Bates, James H.

MEMOIR

of

JAMES H. BATES

Transcript of a taped interview.

Narrator: James H. Bates Tape: #79 A to D.

Date: July 20, 1990 and September 4, 1990.

Place of interview: Mr. Bates’ home in Lakeville, CT. Interviewer: Richard Dwelley.

There are two parts to this interview. In the first Mr. Bates recounts the history of the Salisbury School in Lakeville, CT where he has been a student, master and trustee. He explains its philosophy of education since its founding in 1901 and its development over the years. All of the headmasters and their achievements are included in this account. He also speaks of many of the outstanding masters and instructors who have contributed to the quality of the school.

The second part deals with the Sharon Hospital, its history and growth since its founding to the present. Mr. Bates has been Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the hospital.

1990

Property of the Oral History Project.Salisbury Association at Scoville Memorial Library.Salisbury, CT 06068.

 

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RD:Today is July twentieth nineteen hundred and ninety. My name is Richard Dwelley and I am interviewing for the Salisbury Oral History Project James H. Bates, who is a master at Salisbury School and we’re going to talk today about his impressions of Salisbury, its history, its philosophy, its people, where it’s come from and what it is today. Good morning, Jim.

JB:Good morning, Dick.

RD:What was your first contact with Salisbury and your impressions of that? How far back does that go?

JB:It goes back to the winter of 1942 when my brother was a student at Salisbury and my family saved up about six weeks of gas ration tickets in order to drive up from Redding Ridge, Connecticut. I remember driving over the Salisbury town line on the Housatonic River and I saw the sign, Salisbury, CT which was even back then on the edge of the road. My father said, “Don’t get too anxious Jim, because Salisbury’s a big town and we’re still about fifteen miles from the school.” We were about twelve, I think. We came up on to the campus. My recollection is that it was early December and it was rather bare. Obviously, there were no leaves on the trees and the main building you approached from the north side to the north dormitory wing at that time and the campus was open on the north with the main building oriented north-south and the gymnasium, a stucco building, facing as you drove in and then on the left of the walk there was Payson dormitory which had been built in 1929. Beyond that there was a small mountain cottage that was used as a faculty house and that was it. That was the entire campus.

RD:Are those buildings there today?

JB:Yes. The main building has been about two-thirds completely renovated, new wiring, new plumbing with the building torn right down to the studs. It was found that it’s a very sound building and there’s a new dining room on the southern portion. The whole front area on the south dorm the kitchens have been totally rebuilt as of 1988. So the building is completely modernized with the exception of the northern wing which is the same as it was. The gymnasium which was built in 1911 was converted into a dormitory in the fall of 1959 with two faculty apartments and room for twenty-three boys. Janet and I and Jim Bowen, Judy moved into one of the faculty apartments in the fall of 1959. I ran that dorm for the four years that we lived there prior to moving into a house. Payson dormitory was the modern building on the campus. It was then about fourteen years old. Very solid, sound modern building with two faculty apartments on the southern side which are still attractive apartments with a bachelor’s pad kind of on the third floor which has been converted into a regular apartment.

RD:Let’s go back, Jim, to when you went to school there. What were your early impressions as you drove to the school?

 

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JB:I remember the school was exactly the way I described it, when I arrived in the fall of 1945 as a fourth former or tenth grader to go to school. The faculty as I recall had eleven men on it, ten or eleven, all male. Obviously, at the end of the war the maintenance tended to be a little bit on the threadbare side for two reasons. Number one the war had prevented the normal maintenance of buildings that we would expect today and the second thing, the school had no money, at all. It had been in desperate financial shape and had barely survived the war really due to the strength of the personality of George Langdon, the headmaster, who came in 1942 and that’s another whole section on him. I do remember, however, the strength of the faculty. A man named Muss Firuski who…

RD:What was his first name?

JB:Yeah, good question. Maurice. Maurice Firuski who owned and ran the Housatonic Book Shop where John and Elise Harney live now and that was a very very famous rare book shop. Muss was hired by George Langdon, I’m sure, for no more than a dollar a year to come up and teach history. He was member of the class of 1916 at Yale and a real scholar who had owned the same rare book store in Cambridge, Massachusetts before he moved to the northwest corner. Something which I hadn’t realized until fairly recently. The person teaching English was Harold Corbin who now run…. he and Florrie run The Three Ravens. Actually my fifth form, or junior year, I lived down across the street in a big white house where Woody Rudder and the Bieners now live. That was reopened as a dorm as the school began to grow at the end of the war. So my first year, as I recall, they had 96 students. The second year it went up to about 110 or 115 with that dorm open across the street which we called Lake Cottage. Now it’s Kerr house. Then in my senior year I think we had gotten up to about 126 or 127 students. By June of 1948, the school was not only surviving but was beginning to really prosper under George Langdon’s leadership.

So we had Harold Corbin and Muss Firuski teaching English, history and English literature to fifth form, eleventh grade, and American history, American literature to sixth form, the seniors. I don’t care what school you would have gone to no one had a better English history and American history, literature background than we had. As I went on to Yale why it was almost a reprise of my senior year in my freshman year when I actually took sophomore English and did extremely well because we had been so well grounded and had learned how to write.

RD:It speaks so well for the school.

JB:I think that people like that and I talked about Harold and Muss but Ed Tappert who taught me Latin and German. Latin I barely survived. I think my final grade in my sophomore year was 61. Hannibal and I had trouble in the Alps. But he was a wonderful teacher who gave himself to Salisbury.

 

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He was there for … I think from 1938 until he retired in 1974. He died about five years ago. He lived at Noble Horizons. We became good friends and I actually had power of attorney for his daily expenses as he got more and more ill. He also taught three years of German to me and to two other boys, George Young who went to Princeton and Fred Jarvis who went on with me to Yale. The three of us were in class learning German and while we just had three years we really became fluent. You don’t escape from a strict master if there are three people in the class. We did our homework and Ed was a punster, a marvelous man. I went on to Yale, took scientific German in my freshman year which was a junior course, to get rid of the requirement. Then did nothing with German. Obviously, in the Korean War I was drafted and went to Officers Candidate school and then went to Germany and found out after ten days in Bavaria that I really spoke fluent German to the point where border guards and other German people would come up and say, “Bist du ein Amerikaner?” or “Bist du ein Deutscher?” I would say,”Nein, Ich bin ein Amerikaner,” and they would be surprised that I was an American even though I was in a lieutenent’s United States Army uniform. It was kind of fun to be that fluent. I was in addition to execing a field artillery battery, I was our beer requisition officer, illegal, but a very important position in the battery. I came back, couldn’t wait to go up to see Ed Tappert and speak to him in my fluent German since I was practically a native German, from a German point of view, came on to the campus. We started to talk and Ed got visibly angry with me. I asked him, “Warum? Why?” He said, “Du sprecht sud Deutsch.” In other words, I was speaking southern German rather than northern German. Southern German being kind of Tennessee or Arkansas German but I was stationed in Bavaria so I picked up the bad accent and Ed was…. That’s the kind of person he was though. He was a scholar. He was a perfectionist and a marvelous, marvelous teacher. John Myers, Win Kerr teaching math, Win music, playing the organ, Sam Carr who came back to the school during my time there and worked for another twenty years having retired. These people I can talk about as you triggered, but Ed Tappert, Muss Firuski, Harold Corbin – tremendously significant teachers in my background

RD:Obviously, that was the case as you went off to Yale, several steps ahead of everyone else. What are some of the other impressions you had about the school when you were there? Of the town, if you had any of those still hanging around.

JB:To take the last first, the town. George Langdon always felt that Salisbury School was part of the town of Salisbury, I think partially because he was able to hire local people who would come up and teach and as I said before, he paid them damn little. But they were clearly upstanding citizens in the town. He would always tell the boys, all of us, that when we go downtown people in Salisbury are our neighbors and our friends and they’re not to be treated lightly or treated as servants, as adolescent boys tend to do sometimes.

 

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I think that that carries over. I know at school meetings I speak to the students about living downtown, being a taxpayer, involved in the community. Often community people would become part of our chapel talks, which I give five or six times a year and other faculty members do so that we have tried to engender in the school student body a sensitivity and a respect for the people in the town of Salisbury and the school’s relationship to it. In addition to that, in recent years we’ve had a lot of people on our faculty who’ve been involved in the town of Salisbury. Carl Williams just retired as chairman of the finance committee. Mark Henning . .

RD:What committee?

JB:Finance committee of the town of Salisbury. Mark Henning is, Jackie Rice is CPR, members of the ambulance squad. Mike Dalton until he went to Tennessee was a member of that. I’ve been involved in Sharon Hospital. So there’s a large number, a large group of us that are involved in community affairs. I’ve just hit two or three. Bob Gardner was a member of the school board, and so on and so forth. So I think both at the student level and at the faculty level we try to have an involvement in and respect for the town. That’s, I think, been a positive relationship we’ve had with the community. Likewise, we’ve also provided more dollars in scholarship aid to local students than does Hotchkiss. That’s not relative dollars that’s real dollars. We have always had a commitment to educating local boys and allowing them to come to Salisbury regardless of ability to pay. I think there are people…. Joe Reol (sp?) came from Canaan. His dad was postmaster or postman over there. Joe now writes for a paper in New York. So he’s… He had an article a couple of years ago about this relationship of school and town.

