120TH Anniversary
24
M e r c e r s b u r g m a g a z i n e s u mm e r 2 0 1 3
120 t h Anniversary
Walter and Barbara Burgin
M e r c e r s b u r g m a g a z i n e s u mm e r 2 0 1 3
25
Walter Burgin ’53 How did I get to Mercersburg? It’s a fairly long story. I grew up in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania, just across the river from Harrisburg. My dad was a small-town doctor there. When I was in the eighth grade, a friend of his who ran the local bank had a very bright son who’d graduated as valedictorian of his high-school class, gone off to Cornell, and then flunked out after a semester. My father knew that wasn’t what he wanted for me. I’m sure it was the boy, but he worried that it was the school. When my father was fresh out of medical school, he had gone to work as a doctor for a coal company in a mining town in western Pennsylvania. A hardware store in the neighboring town supplied the company store. Part of the arrangement between the company and the hardware store was that my father would take care of its owner and his family. He got to know them all, except for the son, who was away at boarding school—at Mercersburg. He ended up going to Princeton and had a pretty successful life. His name was Jimmy Stewart ’28. That’s how my father knew about Mercersburg, and one Saturday morning, we got in the car and started driving down the valley. When we got to campus, Wilmarth Jacobs interviewed me, and I was enrolled in the fall. It was not any conscious decision on my part, and it wasn’t choosing Mercersburg among options. It was simply my father in a mild panic about what might happen to his older son deciding to do something. When I began at Mercersburg, ninth graders all lived together in Laucks Hall and were referred to as “upper juniors.” At one time there had been an eighth grade—the “lower juniors.” I remember going home and telling people I was a junior, and they thought I had skipped two grades. The strong sense of community back then came in part from athletics in an all-boys’ school, with rivalries and going out to support the teams. You learned that very quickly as part of the culture. Step Songs, the rallies, being at football games—all those things were important. They were the source of some of the bonding, but most of it came from just living and eating together and moving around in a way that you really got to know everybody. Though I became a mathematics teacher, I didn’t take math my senior year at Mercersburg. That passion came later at Dartmouth. At Mercersburg, mathematics was just a course I took, but it was in a geometry class and in Keil Hall that I found the faculty member
who made the greatest difference in my life—Bill Howard. You really learned from him in the classroom because you understood. And we were real people for him. He was a marvelous human being who cared about you—even though he scared the hell out of you, really, and you lived in fear of him. I remember when he died, I went up to Massachusetts for the service, and they asked me to say something about him. People came up to me afterward and said they couldn’t believe that anybody was ever intimidated by this nice old man. But he was the dean, and he did what he needed to do as the dean. He also ran a dormitory. He taught a full load of mathematics classes. He was the registrar. He did college counseling singlehandedly. And he ran the dining hall. Years later, when he retired and I was headmaster, we kept replacing pieces of him. As a Mercersburg student, I swam for “King” John Miller, and though I was just a journeyman swimmer, when I ended up going to Dartmouth I swam for another Mercersburg graduate, Karl Michael ’25. I edited the Mercersburg News and worked with Bryan Barker, who was also a strong influence. And I became good friends with Joe Caldwell, an English teacher at Mercersburg who lived in New Hampshire when I was at Dartmouth. There were seven of us from Mercersburg at Dartmouth our freshman year, and three of us got in a car and drove down to have dinner with Joe and his wife one evening. During dinner, there was a knock at the door and Joe got up to answer it. He came back, opened his liquor cabinet, got out a glass, poured some scotch, and went back to the door. After he sat back down, we asked him what it was. He said, “My neighbor just needed a couple of fingers of scotch.” The neighbor was J.D. Salinger. The summer before I enrolled at Dartmouth, I received a letter from a man named John Kemeny, who was the incoming head of the mathematics department. He wrote that he had been looking over the records of the entering class and planned to teach a course in calculus and thought I would enjoy taking it and hoped I would. Remember that I hadn’t taken senior math at Mercersburg, and I never had trigonometry in my life until I taught it. But I thought, why not? For the next four years I just attached to John. He was only five or six years older than I was with a freshly minted Ph.D. from Princeton, where he had been Einstein’s last research assistant. He eventually became president of Dartmouth and later worked with
26
M e r c e r s b u r g m a g a z i n e s u mm e r 2 0 1 3
Dick Thornburgh ’50 as chair of the Three Mile Island Commission. He was brilliant at whatever he did and had a mind you just don’t encounter very often. He was a marvelous teacher and a wonderful mentor. In the summers before and after my senior year in college, I worked at IBM in research and then went into the doctoral program at Princeton in mathematics. I began to understand at Princeton, in a small but brilliant group of other graduate students in mathematics and physics, that though I could learn almost anything in mathematics, I would never be the one to chart a new course. I had been back at Mercersburg for my five-year reunion early in my second year in graduate school. I talked with Dr. Charles Tippetts (1912), and somehow he must
