule.”

Century-Old Rivalry

The Thanksgiving Day football match between Boston Latin and English High, now approaching its 99th game, is the nation’s oldest prep school rivalry. Latin has won 16 of the last 17 games, spurred on by the brekeke-kex, koax-koax Greek cheer from Aristophanes’ “The Frogs.”

Boston Latin has always been the stage for what historian T. H. White (‘32) calls the “urban ethnic ballet,” the old Yankee stock’s moving out and sending their children to Exeter and St. Paul’s, to be replaced by the Irish, then the Jews, who in turn “dissolved in the suburbs,” giving way to the Italians, then the blacks and Orientals.

The student body was about “40 Jewish and 40 Irish, the rest everything,” when White, at the height of the Depression, often walked the four miles from Dorchester because his family, which was on home relief, could not spare the nickel trolley fare.

“You had to want to go there,” recalls White, who hated Cicero at the time but loved playing solo B-flat cornet in the band.

“It was the best kind of school. It gave everyone the same chance, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Protestant, black, then flung them out ruthlessly when they didn’t make it. This was a magnet school, drawing the best from all over the city, before magnet schools were invented.”

Headlines in Latin

White, who was too poor to go to Harvard until he received a newspaper delivery boys’ scholarship two years after graduation from Latin, used to shout the headlines in Latin to envied classmates descending the stairs to the Cambridge subway in front of his newsstand.

Composer Leonard Bernstein (‘35), in accepting the alumni Man of the Year Award last November, waxed nostalgic at the invocation, delivered by a graying priest: “It’s nice to be blessed by one of the Irish who used to beat up on us Jewish kids.”

“Walk up the corridor with me,” Headmaster Contompasis said. “We’ll meet Russians, Lebanese, Cape Verdians, Haitians, Vietnamese . . . . This school never has been more of a melting pot.”

A silver-thatched reporter, who, for one glorious semester decades ago had strolled these corridors as a substitute Greek and Latin teacher, accepted his invitation.

“Tempora mutantur (times change), “ echoed a refrain from Ovid. The jarring class bell has given way to a brazen siren, which girls, too, now hurry to answer. The old dress code of jacket and tie has been replaced by the unisex outfit of T-shirt, jeans, white sox and sneakers. More math and a modern language are required now, and everyone has to be “computer literate” to be graduated. But the conjugation of Latin irregular verbs can be called up on the computer.