RD:Expanding on that relationship if it’s appropriate here. I don’t mean to cut you off or anything. We discussed before we began recording the school’s philosophy and certainly the town is part of that philosophy. Is this an appropriate time to expand on that, do you think?

JB:OK, philosophy. Salisbury and I think this would go back to the founder, the Reverend George Quaile, from what I have read about him and then to Emerson, his son, and certainly to George Langdon who was my headmaster and who married Janet and me and who I worked for when I came back as a faculty member for six years. George believed that there were no bad boys and he also realized that good boys do bad things. Using that as a benchmark it really starts those of us who work with kids at a point where you try to correct the bad things and make good boys do good things. That sounds simplistic but really isn’t. The school has tried to teach well and teach the basic subjects, i.e. math, languages, history, literature, well but also believes very strongly and has over the life of the school that the liberal arts without a moral foundation is worthless.

 

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If you’re educated but don’t have a philosophical underpinning for that education you can become a Bosky or someone like that. Therefore, I feel strongly and always have felt, and say it at school meetings, that the most important building on Salisbury’s campus is the chapel. Not to make Episcopalians out of everybody – that’s the last thing we would want to do – but to allow the school to come together in a different setting, a special setting, to be able to talk about ideas and about right and wrong. Through the Judeo-Christian tradition, I say not Christian tradition, but the Judeo-Christian tradition to go back to the Ten Commandments and to see the relationship of what we do every day in math and in music and in literature and in history, to see the relationship that that has to the moral underpinnings of Western civilization. To me it’s very clear if you take the Ten Commandments, then Christ, St. Augustine, then Bede, and from Bede you move into the development of early universities in western Europe. Out of that comes the western tradition and you have to wind up at democracy and there’s no other place to go. Having given two thousand years of Christian thought in one minute, I’ll stop. But I think that relationship, education with a religious or ethical tradition is a connection that has to be made. You can’t have good education without a foundation in really basic principles of the Judeo-Christian tradition that the school is a part of. It expresses it through the Episcopal Church but we have rabbis and Muslims and all kinds of people, lay people, come and talk in the chapel including people like Ambassador Schaufele and Harrison Salisbury so that the guys get a broad view of different ideas, not just arithmetic and English and history.

RD:While we’re on this subject of philosophy and what it’s done for the boys that attended the school over the years, can you tell us the names of some of the better known students that may be out in the world today, that have made their mark expressing the virtues that you’ve just described?

JB:Well, I think it’s interesting and this is one of the things I have. I think that Salisbury boys the down side of this is that they tend to go into service areas perhaps more than leadership areas. Oh gosh, the names are going to be hard to come by. The next head of McGraw-Hill will be a Salisbury graduate, we have had people in government at the Secretary of the Air Force level. We’ve had executive vice-presidents of major oil companies, in fact, one of whom resigned and I went to solicit him for a $50,000 gift for our new gym that we built in 1983. He said, “Jim, I’ll either give you five thousand or fifty and if I give you fifty you’ll know I’ve moved to Pittsburgh. If I give you five you’ll know I’ve moved to Atlanta and retired and that will be because I will have to compromise my principles and if I do it’s Salisbury’s fault.

 

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That guy happened to be a couple of years ahead of me and he did choose to retire. It’s hard to say, I don’t think in terms of famous…. G. Mennan Williams was a Salisbury graduate, but there are not the people we would call famous.

RD:I meant famous in carrying on the basic traditions of faith.

JB:My guess is that that would be a lot of the graduates who carry stuff on. In my travels when I was fund raising, I was always impressed. I would often ask a question “You think back about your life at school. What seems to be the most important thing and what do you think of first?” I was dumbfounded at how many people said, the chapel which we then did every day. I think that that really says what I was saying earlier that that connection is at least subliminally made and these guys begin to think about the hills and the country and, of course, the chapel’s oriented toward the hills so that all becomes a part of their personal warp and woof and philosophy.

RD:Maybe a logical outgrowth of what you’ve been discussing so far with me would be the founding of the school. We touched on that a little bit. Do you have anything to add to that? What year was that?

JB:The school was founded in 1901 and the story goes, the Rev. George Quaile had a school St. Andrew’s on Staten Island and he felt that parents were interfering too much. Apparently, he had a brother-in-law. There was a relationship who summered up here. So they came to visit Salisbury and they bought the farm Frinck hill in 1900 and built the school. Mrs. Quaile was a lady of substance – I think would be a nice way to put the late 19th century term. So the main building was built. It’s interesting. We spent two million seven on it two summers ago and it’s only two- thirds redone. The first insurance coverage on the main building was for twenty-five thousand dollars. I happened to find that in some of the papers that I was looking through several years ago. Shocking! So they built the school. It was owned by the Quaile family until 1924 when it incorporated as a non-profit institution and the rector, the Rev. George Quaile and Mrs. Quaile continued as headmaster and lady leader and setter of a lot of tone, I think, until her death in 1930 and his in 1935. Again, as you look through the early Sarum books, the school magazines printed in the early 1900’s which I read all of, you get that sense of, we’re going to make these boys behave. We’re going to make good people out of them in addition to good students and that effort to work with a boy, not just as an intellectual person but as a thoughtful human being. I think that relationship is there from the early years all the way through the history of the school.

RD:Would this be an appropriate point to ask you, why not girls?

JB:OK.

 

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RD:I’m sure that the school has concerned themselves with the question.

JB:I was a trustee from 1974 ‘til I came back to work at school in 1980. In 1976, I actually chaired the Trustee Student Faculty Committee on Co-education. We split philosophically. We had two votes at that time. Split philosophically about fifty-fifty as to whether to co-educate or not. In terms of doing it in Salisbury then we voted sixteen to nothing against doing it because we realized that to co-educate is a lot more complex than simply putting girls in rooms and carrying on your school. It’s a whole process. I said to a foundation head this last spring that I think co-education in many ways would be good but I’m not concerned about sex. I’m concerned about size. If we co-educated and carried on our relationships with the schools we’ve been related to for a long, long time. Westminster, Millbrook, Pomfret, schools like that and then some bigger schools. We row against Choate. We play Hotchkiss in some sports. If we had the base of two hundred fifty boys to provide a strong athletic program which I think is very important to this whole building of an individual, we would have to have one hundred and fifty girls and the school would have to go to four hundred and that would totally alter the school. I think all of us on the faculty, at least a vast majority of faculty members, by Christmas time we know the name of every boy in the school and we probably know half of them reasonably well. I know in last year’s graduating class there wasn’t a student I hadn’t taught. I think that that relationship of individual to individual is terribly important at the adolescent age.

RD:Back to original philosophy.

JB:Right, to know the whole person. If we got bigger, it doesn’t mean we’d be worse but we’d be different. I don’t think any of us who’ve been associated with the school for a long time really want to lose the ability to get to know some young men very, very well and if we add young women to the mix, the young woman or the young man will see just as many faculty members but they won’t see the same faculty member in different areas. That’s what makes our kind of educate very special and which allows it to serve a lot of kids very well.

RD:I guess the next thing that you said you would like to touch on… If you can expand more on the people. Can you do that?

JB:George Quaile and Emerson Quaile I never knew. If we took the headmasters and then kind of went through. George Langdon served the school from 1942 ‘til 1964 when he retired. He was a big man, a very shy man in many ways, but a very strong man. He had a view of what the school should be. He took over a school that was in desperate shape in June of 1942 with numbers of students and a whole war to process. He had a philosophy that you never spend money you don’t have and so when the school did anything it paid cash for it. It came out of the tradition of the thirties when there simply was no money at all.

 

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So, he carefully husbanded what we had. As I said, or alluded to before, he was a master at hiring people. He got the right mix of people and brought them together and then allowed them to do their own jobs. And I think that’s still a philosophy where those on the faculty feel very free to work within the range of our own ideas. The choice has been made in the hiring process so that you get a broad mix of people and then let them do what they do well. George Langdon really built the school. He brought it from moribund to in 1950 building Memorial Hall, a major classroom building, in 1954 built Quaile House, a faculty house and dormitory for sixteen boys which has been doubled in size, two faculty houses and now thirty-four or -five boys as of three years ago. In 1958, the John C. Meyers Gymnasium was built and in ‘59 the old gym became the dormitory, in fact, the housing that Janet and I moved into. So that new gym added two buildings to the campus and the last building was really built by the trustees in 1960 and ‘61. That was the new chapel which meant a tremendous amount to George Langdon and he loved that building. It was really the capstone of his career. Instead of having the chapel in the basement of the main building which was a very attractive smaller chapel but did not lend itself to weddings and outside events, this chapel is a building that we all think a great deal of. During his career the school grew from as I said I think about sixty-seven or sixty-eight boys his first year, it went to the hundred and fifty, one hundred sixty mark. Of course, once we got to a hundred and fifty and I was on the faculty as a young man then. Why, it was never going to go above a hundred and fifty. At one fifty-seven, it was never going to go above one sixty. At one sixty- five. “It’s never going to go over one seventy-five.” Well it’s now two hundred and forty. My guess is…We have been at two forty for a long time…. unless the move toward co-education comes we will stay right about where we are now. The plant seems well-balanced for that, with few exceptions, library additions, so on and so forth. So George Langdon put the school on an incredibly sound base physically and also carried on through the excellent hiring of people to keep a core faculty.