120 t h Anniversary
have sensed the challenges I was facing. I don’t know how, because I still didn’t really understand them myself. But shortly before Christmas, I got a call from him telling me that Norris Grabill had fallen ill and wouldn’t be able to teach again. He wanted me to come back and teach the rest of that year. I was in the middle of graduate work. I had a National Science Foundation fellowship. We had a lease on an apartment. Barbara had a job. I said I couldn’t. But then he said, “I really need you,” and two weeks later, I was teaching at Mercersburg. That’s how I came to Mercersburg a second time, and again it wasn’t intentional, but again it was absolutely the right thing. I just loved the teaching and never looked back. I kept reading and doing things in
About Walter Burgin Valedictorian of Mercersburg’s Class of 1953; graduated from Dartmouth College and did graduate work at Princeton University and Harvard University Taught mathematics at Mercersburg from 1958 to 1964; was department chair from 1961 to 1964 before leaving for eight years to teach at Phillips Exeter Academy Appointed Mercersburg’s fifth headmaster in 1972; spent 25 years in the post before retiring in 1997 Serves as chairman of the board of directors for the E.E. Ford Foundation His wife, Barbara, has made countless contributions to the life of the school— most notably as an admission officer, interior designer, landscaper, and hostess;
the Burgin Center for the Arts, which opened in 2006, is named in honor of the couple Other Mercersburg alumni in the Burgin family include his daughter, Christine Burgin Wegman ’78; brother, Alex Burgin ’57; brother-in-law, Don Shuck ’48; and nephew, D.L. Shuck ’71
mathematics and developed a mathematics curriculum, but I was now a teacher, not a mathematician. I became department head too soon—essentially, by default. I was perfectly happy teaching at Mercersburg and really had no ambition to do anything other than be a good department head, but I did decide that there might be something about education that I should know. So I pursued a master’s degree at Harvard during the summers. In order to do it in two summers instead of three, they said I needed to convince someone to do a reading course with me. A man from Exeter named Jack Adkins taught the master of arts in teaching candidates in the summers, and maybe he could take me on. Jack was willing, and he and I worked together a couple of times a week that summer, and I managed to get accelerated. Jack was one of the authors of the textbooks we used at Mercersburg in algebra and geometry. Later that year I got a call from him saying he’d like me to come up to Exeter. I didn’t understand that it was to interview for a position. I thought he just wanted to show me the place—like a kid with a new toy. He was a wonderfully enthusiastic man, and he loved Exeter. But it turned out they did have an opening and that’s what I was there for. I realized pretty quickly that these were people from whom I could learn a lot. Rannie Lynch, who became my closest friend in the department at Exeter, had been there 25 years and was still a junior member. These were the people who had written all the textbooks we used. They’d all been there forever and they were master teachers. And so I went to Exeter and loved what I did there. I had been at Exeter seven years when I got a call from Mercersburg that Bill Fowle was going to step down. They wanted to know if I would represent the alumni body on the search committee. I thought that
M e r c e r s b u r g m a g a z i n e s u mm e r 2 0 1 3
was great, because while the next head didn’t have to come from another boarding school, there certainly would be candidates from such schools, and most were in New England where I was. I had a kind of network because I was active in the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and knew a fair number of people at other schools. I thought it would be a way for me to give back to Mercersburg. As we were finishing our first session, Jack Detwiler ’29, who chaired the search committee, looked at me and said, “Walter, I think we’d like you to step off the committee and become a candidate.” And I said, “Jack, you’re not going to hire me. I’ve got no administrative experience. If you just don’t want me here, that’s OK. You’ve had three hours of me and if that’s enough, I’ll understand.” But he said he was serious and wanted me to think about it. How do you say no? The others on the committee were Bill Howard as the faculty representative and Nick Coyne ’50, who was a student when I was a student, though he was three years ahead of me. I went back to Exeter and talked to the principal. I told him that this could happen. He was supportive, and I came back in 1972. At Mercersburg, I wasn’t really the head of one school for 25 years—I was the head of several schools, all in the same place. Compare the school from the early 1970s to the one in the mid-1990s and they’re very different places in very different times. When I became headmaster, the school had just become coeducational. That would have been one of the things I was most determined to change, but it had just happened, and so I didn’t have to do that. I just had to help the school do it well. One of my early priorities was to completely reconfigure the way in which faculty and students lived together in dormitories. I knew from personal experience how that
27
Burgin with Nobel Laureate Burton Richter ’48
could be, and I wanted Mercersburg to be more like what I had known living in the dormitory with my family at Exeter. I didn’t want to make it exactly like Exeter because they are very different schools, but I wanted us to have faculty families living in dormitories, because simply having families in the dormitory is greatly different. We weren’t going to be able to maintain an outstanding faculty of only single men and now women willing to live in one-room apartments. In some dormitories, the faculty even shared bathrooms with the students. It was something we as a school needed to do, but it couldn’t happen quickly, at least not completely. We made progress in small ways in a number of dormitories, but there were other priorities, and getting plans in place to do it in the largest dormitories was the last thing we accomplished 25 years later. The planning was done; the building had to follow after I was gone. Before then, we dealt with the academic spaces, and with the building of Lenfest Hall and the renovations in Keil Hall and Irvine Hall, every single space in which teaching went on was either new or newly renovated. This is such a beautiful campus, but before the academic building program we went to school just like you’d go to school in any big public high school—we came in the doors of Irvine Hall in the morning and went up and down stairs to classrooms. We came out for lunch and then went right back in. Irvine Hall was built deliberately to house all
the classes, because at the time classes were scattered about in some very substandard rooms. So the building of Irvine Hall originally was a big accomplishment. But over time, it became apparent that we should break that up. So when we built the library, we deliberately put the history department there. When we moved the library out of Keil Hall, we put classrooms and the English department there in Rutledge Hall. We had classrooms around the campus, and everybody had to go to them almost every day. People were back outside and could enjoy the beauty of the place. The best thing that I got from all my years at Mercersburg came when I was a student. I went to Pittsburgh on a weekend with my roommate, Fred Eichhorn ’53, and had a blind date—Barbara. I never let go. For the next four years, we continued to see one another as much as we could with her at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh and me at Dartmouth in New Hampshire. I graduated on a Saturday, she graduated the following Friday, and we were married the next day. She was an integral partner in everything that I did when I was headmaster. She took a strong interest in the school grounds and the renovation and care of interior spaces across the campus. She also worked in the admission office, because we needed her there. She was always there to do what needed to be done. She still is. I can’t imagine my life without her.
M e r c e r s b u r g m a g a z i n e s u mm e r 2 0 1 3
120 t h Anniversary
Walter and Barbara Burgin
M e r c e r s b u r g m a g a z i n e s u mm e r 2 0 1 3
25
Walter Burgin ’53 How did I get to Mercersburg? It’s a fairly long story. I grew up in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania, just across the river from Harrisburg. My dad was a small-town doctor there. When I was in the eighth grade, a friend of his who ran the local bank had a very bright son who’d graduated as valedictorian of his high-school class, gone off to Cornell, and then flunked out after a semester. My father knew that wasn’t what he wanted for me. I’m sure it was the boy, but he worried that it was the school. When my father was fresh out of medical school, he had gone to work as a doctor for a coal company in a mining town in western Pennsylvania. A hardware store in the neighboring town supplied the company store. Part of the arrangement between the company and the hardware store was that my father would take care of its owner and his family. He got to know them all, except for the son, who was away at boarding school—at Mercersburg. He ended up going to Princeton and had a pretty successful life. His name was Jimmy Stewart ’28. That’s how my father knew about Mercersburg, and one Saturday morning, we got in the car and started driving down the valley. When we got to campus, Wilmarth Jacobs interviewed me, and I was enrolled in the fall. It was not any conscious decision on my part, and it wasn’t choosing Mercersburg among options. It was simply my father in a mild panic about what might happen to his older son deciding to do something. When I began at Mercersburg, ninth graders all lived together in Laucks Hall and were referred to as “upper juniors.” At one time there had been an eighth grade—the “lower juniors.” I remember going home and telling people I was a junior, and they thought I had skipped two grades. The strong sense of community back then came in part from athletics in an all-boys’ school, with rivalries and going out to support the teams. You learned that very quickly as part of the culture. Step Songs, the rallies, being at football games—all those things were important. They were the source of some of the bonding, but most of it came from just living and eating together and moving around in a way that you really got to know everybody. Though I became a mathematics teacher, I didn’t take math my senior year at Mercersburg. That passion came later at Dartmouth. At Mercersburg, mathematics was just a course I took, but it was in a geometry class and in Keil Hall that I found the faculty member