The Reverend Edwin M. Ward and his wife Aleen came in 1965, Ed and Al also committed themselves to Salisbury School. It became their school. They became a central part of it immediately and Ed served the school through the difficult late sixties and early seventies and up until 1981 when he felt he should leave because he’d been there at that time sixteen years. He told me… I was then president of the Board of Trustees and we talked about this…that if he stayed until he retired he would have had twenty-eight years at Salisbury and he felt that that was just too long to have the school under one head in the period we had been through. He was an excellent teacher, carried on with the academic tradition bringing in a different kind of faculty than who were far more individual in their orientations as we kind of moved into the post-Victorian era.

 

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But he brought out a faculty that while diverse, still had that commitment to kids. Ed was more conservative, I think, religiously than George Langdon was. It’s interesting that we tended to become more of a church school and more oriented in a Christian way or Episcopal way than we had been under George Langdon. I never heard George Langdon say ‘church school’ that I can recall. Ed Ward used that word a lot.

Woody Rudder who became director of admissions, taught French and is now our development director and has been there some years himself. When Ed retired the catalog was changed the day after Ed and Al left the campus, to take out ‘a school founded in the Christian tradition’ and it became ‘a school founded in the Judeo-Christian tradition’. The people who made that change were Woody Rudder and Jim Bates we did it the day Ed left or the day after. We both believed strongly in a broader tradition, but Ed wasn’t… he was very conservative in that way. Wonderful man, great sense of humor, had a wonderful way of writing and getting his message about what the school stood for into publications and he spoke at alumni gatherings. You knew through the turbulent sixties and seventies, you knew that here was a man who said what he believed and believed it deeply and I think that with all the strains and stresses, the beginning of the drug age and the Vietnam war and all these crises that occurred during his tenure as headmaster. Salisbury bent but never broke. Other schools had a lot of problems but we were able to handle them. I became a trustee during this period and developed a tremendous respect for Ed and for Ted Childs, the associate headmaster, in the way they handled these kids in a not easy era. We are more back now, we’re back to where it’s much easier to talk to students and chit-chat back and forth. They don’t seem to have the antipathy toward institutions which was a part of the early seventies, where the institution was necessarily bad. We grew up when if something was wrong, it was you not the institution. It flipped the other way where everything’s wrong with the institution and I’m fine. Now we’ve reached a better era.

But Ed really built the school. The endowment when he left was still under a million dollars. But after the chapel came…Oh let’s see. The science building was built in 1978. But if I go back and go chronologically. 1959 the library was built. 1967 Langdon Dormitory was built which houses about twenty-six boys and two faculty families. 1970 or ’71 Kerr house was built, another large dorm. 1972 Belin Lodge a student union was built and then we got – what other large buildings during the seventies? ‘787 the science building was built. That was the last building built during Ed’s tenure. I think as we got the science building which is a fine building with individual bio, chem and physics laboratories and space for photography and some other ancillary spaces.

 

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That building really did a great deal for the faculty and for parents as they came around the school. With Memorial Hall it gave us two classroom buildings which are together fairly impressive, especially the new science building which is very well maintained and very easy to maintain. It says something academically. In 1983, we built a new gymnasium, the Childs Gym, which was next to the Meyers Gym built in ‘59 and that becomes a fine athletic complex. In the academic buildings parents and students see that this is a place committed to strong academics and in the gymnasiums and the fields they see that this is a place that pays attention to the physical aspects of development. So Ed and Al, you have to almost mention their names together, Ed and Al Ward as you mention George and Anne Langdon. Anne Langdon, who I’ve skipped, who now lives at Noble Horizons, was a very potent force for social graces, for right and wrong and was very much a partner of George Langdon as Al was for Ed. Those two headmasters were very, very important.

In 1982, the Reverend Peter Sipple and Margaret became the leaders of the school. Peter, as headmaster, and Margaret who taught English. His wife, Margaret, was again an excellent partner, a part of the school. Peter stayed six years until, I guess, 1988 – yes ‘82 to ‘88. Since this is a history and history should be the truth, I don’t think that Peter ever really committed himself to Salisbury School. Obviously, a minister, had a PhD in, I think religious thought and a very bright man who loved music and music was his real strength. But I perfectly frankly don’t feel that he made that commitment that our other headmasters had to the school . He saw it more as a job. In spite of that during his time the Harvey Childs Gymnasium was built, a major addition to the athletic plant and the addition of doubling the size of Quaile House, with Quaile north, a faculty home. An addition about doubling the size of that dormitory was done and in addition to that Mountain Cottage was renovated in 1983 and that was a faculty home and small dorm and that became a health center, so we have a very good health center. In addition to that, the endowment in 1980, was $945,000 and in June of 1984 it was $3,034,000 …. and since I was assistant headmaster for development during that period, I’m very proud of it. Peter and I were friends or acquaintances but not really good friends and I would hate to prejudice this history but I think that other people would agree that he came to Salisbury, never having taught in a boarding school. He had been the headmaster of a school in Portland Oregon, Oregon Episcopal Academy. So he didn’t realize that this is a twenty-four hour seven day a week job. Those of us who work at a boarding school, it is our life for nine months of the year. And he never…. He intellectually understood that, he was a Choate graduate but he didn’t understand it in the gut. If you don’t understand it in the gut, you are not going to become a school man.

 

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It’s that simple. I think plus the fact that he had been heavily involved in music in Oregon and we’re a little bit far from a music center. He’s now headmaster in a Moravian Academy in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and there’s a city chorale and stuff that he’s involved in there. That very important musical side of his life was left somewhat vacant during his time here.

In 1988, Dick and Sally Flood arrived, Dick being the first headmaster who was not an Episcopal minister other than the son of the founder who was Emerson Quaile. Of course, that choice may not have been quite so open because the Quaile family had the mortgage on the school in 1935. But Sally and Dick again, he’s finished his second year at school. He’s a consummate school man and that is an expression that I use very sparingly. I’d say maybe five percent of teachers deserve the title ‘good school man’. Dick certainly does. He and Sally came from Noble & Greenough. They are a partnership. He is a wonderful school man. Has that sense about boys, knows where they’re at, again committed to the whole boy, really enjoys as a non-minister and having come from a school without the kind of philosophical underpinnings that the chapel has provided us. He’s very happy to have that and very comfortable with it. It does strengthen the school tremendously.

RD:Is there an official tie with the Episcopal church philosophy?

JB:If the school closes, the property goes to the Episcopal church. We have no financial connection with them at all. The chapel is, I think, described as a mission in the town of Salisbury. At least, in theory it becomes a part of St. John’s but really isn’t. We’re independent. As a mission you can do things that might be less accepted in the Episcopal church and we’ve had some interesting services at Salisbury. For instance, memorial services where the Episcopal pattern has not been used, where there’ve been eulogies, where there’s been music, when Hop Rudd died the band played “The Saints Go Marching In” and that’s perfectly appropriate at Salisbury School and for Hop Rudd. I don’t think the Rev. Bevan would cotton to that particularly.

RD:You mentioned Hop Rudd. You haven’t mentioned him as a person before this. Would you care to comment on him at this point? Have you finished…

JB:No, I just have gotten through the headmasters.

RD:Did you give Mr. Flood his due?

JB:Well, I think he’s finished two years. We’re busy beginning to raise money to pay down the debt which we had to incur in the renovation of the main building because the state said we had…Obviously, the new 1980 fire laws in Connecticut had tremendous impact on that building as it has on many buildings in the state of Connecticut. So that we’re involved in that project. I think the thing to say about Dick is that we all hope that he stays a long, long time.

 

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Philosophically he fits very well. He’s very hard-working and is committed to Salisbury School, and a very very fine school man. I guess that relationship, the way he handles students and the faculty that he is a part of and very much of the school. We have very good leaders in both Dick and Sally.

That kind of does the headmasters. As we go to other faculty and obviously Hop, Hop Rudd, would be one of those. We’ve got Kerr. Meyers, I mentioned Kerr

RD:How about some first names?

JB:OK. John C. Meyers, Edwin Tappert, William Kerr, is retired, lives just beyond the Catholic Church on the way to Hotchkiss school. Win taught me Algebra 2. He came about the time Ed Tappert did and they retired the same year. Bob Gardner, who retired last year, Harold Corbin I’ve mentioned, Hop Rudd I haven’t mentioned but certainly will.