who made the greatest difference in my life—Bill Howard. You really learned from him in the classroom because you understood. And we were real people for him. He was a marvelous human being who cared about you—even though he scared the hell out of you, really, and you lived in fear of him. I remember when he died, I went up to Massachusetts for the service, and they asked me to say something about him. People came up to me afterward and said they couldn’t believe that anybody was ever intimidated by this nice old man. But he was the dean, and he did what he needed to do as the dean. He also ran a dormitory. He taught a full load of mathematics classes. He was the registrar. He did college counseling singlehandedly. And he ran the dining hall. Years later, when he retired and I was headmaster, we kept replacing pieces of him. As a Mercersburg student, I swam for “King” John Miller, and though I was just a journeyman swimmer, when I ended up going to Dartmouth I swam for another Mercersburg graduate, Karl Michael ’25. I edited the Mercersburg News and worked with Bryan Barker, who was also a strong influence. And I became good friends with Joe Caldwell, an English teacher at Mercersburg who lived in New Hampshire when I was at Dartmouth. There were seven of us from Mercersburg at Dartmouth our freshman year, and three of us got in a car and drove down to have dinner with Joe and his wife one evening. During dinner, there was a knock at the door and Joe got up to answer it. He came back, opened his liquor cabinet, got out a glass, poured some scotch, and went back to the door. After he sat back down, we asked him what it was. He said, “My neighbor just needed a couple of fingers of scotch.” The neighbor was J.D. Salinger. The summer before I enrolled at Dartmouth, I received a letter from a man named John Kemeny, who was the incoming head of the mathematics department. He wrote that he had been looking over the records of the entering class and planned to teach a course in calculus and thought I would enjoy taking it and hoped I would. Remember that I hadn’t taken senior math at Mercersburg, and I never had trigonometry in my life until I taught it. But I thought, why not? For the next four years I just attached to John. He was only five or six years older than I was with a freshly minted Ph.D. from Princeton, where he had been Einstein’s last research assistant. He eventually became president of Dartmouth and later worked with
26
M e r c e r s b u r g m a g a z i n e s u mm e r 2 0 1 3
Dick Thornburgh ’50 as chair of the Three Mile Island Commission. He was brilliant at whatever he did and had a mind you just don’t encounter very often. He was a marvelous teacher and a wonderful mentor. In the summers before and after my senior year in college, I worked at IBM in research and then went into the doctoral program at Princeton in mathematics. I began to understand at Princeton, in a small but brilliant group of other graduate students in mathematics and physics, that though I could learn almost anything in mathematics, I would never be the one to chart a new course. I had been back at Mercersburg for my five-year reunion early in my second year in graduate school. I talked with Dr. Charles Tippetts (1912), and somehow he must
120 t h Anniversary
have sensed the challenges I was facing. I don’t know how, because I still didn’t really understand them myself. But shortly before Christmas, I got a call from him telling me that Norris Grabill had fallen ill and wouldn’t be able to teach again. He wanted me to come back and teach the rest of that year. I was in the middle of graduate work. I had a National Science Foundation fellowship. We had a lease on an apartment. Barbara had a job. I said I couldn’t. But then he said, “I really need you,” and two weeks later, I was teaching at Mercersburg. That’s how I came to Mercersburg a second time, and again it wasn’t intentional, but again it was absolutely the right thing. I just loved the teaching and never looked back. I kept reading and doing things in
About Walter Burgin Valedictorian of Mercersburg’s Class of 1953; graduated from Dartmouth College and did graduate work at Princeton University and Harvard University Taught mathematics at Mercersburg from 1958 to 1964; was department chair from 1961 to 1964 before leaving for eight years to teach at Phillips Exeter Academy Appointed Mercersburg’s fifth headmaster in 1972; spent 25 years in the post before retiring in 1997 Serves as chairman of the board of directors for the E.E. Ford Foundation His wife, Barbara, has made countless contributions to the life of the school— most notably as an admission officer, interior designer, landscaper, and hostess;
the Burgin Center for the Arts, which opened in 2006, is named in honor of the couple Other Mercersburg alumni in the Burgin family include his daughter, Christine Burgin Wegman ’78; brother, Alex Burgin ’57; brother-in-law, Don Shuck ’48; and nephew, D.L. Shuck ’71
mathematics and developed a mathematics curriculum, but I was now a teacher, not a mathematician. I became department head too soon—essentially, by default. I was perfectly happy teaching at Mercersburg and really had no ambition to do anything other than be a good department head, but I did decide that there might be something about education that I should know. So I pursued a master’s degree at Harvard during the summers. In order to do it in two summers instead of three, they said I needed to convince someone to do a reading course with me. A man from Exeter named Jack Adkins taught the master of arts in teaching candidates in the summers, and maybe he could take me on. Jack was willing, and he and I worked together a couple of times a week that summer, and I managed to get accelerated. Jack was one of the authors of the textbooks we used at Mercersburg in algebra and geometry. Later that year I got a call from him saying he’d like me