RD:Hop? What’s his first name?

JB:Roswell H. Rudd. The “H” stands for, not Hop I think the nickname came from that. Oh, Hop was a piece of work.

RD:A good musician.

JB:Yes. Should I start through those?

RD:The tape is about to end. Why don’t I turn it over now?

END OF SIDE A

SIDE B

RD:Continuing now on the second side of the tape. I did not introduce James H. for Harrison Bates properly in the beginning, but he is the Senior Master and holder of the Frederick C. Hamilton Chair in the physical sciences at Salisbury School. Before we continue with more about people, Jim, what is the Frederick C. Hamilton Chair in physical sciences? What does it mean? And congratulations for having received it.

JB:Right. It’s the… At a college, a chair professorship is a professorship where an endowment is given out of which the salary of the holder is paid. We’re a little less formal than that. Actually a significant sum of money, a heap of money, was donated to Salisbury School and really it adds to the faculty pool fund, so that everybody really benefits from the gift of a chair. It’s an honorary position and the Frederick C. Hamilton Chair in physical sciences was the first chair given to Salisbury, so it’s kind of fun to have that. This spring a second chair was given, the J. Richard Munro Chair in English, a family chair In English. And that’s important. Dick Munro just retired as the Chairman of Time Warner and he’s the parent of two boys. Mac graduated this year, a wonderful family. So now we have our second endowed chair. So, it’s an honorary position, really. In a college it would also mean a significant amount of money. Yale, for instance, has Harkness Chairs and Stirling Chairs and they’ve got a Henry Ford Chair in physics, etc., etc.

 

 

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RD:How long have you taught at Salisbury?

JB:Okay. Interesting. Nobody knows. I came to Salisbury as a young teacher with Janet and our family in the fall of 1959, and stayed until June 1965. Six years. But we went down to Yale and we were involved in Yale essentially for fifteen years, came back to Salisbury in June, 1980. I taught part-time during the four years I was assistant headmaster for development, but the teaching process and the development process, because of the travel, are really kind of oil and water. I only had one course, which wasn’t the reason I left Yale. To leave Yale, I wanted to go back and teach. So after four years I saw Peter and said I was going to fulltime back to the classroom. I completed six full-time years. I’ve been at Salisbury sixteen years. In addition to that I was a trustee for seven years.

RD:And a student.

JB:And a student for three years and a parent for six, with two sons.

RD:Let’s just talk about the two sons and I want to talk about Janet’s role as the wife of the senior master, today and what are her responsibilities? Let’s take the children first.

JB:Jimbo, now Jim Bates, James Martin Bates, went to Salisbury for three years, starting in the fall of 1972 and graduated in 1975. It was during that time that I became a trustee and more and more involved in the school, working at Yale. Jim went on to Springfield College and went into the cable TV business. He’s now assistant general manager of a sports channel in New York and has a wife, Susan, three children, Sarah, Johnny and Geordie. They live on Long Island. He has had a very successful career and very committed to Salisbury School. Jerry came to Salisbury in 1979 and graduated in ‘82. He also graduated from Springfield College and is now director of their annual fund. Lest I forget, our daughter, Jodie, graduated from Westover, which is almost a sister school of Salisbury, and then Connecticut College. She’s teaching and she always gets angry if she’s left out, not being a direct Salisbury connection, so we have to mention her.

RD:Excuse me. You were at trustee at Westover. Are you still?

JB:I’ve been a trustee at Westover for five years and am still a trustee. I will serve one more year, when I have to go off for at least a year. That’s been a very rewarding experience. I think that as I sit in board meetings at Westover, they could be board meetings at Salisbury. The philosophies of the schools are close to each other.

RD:Getting back…

JB:Janet.

RD:Oh, Janet, that’s right. We mustn’t Janet.

JB:Janet’s role is an interesting one. She is not up at the school too much because she works, but we try to use this house as a place to have people come off the Hill and relax and get a change of scenery.

 

JAMES BATES 14

We have a mentor/mentee dinner each year for new teachers to meet the old fossils and people who have been around a long time. Each new master or teacher has a big-brother kind of thing to help out in the first adjustment period. We have that dinner each fall and it’s kind of fun. It is off the hilltop, very informal, and it gives new people a chance to meet in a presumably non-threatening situation, other people to get a sense of the fact that the school is a family.

RD:When you say ‘people’, you mean students?

JB:No, these are faculty.

RD:Faculty, OK.

JB:We also . . .I have between eight and eleven advisees each year and we have them down for dinner quite regularly, and, of course, my lumber jacks that I chop wood with in the fall and in the spring as a sport. These tend to be boys who can’t participate in a sport because they’ve got a sprained knee or have diabetes or have some ailment that prevents them from a sport. This is a good group and we have them down regularly. We often have Woody Rudder’s and Ralph Manconi’s advisees. They’re two bachelors. So we have them down for a family picnic. So Granny does quite a bit of entertaining and it is kind of fun because . . .I call her Granny and really everybody at school does now, including the students. It’s a name that has caught on and it’s a little incongruous, as you look at her but it’s her name.

So we try to be very much a part of the life of the school and I think we’ve succeeded in that. It is a little bit more difficult when you live off the campus, but if you’re committed to the school it works. With all our children grown whether I get home at six o’clock for dinner or eight thirty or quarter of nine really doesn’t matter too much because there’s nobody to change and put to sleep anymore. So, I can come and go and I just sort of keep Janet informed of where I’ll be. During term time we’re busy and I’m at school a great deal of the time. But that’s what the life is like and this is where I think it’s so important – anybody interested in a boarding school situation. I happen to believe it’s the best kind of education that can be provided for adolescents, particularly, I think, the single sex atmosphere in a relatively small school. But the tragedy for all of us is that so few people can take advantage of it. It is terribly expensive.

RD:How expensive is it?

JB:It’ll be I think sixteen thousand five hundred dollars this year. However, we give a lot of scholarship aid and this is one of the things that we’re working very hard on, the endowment for…. Because as it becomes more and more expensive you don’t want to shut out the middle class people for whom that’s a tremendous expense. So we feel – at Westover this is also true – where, as we add scholarship aid, we can continue to keep the student body broad and even broaden it further than it has been.

 

JAMES BATES 15

RD:Can you tell me how many students receive such aid?

JB;OK. At Westover this coming year it will be over fifty percent. At Salisbury I’m taking a guess. I think it was twenty-four percent last year and my guess is that it will be twenty-six to thirty percent this year. That’s obviously not full aid, but it’s a tremendous help.

RD:Before we get back to more people, what is the endowment today?

JB:The endowment today is about five million.

RD:OK. We’ll get back to that in a minute. Why don’t you continue, then, Jim, please with people.

JB:OK, people. Sam Carr graduated from Trinity College in 1906 and came to Salisbury. He taught here until 1927, when Mr. Quaile, Sr., George Quaile, needed some help and hired his son from Hotchkiss, Emerson Quaile, who became the headmaster in 1935. Emerson taught Latin and Sam taught Latin. So after twenty-one years of service to Salisbury, why Sam was essentially fired, which seems out of character as you read the rest of the story about the Reverend George Quaile. Sam went to Brooks School which was then being founded by Frank Ashbum, and taught at Brooks until about 1946 or 1947 when he finally retired. Sam chose to come back to Salisbury to live and moved into a little apartment downtown. He always drove, I think it was a 1927, but it might have been a 1928, Studebaker with black fenders and a light blue color. It was the damnedest car you’ve ever seen.

RD:He still had it?

JB:He had it in the forties and he sold it about 1967. That was Sam’s car and everybody laughed at Sam, but they really laughed with him. He was an unusual person and while in print you can’t express it, but his voice was modulated up and down and he spoke very, very distinctly and slowly. His voice would go up and his voice would go down and he’d say, “Now, boys…” He was a marvelous character, devoted to Salisbury School. I think the fact George Langdon, when he found out George was back in town . . .This was, I think, 1947. I was a student and I believe a junior when he arrived first. He came to tutor in math and Latin and was there for maybe an hour a week or so. Within six months he was a full-time faculty member of the next year. I think maybe part-time and then full-time. He kept on. When I came back as a teacher in 1959, Sam was very much a presence on the campus. He, by that time I think, had dropped to about two courses and some tutoring, driving up in his blue Studebaker with black fenders each day to school, teaching and then heading back to his apartment in Salisbury. He actually lived behind the Village Store and the liquor store. There’s a little building back in there and he lived up . . .A lady named, I think, Mary Moore had a house and there was a little cottage or something behind. That’s where Sam lived. Well, Sam finally retired in 1966, at the age of eighty-seven or eighty-eight, in his late eighties certainly. He lived to see Carr dormitory, Carr House, dedicated, which is the farthest building as you go up the hill behind the athletic field.

 

JAMES BATES 16

He lived to see that dedicated in his honor and he died, I would guess around 1971 and left Salisbury a significant amount of money in a life income gift which has not yet matured. I think it was in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand dollars and it’s probably between five hundred and six hundred thousand dollars when we get it because of growth over a twenty year period. A marvelous man, an institution and one of these special, special people.

John C. Myers was Senior Master for a long time. He retired in 1962, having come to the school in 1916, a Gettysburg College graduate and then he took a year off for World War I. John Myers was a tough math teacher. You had to know thirty-two theorems by heart in order to go home at Christmas vacation. The juniors, we took geometry, I think, as juniors then….the juniors lived in fear and trembling because if . . .you might do all thirty-two theorems or if you did the first three very well, he’d let you go. If you didn’t pass, you didn’t go home for Christmas vacation. There were boys who stayed two or three days over to work on their geometry. There were boys who did not graduate from school because they could never get a Salisbury diploma because they never were able to do those theorems and therefore pass geometry. He was tough. An excellent football and baseball coach, coached for probably thirty years and was married to Josephine. When they retired, they retired downtown to the house next to Lower Cobble, where Ambassador and Heather Schaufele live now. That was the Myers’ house before the Schaufeles bought it. John Myers was a guy who was a little cold. He was frightening. He was very tough, very, very respected, but I don’t think many students, at least in the forties and beyond, ever became a friend of John’s. He was a little aloof and a little scary. As a matter of fact, he was damned scary at times, especially in class. But, boy, when you passed geometry you knew it. A very fine teacher and a fine coach.

Win Keur came to school, I think, in 1937 or thereabouts and taught until 1974, when he retired. He was married to Jane in 1944 or 1945. I had him for algebra II and I remember the first class I had in Salisbury in 1945. I was sitting in the classroom, having found it. It was in the main building and from the back of the room came a large man in a black academic robe and everybody stood up. So I stood up too and Win walked to the front of the room. I saw this guy dressed in a long black robe and thought; Jim Bates you’ve really done it this time. What is happening? I hadn’t realized that until really after the war all the masters wore academic robes to class. With men coming back from the service, like Jeff Walker, Wally Herrick – they’d had enough of uniforms and they wandered around with . . .I think Wally’s was ripped all the way up to the shoulder pattern across the back, until finally the robe tradition fell of its own weight. Win was imposing, but a very kind, thoughtful, demanding teacher at the same time. Again, here you learned your algebra but Win is really a very gentle man and also he played the organ every day in chapel, including Sunday, and ran the Glee Club, so that music was very much a part of his and Jane’s life.

 

JAMES BATES 17

They moved from North Dorm, where they started married life to Keur House (It was then called Lake Cottage) across the street. They had the main part of the house with two children, Linc and Judy. I babysat for both of them when they were little children, and Linc actually I taught when I came back as a teacher. So Linc’s father taught me and I taught Linc. He is now teaching in New Jersey. Judy is the daughter’s name and she lives, I think, in New London, CT. But Win and Jane were delightful people, very much a part of the school for those years.

Ed Tappert came a year or so after Win in the late 1930’s and retired the same year 1974. Ed Tappert – I gave a chapel talk at school in his memory, to tell the boys that Tappert Building, Tappert Dormitory had a man connected with it who was really a very special person. I’ve talked about him some before. But Ed was a bachelor, always a bachelor, and I described him as the cement that held the brick together. He really did everything. He edited the school catalog. He would review the comments made by teachers to see if there were any errors that were grievous in the hustle to do comments on every student. He ran the dining room seating, which changed every week. He ran a dormitory for, I think, close to forty years. He was always there. I think if there was a sad part of his life, it was that he was so involved at school that he really didn’t have a personal life outside of the school. Taught Latin and German, very much a student and a scholar. A quiet, thoughtful man and demanding teacher, but one whom you could really feel quite close to even though you had such respect for him that you really never got that close until…. Actually I came back as a colleague and then in the second incarnation, when we came back in 1980, he had retired and had very, very difficult arthritis and I got more involved in trying to help him. So, we became quite close in the later days of his life.

Again, these people – Carr, Myers, Tappert, Keur were so much a part of the place. Hop and Jo Rudd arrived in the fall of 1948, so I missed them by three months as a student because I graduated in June 1948. Hop was a Hotchkiss graduate, went to Yale in the Class of 1930, almost made the Olympic hockey team, was a very good baseball player. He and Jo were married and I’m not sure when, but the early thirties. Her name was Josephine Bauman Rudd and (of Bauman and Garrity I think she was a Bauman), so she had Lakeville roots as Hop did. Well, they had four children and Hop and Jo were a great couple, Jo, well organized, the founder of the Salisbury Reading Center, essentially. We have a reading center that helps boys in developmental reading and reading skills. So, it’s a tutorial process in which three people work now part-time, as we get boys.

 

JAMES BATES 18

Often scholarship kids will have great difficulty, as we talk about minority young men having difficulty in reading. Their background is shaky, so that we will bring them along and I as a teacher will talk to one of the people in the reading center and we will work to see how we can best bring him along. So it’s the teacher to the reading specialist, working with them, to the student and back and forth. The progress these guys make is tremendous. This goes back to what Jo Rudd really started as a pioneer in reading help in this country. She was bubbly and effervescent.

By the way, it’s an aside, but I think here again is a function of size. If it’s a bigger place you don’t spot these difficulties as quickly and will jump on the guy and then see him in the front hall and say, “How’re you doing, George and how did it go today with Mr. or Mrs. So and So in the reading center?” That kind of contact is important.

RD:Where applicable, then, what you’re saying is that the wife of a master plays a very important role, as Jo did and your Janet and I’m certain, the wives of others.

JB:Yes, Jo was the first faculty wife who was also an employee. Now, we have several. John and Marcia Lindberg, Cathy and Rich Weymouth both work at the school. Mark and Cathy Henning both work at the school. I’m embarrassed. I probably left somebody out, but Bonnie and Bruce Blodgett. Bonnie now works for Becton and Dickinson. She’s a computer whiz but she started when the kids were small and I think properly so. These are very competent professional women who become more a part of the life of the school, both professionally and as role models of family life as it can be. I think it’s tremendously important particularly as we get into the place where the family is having severe problems now. They can see the Hennings and the Weymouths and really the Bateses, in a way. Our children are grown, but they can come into a family house that is obviously a family house, with all the pictures around here. I think this is very important, probably more important now than it might have been thirty years ago. I remember one mother speaking to Janet and me after graduation, and our children were then tiny, but saying that she so much appreciated having their son, John, on our dorm as a sophomore and then as a senior supervisor or prefect, because he had seen a younger family at work. They were older parents with an only child and she felt that what he had learned about being a part of a family . . .That’s, of course, when we were in an apartment and the guys banged at the door and there was one shelf of our icebox that was set aside for Cokes and stuff that the boys had. So, at four or five in the afternoon they’d bang on the door and the apartment was essentially open during that time for them to come back and forth.

Hop was Director of Athletics, taught some Latin and some math, but sports was his fort. He could tell a story that would last for five minutes or two hours, a marvelous spinner of tales.

 

JAMES BATES 19

He and Jo were institutions in the school, and if you asked about Hop Rudd’s career at Salisbury, you’d be hard put in some ways to say what he did. He didn’t teach. He ran an athletic department. But Hop was Hop and he contributed in so many ways. I remember getting up my first year there, looking out from our bathroom, hearing a motor. He had wanted to play the first home game against Gunnery at school, rather than drive to Gunnery. It was early April. Well, it snowed about four inches that night and here is Hop out with the snowblower trying to snowblow the infield of our baseball field. You knew it was impossible, he knew it was impossible, but he was going to give it a shot. Whenever I think of Hop, I think of that story.

At Hop’s memorial service, the chapel was full of people and there were probably fifty to seventy-five alumni who had come back, who had that relationship with Hop playing hockey. One of them was Howie Baldwin who was the managing general partner of the Whalers, now of California. The whole group of early sixties guys who were very, very close to Hop. And then spinning off into the fifties and later on into the seventies. So he was a special person and he never would talk about philosophy, but it came through his sport – how he handled boys, what he expected of them and if they didn’t live up to his standards of sportsmanship, why they knew it. He contributed in a way that’s fascinating as you look at life today and we look at resumes etc. I wonder whether Salisbury would hire Hop Rudd. If we find that young guy today, coming along – actually he was in his thirties when he was hired – if we didn’t it would be tragic. Yet as we’ve gotten more sophisticated, he might not make the cut. He did not have a master’s degree. He wasn’t a student, but he was a wonderful school man. There again the phrase that’s so difficult to define.

Woody Rutter has been at school for twenty-two years. He came to teach French. He was Director of Admissions for many years and is in his second full year as…No beginning his third year as Director of Development. Woody is a graduate of Exeter and Washington and Lee. He came to Salisbury to do some admissions work and teach French. He was going to be here for a year or two and then move on. He’s been here, I think it’s twenty-two years. Marvelous man. He’s a bachelor. He spends a tremendous amount of time working with individual students, helping out the guy who is at sea for one reason or another. He has a house on Nantucket, part of a family compound, so he tries to get away some in the summer. He knows everybody. He knows everybody from Salisbury. He knows everybody from all over the place. He’s an awfully good friend of ours. He’s a part of the school, carrying on that kind of bachelor tradition that you might say Ed Tappert was part of, except his life is far more active than Ed’s was. Particularly in his development job as he begins to see people whom he actually admitted to the school fifteen years ago. He is an important part of the school.