to come up to Exeter. I didn’t understand that it was to interview for a position. I thought he just wanted to show me the place—like a kid with a new toy. He was a wonderfully enthusiastic man, and he loved Exeter. But it turned out they did have an opening and that’s what I was there for. I realized pretty quickly that these were people from whom I could learn a lot. Rannie Lynch, who became my closest friend in the department at Exeter, had been there 25 years and was still a junior member. These were the people who had written all the textbooks we used. They’d all been there forever and they were master teachers. And so I went to Exeter and loved what I did there. I had been at Exeter seven years when I got a call from Mercersburg that Bill Fowle was going to step down. They wanted to know if I would represent the alumni body on the search committee. I thought that
M e r c e r s b u r g m a g a z i n e s u mm e r 2 0 1 3
was great, because while the next head didn’t have to come from another boarding school, there certainly would be candidates from such schools, and most were in New England where I was. I had a kind of network because I was active in the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and knew a fair number of people at other schools. I thought it would be a way for me to give back to Mercersburg. As we were finishing our first session, Jack Detwiler ’29, who chaired the search committee, looked at me and said, “Walter, I think we’d like you to step off the committee and become a candidate.” And I said, “Jack, you’re not going to hire me. I’ve got no administrative experience. If you just don’t want me here, that’s OK. You’ve had three hours of me and if that’s enough, I’ll understand.” But he said he was serious and wanted me to think about it. How do you say no? The others on the committee were Bill Howard as the faculty representative and Nick Coyne ’50, who was a student when I was a student, though he was three years ahead of me. I went back to Exeter and talked to the principal. I told him that this could happen. He was supportive, and I came back in 1972. At Mercersburg, I wasn’t really the head of one school for 25 years—I was the head of several schools, all in the same place. Compare the school from the early 1970s to the one in the mid-1990s and they’re very different places in very different times. When I became headmaster, the school had just become coeducational. That would have been one of the things I was most determined to change, but it had just happened, and so I didn’t have to do that. I just had to help the school do it well. One of my early priorities was to completely reconfigure the way in which faculty and students lived together in dormitories. I knew from personal experience how that
27
Burgin with Nobel Laureate Burton Richter ’48
could be, and I wanted Mercersburg to be more like what I had known living in the dormitory with my family at Exeter. I didn’t want to make it exactly like Exeter because they are very different schools, but I wanted us to have faculty families living in dormitories, because simply having families in the dormitory is greatly different. We weren’t going to be able to maintain an outstanding faculty of only single men and now women willing to live in one-room apartments. In some dormitories, the faculty even shared bathrooms with the students. It was something we as a school needed to do, but it couldn’t happen quickly, at least not completely. We made progress in small ways in a number of dormitories, but there were other priorities, and getting plans in place to do it in the largest dormitories was the last thing we accomplished 25 years later. The planning was done; the building had to follow after I was gone. Before then, we dealt with the academic spaces, and with the building of Lenfest Hall and the renovations in Keil Hall and Irvine Hall, every single space in which teaching went on was either new or newly renovated. This is such a beautiful campus, but before the academic building program we went to school just like you’d go to school in any big public high school—we came in the doors of Irvine Hall in the morning and went up and down stairs to classrooms. We came out for lunch and then went right back in. Irvine Hall was built deliberately to house all
the classes, because at the time classes were scattered about in some very substandard rooms. So the building of Irvine Hall originally was a big accomplishment. But over time, it became apparent that we should break that up. So when we built the library, we deliberately put the history department there. When we moved the library out of Keil Hall, we put classrooms and the English department there in Rutledge Hall. We had classrooms around the campus, and everybody had to go to them almost every day. People were back outside and could enjoy the beauty of the place. The best thing that I got from all my years at Mercersburg came when I was a student. I went to Pittsburgh on a weekend with my roommate, Fred Eichhorn ’53, and had a blind date—Barbara. I never let go. For the next four years, we continued to see one another as much as we could with her at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh and me at Dartmouth in New Hampshire. I graduated on a Saturday, she graduated the following Friday, and we were married the next day. She was an integral partner in everything that I did when I was headmaster. She took a strong interest in the school grounds and the renovation and care of interior spaces across the campus. She also worked in the admission office, because we needed her there. She was always there to do what needed to be done. She still is. I can’t imagine my life without her.