 

JAMES BATES 20

Another person who should be mentioned is Ralph Vanconi, who has been at school for eighteen or so years. Ralph is Chairman of the English Department. These two men use our house and we have them down quite often. They seem to like Granny’s cooking and we enjoy having them with their advisees. These are two important people on the campus.

One person I haven’t mentioned is Ted Childs who was associate headmaster, coming a year after Ed Ward, arriving in 1966 and leaving the year before Ed Ward in June of 1980. Ted and Katie had three children, two of them were Salisbury graduates, Bobby and Billy, in the mid-seventies. Ted again was a real school man. He taught math and was Director of Athletics, and Associate Headmaster and Dean of Students and really Ed Ward’s right hand. They worked very well together during, as we mentioned, those very difficult times. Ted was very much a part of Salisbury. In 1974, he had the first undefeated Salisbury football team since 1923, and I remember Connie Smith, the headmaster’s secretary, saying that if football season didn’t end within a week or two, that she didn’t know what she was going to do with Ted Childs because he was getting more and more excited. Actually, Jimbo was the split end and the high scorer on that football team so we did see, I think, every game except one, when I was involved in Yale and just couldn’t get there. Ted and Katie were marvelous people. Katie tragically developed cancer just really as they left Salisbury and she died about three years later after a long illness. But they, again, were very important people during the development of the school after George Langdon, and prior to the eighties. I think that’s pretty much it.

RD:I’m sure you’ve forgotten someone, but in the press of time at the moment….

JB:I think I’ve covered it pretty well. There are some people in the thirties, a man named Sterns, whom I just did not know. There would be some later on, the Blodgetts. Well, I mentioned Bruce and Bonnie. Actually, Bruce is our Director of Curriculum and is the holder of the J. Richard Monroe Family Chair in English, which he got in June. He’s a very significant participant in the life of the school and has been for a long, long time. I think I’d like to end this by saying that anyone who hasn’t driven onto the campus should do so. Of course, it’s summer now and so it’s absolutely beautiful. But it’s beautiful at any time of the year with the exception of March. It really is a fine, well-developed, well-thought out and effective and efficient campus. The main building, a beautiful Greek revival building with a portico and columns which you drive around. Then under facing the gorgeous view of our Taconic range, with the chapel there, with the window from the chapel viewing part of the Taconic range. Then behind the main building which is u-shaped you have the heart of the campus, with the Harris Science Building, Memorial Hall, Payson Dorm, and now the Finney Library making that quadrangle.

 

JAMES BATES 21

Then you have a second to the south of that, a second quadrangle which is really the side of the library, the end of Payson, the gymnasium is at the other side and the health center at the upper end. Then you move on to what you might call the upper campus with Belin Lodge, given in memory of Allan Belin, class of 1964, who was killed in his junior year at Williams, and then Langdon House and Carr House, the two buildings I mentioned going up the hill and into the woods. Across the street, Keur House and Tappert House. Then, of course, down the road a mile you have the boathouse and we have… Bruce Blodgett has an excellent crew and has been as terrific crew coach and built an amazing crew at Salisbury, so that three of the Olympic oarsmen in 1988 were Salisbury School graduates.

RD:Do you recall their names?

JB:You had to ask! I don’t. Matt Kiefer was one Salisbury boy and I cannot think of who the other two were.

RD:You’re excused. I have a couple of other things. Have you finished, Jim?

JB:Yup. I think.

RD:I have a couple of other things that I’d like to ask you in closing, my closing not your closing. I’d like to have you describe your duties today, 1990.

JB:OK. My duties now are to teach four courses and this year they will be German history, which is a senior course and a course that I really am self-taught in during my Yale travels, trying to direct my reading when I was on the road. It’s a darn good course and guys have come back from college and said, boy, that they had an easy time because it does cover a lot of modern western European work. Then I have two divisions of Environmental Science which is a course I developed two years ago and I’m revamping that this summer because society has caught up with what we were doing in the last couple of years. Then a division of biology and a division of introductory physical science which is our first science for boys coming in, to give them a foundation in graphing and mathematics in the scientific process in lab work. That’s fun, it’s a great course to teach and this year was a tremendous amount of fun with a lively class. Now that’s five courses. I’ll only teach four and the way it looks now I’ll have one division of Environmental Science and then will assist an intern with the other division. So, I’ll have essentially four courses. In addition to that, I’m the senior class dean, so that every day during recess I fight sin, settle minor infractions, like missing a chapel, which is heinous, but not that heinous unless you do it very often, and just make sure the senior class is functioning and try to help them in that important senior year to not only be responsible individually, but to be leaders and set the tone for other students.

 

JAMES BATES 22

In addition to that I may do a little bit, but just a shade, of admissions. I did that for years both at Salisbury and beyond so I can be helpful there. The role of senior master is totally undefined but I have found this summer that I will do some administrative things just to help out the headmaster and assistant headmaster. That’s kind of on call and you’re kind of the resident old fogy, and trotted out to give historical lectures.

RD:Old fogy! You were born in what year, Jim?

JB:1930.

RD:You went to Yale. Could you tell us what degrees you hold from Yale and elsewhere?

JB:I graduated from Salisbury in 1948, in 1957 from Yale, then went into the service, obviously for three years, came out and got an M.A. from Columbia in 1958, in part time and that was in educational administration, then came to Salisbury and was admitted to a National Science Foundation program at Syracuse. I have a Master of Science degree from Syracuse in biology.

RD:Lastly, you spoke about having students and your fellow masters here at the house on occasion. Could you describe where you live, in terms of the house itself, a brief history, etc?

JB:Yes. This is a house on Stateline Road which is half a mile east of the New York border just off Route 44. You come down the road to what was the back of the house and into our family room. The road in front was the old Albany Turnpike until they changed it in 1948. This house was built between 1748 and 1753, and is acknowledged to be one of the oldest houses in Salisbury. Janet and I bought it in 1970 and it was a real wreck then. It had had nothing done to it for a long time and had elderly people who died and so it was not in very good shape. We opened all the fireplaces. I enjoy working with my hands. We tried to put it back as it might have been when it was built but obviously with a modern kitchen and indoor plumbing and all those amenities. But it’s a great house and it’s a house that people seem to enjoy coming to. There’s no way you can be formal in this place and that would be against our grain, anyway.

RD:Jim, thank you very much for sharing with us your experiences at Salisbury and what it means to you and certainly to the students. I think at this particular time we’ll just close down the interview and thank you very much.

 

JAMES BATES

Today is September 4, 1990. This is Richard Dwelley, interviewing James K. Bates, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Sharon Hospital. The interview is being conducted for the Salisbury Oral History project. Jim has been a Trustee of the Hospital since 1981, and Chairman of the Board since 1982 to the present. Good-morning, Jim.

JB:Good-morning, Dick.

RD:Jim is going to speak to us about the early founding, briefly about the early founding of the hospital, to the present.

JB:Right. Dick, the Sharon Hospital was founded in 1909 by a Doctor Chaffee, and this is well documented in town history and hospital reports. He remained the President, Chairman, chief doctor and everything else for about 40 years, and really ran the hospital as a private fiefdom. He was apparently a man with very strong opinions and built it from a two or three-bed house into a modern hospital for the period.

I think that the beginning of Sharon’s modern history really starts after World War II, when a group of men who had graduated from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and had all fought in World War II as young doctors decided they wanted to get out of New York and live in the country and practice in a small hospital. Fred Gevalt was one of that group, and I gather that his family had a summer home, or a part-time home, up here, and he brought George Haydock, Dr. Fowler, and two or three others with him. Joe Fisher, who has retired as an OBGYN doctor, was another of the founders, and they started what was called the Sharon Clinic. These were clearly fine men, talented physicians, who chose not to work in the city and who liked the lifestyle that you and I know we have up here in the country, in a town without traffic lights, and all of the good things that go with it, including sports, etc., etc.

I think that they really made Sharon Hospital a unique hospital in the time and the place, so that now, carrying on the tradition that they started, when people from the joint commission come, and we are inspected every three years by the National Accrediting Association from Chicago, the teams always come in and are dumbfounded at the equipment in the hospital, the medical competence in the hospital, the whole staff feeling, and all of this, I think, goes back to the fact that you had some topflight professional leadership coming in the late forties, who really built the hospital and made it into a modern, and somewhat unique establishment with knowing its limits, and I think that this is one of the things that’s a hallmark. We know we’re a community hospital. We can treat a lot of things, and some extremely well, but if the doctors don’t feel that they can handle, either by virtue of equipment or training, a particular illness or injury, why, they’ll be flown out, generally, to Hartford, via Lifestar. And we actually use the Lifestar helicopter about twice a week.

 

JAMES BATES

P. 2

So the tradition is a deep one, with talented professional leadership and tremendous community support from the 17 towns in the three states that we serve. If you come up toward the present – In 1962 Paul Sternlof became the President of the Hospital, and I’ll mention him again. He was its administrative head from 1962 through 1987, serving 25 years as Executive Director, and then, in the early eighties, because of the changing nature of the business and titles, why, he became President, and I became Chairman, rather than President. The reason we did that is we went to meetings and people thought I was President of the Hospital and knew something, and that was a grave error. And so we made the titles more appropriate toe the roles where the Chairman deals in policy primarily, and the administrative head is the President. Paul retired in 1987. He has had aserious arthritis for many years, and this got to be more and more burdensome, and Jim Sok, who lives in Lakeville now, became the President at that time, and heis now in his early forties, and I think we’re well set for leadership for the next period.

I think if we go back through my tenure as Chairman, bringing us up to the eighties, that it’s almost easiest to outline it and take it step by step because there have been some significant things that have happened. In the fall of 1982, when I was elected Chairman of the Hospital, it was a 92-bed hospital and we viewed hospital care in the traditional sense. In other words, people who were ill came into the hospital, stayed there, were treated and then released. And the growth of the Emergency Room had already begun, but we didn’t see this as the beginning of a whole different function and broadening of hospital services at that time. So we were in every sense a very fine traditional 100, or 92-bed hospital. Shortly after I became Chairman, while we started to look around and partly by design, and partly by good luck, and with very little brilliance involved, we realized that we were confined to the five or six acre campus, and that there were going to be coming along, although we really didn’t know what they were. There came up for sale an eleven-acre piece of land across the street and down the hill from the hospital, toward Sharon Valley, which is called the cornfield. I’ve never seen corn grown in it, but we called it the cornfield, anyway. We bought that eleven acres for $54,000, with no real idea of what the use would be for it, but feeling that with the old saying that there’s no more land being made, it would be a good idea to have it somewhat for protection in the future, should we decide to expand in some way. That single move really began to raise the sites of the Trustees as to future possibilities for the hospital. And so, I’ll come back to the growth – well, perhaps now is the best time to talk about what we did vis-à-vis land. In 1984, give or take a year, why. Dr. Lovallo retired and he was a surgeon who had served at Sharon for many years and had built a medical office building across the street. He wanted to sell it. One afternoon we were meeting at the hospital, and it was a group of officers: Dick Warden was there, who was’ Treasurer of the Board, and still is; Dorrance Sexton, who was Vice Chairman of the Board and a former chairman of Johnson and Higgins, and really a wonderful and devoted hospital servant, and I were meeting, and we realized that a lease had been let for a radiologist who we did not think should be in the building in competing with the Hospital. That afternoon we decided to try and buy it, and Dorrance and I went over and saw Dr. and Mrs. Lovallo, who, believe it or not, had trouble finding each other in their house, the thing is so big.

 

 

 

JAMES BATESP. 3

And after they found each other, we made an offer of $,1675,000 for the medical office building, five other buildings on the land, and 11 acres, and they accepted the offer. So, we had a medical office building which we felt would serve the doctors well because the Clinic at that time was going out of business as an entity, and this provided a core office building for doctors to be served through. So, this was a successful purchase. Doctors rented it and they have rented it ever since and, as a matter of fact, we’re now discussing the possibility of making this into a condiminium-type operation, where the doctors could actually own their offices, and we would own the outside of the building in a traditional fashion. This would give them the advantages of real estate; would give us more liquidity for other things.

RD:Is there an expansion plan for this condiminium period, or just prior to it? Is anyone considering expanding the building?

JB:No, we’ve bought other buildings since then, which we’ll talk about. That’s a modular building that can be added to, so this is always a possibility, but we really haven’t done that yet. We have bought other buildings on Hospital Hill Road, where we have doctors’ offices, and actually, some doctors own them. Drs. Jensen and Roth own their own house, and have their offices on Hospital Hill Road, for example. And we own two or three, also.

After we bought that building, we realized that we had eleven acres of land, and we began to realize the terrific need for continuing care, i.e., nursing home or assisted living care. So, we began to develop a plan to build a nursing home for the hospital, and this plan has now been accepted by the state, and, I might add, five years later. And as I talk about the Commission, I’ll mention some of the tribulations we’ve had. The Commission voted unanimously to support our application for 70 beds, rather than 90, and that was passed in early August this year. So it looks like we’re on track. Well, with 11 acres, we knew we could build a nursing home and have some land left over, so we began to think more and more of congretate housing, i.e., housing that we can all move into when we don’t want to mow lawns and plow snow anymore, and where we can either rent or own, and probably rent, a two or three-bedroom apartment or condominium. And we have begun to work with Church Homes, who are the owners of Noble Horizon, and we hope to develop a joint venture with them, and that’s making slow progress, as these things always do.

Concomitant with all this thought, why, another piece of property contiguous to the medical office building, came on the market – called the El Apt? property, and that had seven acres and a house, and we bought that.

 

JAMES BATESP. 4

 

So, we now have the campus of the hospital itself, which is about eight acres, the cornfield, which is 11 acres down across the hill, and then the property across the street, with the medical office building and the Apt property, we have an 18-acre plot of land on the southern side of Hospital Hill Road, which gives us plenty of land for the medical office building, the nursing home and congregate housing to be developed in one campus, so that elderly people can come and live in the apartments with essentially total independence, but if one or the other gets sick and has to have nursing care, it can be conveniently located right close to their husband or wife. So, this – we made these moves which I think have been extremely valuable and I believe have moved us forward in our thinking, moving other things along, along with it.

I think that another major factor, and this is my second point, really, is what’s happened to the medical staff in the last eight years. I believe, and I could be off by one or two here, but we have about 34 full active members of the medical staff. Of these, since 1982, 18 are new doctors. This has occurred because the doctors who came in the late forties and fifties obviously retired in the eighties, and on toward 1990, so that there became openings within the medical staff beginning in the early eighties, and also the need for some additions. So we have been able to recruit over the last eight years some excellent new doctors, who, again for reasons of lifestyle primarily, want to be leaders in their profession, but also are committed to their families and a way of life that keeps them out in the country where sports, etc., are available, and of course we’re lucky here in that we have excellent schools around us, so that young doctors and their families have really tremendous advantages in terms of the way they live.

We are very pleased with the three new anesthesiologists (I’ll say “new” here – this is within eight years), radiologists, orthopedic surgeons,- a general surgeon, family practitioners and internists, a variety of needs have been filled and next June we have coming on board a new ENT (Ear, Nose, and Throat doctor), and this is a slot we’ve been looking to fill for really three or four years, and we feel we’ve found an excellent man. So, this medical staff has been rebuilt, which will be, hopefully, an active staff with the same people involved for the next 15 or 20 years. I think this is something that was very important that evolved out of the peculiar break point we were in time.

The medical staff and the administration of the hospital and the Trustees have been in a position during these last eight years of what I like to call dynamic tension. Obviously, there’s tremendous change in health care, and this is both challenging and frustrating. Connecticut has had a Commission on Health and Hospitals, which has been at best, confrontational toward hospitals and toward doctors.

 

JAMES BATESP. 5

 

Their reason for existence is presumably to hold costs down, but they have done much more than this, and they have controlled our budgets in a fashion which has been very restrictive, and when we submit a budget, the budget package is literally over a foot high. Yet, when budgets are solved, they are negotiated solutions which don’t take advantage of any of the documentation. So, it really is a case of a bureaucracy run wild. This control, the advent of new technology, which I’ll talk about, an active young medical staff, and the changes that have occurred – all have focused on potential conflicts between hospitals, their trustees, their administration, their medical staff and other staff members. I think that we have survived very well. We have not been free of conflict, but I think that the medical staff understands the pressures on the hospital, and I think the hospital more and more understands the pressures on the doctors, as they see the traditional role of a doctor not changing at its core, but how its approach is changing tremendously, and this makes doctors very concerned about the future, and probably rightfully so.

Another fact of the eighties – We’ve had the Health and Hospitals Commission being confrontational, but also there was developed a system of diagnostic-related groups, or DRGs. This is a plan that’s been used for the last five or six years -or was, for four or five years, and last year was thrown out. But it was a system where every illness would be paid a set amount, again in an effort to hold down costs – which really backfired. In other words, if you had appendicitis, you would come in and the doctors would be paid and the companies would pay X dollars for your appendicitis. Now, that looks fine on paper, but if you have a complication with your appendicitis, then are you treated for appendicitis or for the complication, and how much for which? So, there’s nothing like a straight illness, and particularly as we deal with an older group of people, and I think it’s 7% of the general population is over 65, and in the service area of Sharon Hospital, about 15% of the people are over 65. And so, this really alters the approach we have to take to care, because the older one gets, the more things that are wrong, and the more that can go wrong in a hospital situation. Likewise, a person may be operated on for, say, a hip replacement, and if they’re in their eighties, other complications can come up and Medicare says at the end of three weeks, you’re out of here, regardless of what the situation is – so the doctors, and our doctors sometimes at risk to themselves will keep patients more than that three-week period because they simply feel they have to. Again, complicating this even more is the fact perhaps there is an 85-year-old widow who has to go home. She can’t afford care, she should stay in the hospital, she can’t get into a nursing home. So, these are all very complex factors that really made the DRGs a poor system. That has now been removed, but some of the limitations, such as three weeks in the hospital, have not been removed. So, we’re moving through a period of rapid change in the way health care is delivered, but we’re not sure where we’re going yet, and it has made life interesting.

 

 

JAMES BATESP. 6.

 

I think, along with all of this, there has been a dramatic shift during the 1980s from, as I mentioned earlier, the hotel, or inpatient operation of the hospital to an outpatient operation. I believe I’m very close to the figures. We had over 35,000 Emergency Room visits in in the 1988-89 fiscal year. And this number is relatively steady, but growing somewhat. When you and I grew up, if we got cut, or something happened, we went to the doctor’s office in our town. Now, nobody goes to a doctor’s office except for routine visits. If you have an emergency, you go right to the Emergency Room, and the hospital will sew you up, or do whatever needs to be done. This is a change, and Emergency Rooms are being used more and more as the first stop for some kind of illness. Now, if you have the flu, you’ll call the doc and he may well send you to the hospital, if you’re an elderly patient. So, the Emergency Room is really the first line of defense in illnesses, and the whole thrust toward working with outpatients is becoming a major fact within hospitals.

Likewise, and along with this, is the one-day surgery, of which there has been a tremendous growth in the 1980s. I’m not sure of the figures, exactly, but in 1980-81 we did somewhere around 10-15% os surgery on a one-day base. Now it’s somewhere around 70% of the surgeries at Sharon Hospital are provided for people who will be home that night. Up to such things as a hernia, which our son had three or four years ago, and he had a hernia operation and was home that night. For appendicitis, he was in simply overnight and home the next day. So, these are major changes in the way we operate.

In the late 1980s, 1987 to be exact, I mentioned the resignation of Paul Sternlof, who is now retired, and deservedly so, and the appointment of Jim Sok as the President of the Hospital. Since his appointment, Jim has reorganized some of the administrative functions under the leadership of the Board, and we now have, instead of directors of various services,we now have six vice-presidents of the Hospital. And, instead of a Director of Nursing, there is a vice-president for patient services, in Liz Bodin, and she has much more authority in all the patient service areas, not just nursing. So, her role has been expanded. Ray Boll is vice-president for Plant services. His job is not just taking care of the physical plant, but also looking, as we look to build, and architecturally, having the overview there. We used to have a Controller; now, Dan ___ is the Vice-President for Fiscal Services, and he negotiates with the State, back and forth with them. He talks with other hospitals and ha>-> a much broader view of the financial direction of the hospital than a comptroller would.

Peter Beardsley, rather than Personnel Director, he’s Vice-President for Personnel – I’m not sure of his specific title, and he really deals in all aspects of people working in the hospital. And Jim Sok is the President, tying all these together. By the way, Mark Aresco is a Vice-President who has a more general role – taking care of those things that don’t fall into any of the other pockets – architectural planning, etc. This I think has been important because as the hospital role expands, there’s only so much that one man can do, and he has to delegate authority, and I think that this is working out quite well.

 

 

JAMES BATESP. 7

 

RD:Jim, while you’re at this spot, maybe you could speak about thebudget growth over the years when you were first there, the size of the budget.

JB:The budget in 1980 was in the neighborhood of $10,000,000. The budget this year is $34,000,000.

JB:Indeed.

 

JB:Some of that is inflation, some of it is added service, some of it is simply the tremendous increase in the cost of technology. As a matter of fact, one of the things I was going to mention – In 1983 we got a CT Scanner. It cost a million dollars. That’s now seven years old, approaching the end of its useful life, The CT scanner is now an obsolete piece of equipment, and MRI, magnetic resonance imaging, is the next step, which we would probably move to, which has much greater diagnostic capability than a scanner. It’ll cost more than a million dollars, but, actually, it, too, is now obsolete. There’s another generation coming on board. But an MRI is probably in the future of the hospital. Likewise, we had a piece of X-ray equipment that we bought in about 1982 or 1983, and I can remember its purchase. We had to make a special budget exception to purchase it, and the cost was $50,000, one of those pieces of equipment you had to have. Its useful life after seven years was over, and last year we went to purchase another one, and I asked the cost of that, and the cost of the replacement for the $50,000 piece of equipment was $256,000. And you cannot buy a Model A and put it in an X-ray room. You’ve got to stay up with technology, and this is one of the things that’s been driving the increase in medical cost, because so much new and excellent equipment is coming on line that hospitals are really expected bv the public to have it, and yet the public really doesn’t want to pay for it, doesn’t understand why the costs have increased the way they have.

Along with all of this, and this is, I think, one of the things that I’m proudest of, as we looked at the movement to outpatient care, the new medical staff, the addition of land and the medical office building, thoughts of the nursing home and congregate housing – About 1985, I put a resolution before the Board at a December meeting, which we then revoted in 1986 or 1987. What it did was to philosophically expand the mission of the hospital. It said we are no longer just an acute-care facility, taking care of patients who may be here for one day or for a stay at the hospital. We view health care and the hospital’s mission as the overall mission of service to the community, trying to help keep people healthy through physical therapy,- an outreach provision of drugs, etc., and we’re doing more and more of that with doctors, and also the provision of congregate housing and nursing home and hospital as a continuum of concern for health, rather than the narrower traditional hospital role. And I think that was a very significant thing that we as Trustees did, and I think that we have been involved with that philosophy long enough so that it’s becoming part of really the warp and woof of the hospital and the people involved with it.

 

JAMES BATESP. 8

 

I guess there’s one other thing that’s happened that I think is significant, and that is: As the new doctors have come, and this goes back a little bit, why, there was concern about the service area. In the mid-1980s, the gradual expansion of New Milford Hospital, the movement of Vassar Brothers and St. Francis Hospitals in Poughkeepsie to include Millbrook more and more in their service area, and it just so happens that the Chairman of St. Francis was a Millbrook resident. All of these things began to have us become somewhat concerned about protecting our service area so that the hospital would remain strong. Now, 60% of our patients come from the State of New York. Therefore, that western service area, including Amenia, Dover Plains, Pine Plains, Millbrook, etc. is important to us, because if we lost 20% of that population to Poughkeepsie, a 20%drop in income or patients would clearly hurt the hospital financially, and therefore, in terms of what it could do. So, we began a program of trying to support and help physicians come, internists and family practitioners, who would help to pin down the corners and the extremeties of our service area. A way to describe this that I like is that as a boy I worked on a farm, and since I was the littlest kid working, I was always put on top of the hay-wagon, back in the days when you loaded loose hay. Mr. Burn, who was the farmer, said, “Jim, load the corners and pin the sides together, and the middle will take care of itself.” That way you get a good strong, tall load of hay that’s basically square, and the middle just fills in naturally as you pack and move the hay piles around. I think the analogy is a good one. If you make the corners of your service area, the peripheries, strong by service and good doctors, the center part will take care of itself. Obviously, we don’t ignore the center part, but I think the analogy holds. Bruce Janelli is in Canaan, came there, and he’s become a fine young member of that community; Dr. Dweck in Millerton; Dr. Reed in Pine Plains; Bill Elman down in Dover Plains; we have now rented a building and redone it in Millbrook, where pediatricians and doctors will be two or three afternoons a week, which will increase in terms of timing; Dr. Timmel in Amenia, who lives in Cornwall – these are all doctors who have come in in the last half-dozen years and worked in the periphery of our service area. Again, this new corps has been developed. But I think had we not seen that and done it in 1984, 1985, we might well have lost some of our service area to competing hospitals. And we have to face it, that hospitals are in competition. They’re non-profit corporations, but if they consistently lose money, they simply go out of business. So, you’ve got to be concerned about the service area and what you’re doing for the communities that you do serve. So, that’s another thing that I think, along with all of these other issues, has been significant in maintaining the health of the hospital through the eighties, when a lot of hospitals have gotten into financial trouble. We have not, we are not, and we’re concerned about the future, but I think we’re certainly in a very strong position today.

 

 

JAMES BATESP. 9

 

RD:Jim, as it relates to the cornerposts on the hill – you now have a person who is involved with marketing to some degree, and to public information. Could you just address that new position and what it has done for you, for the hospital, in the short time it’s been _______

JB:Yeah. I think we all come from a background – at least many of the trustees do – in my experience working at Yale, the philosophy was that if people don’t understand what’s happening here, it’s their fault. I think that’s a little bit outdated and so we realized that we have to try and reach out to the community to explain more and more what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and make the community people realize that they are an important part of the hospital, that the hospital isn’t something thatlives in isolation and is there when you need it. The whole Tuesday Talks program, which has been extremely successful, – the first one, they expected about 40, and over 200 people showed up, or signed up for it. These are talks about cancer, intestinal disease, heart disease, etc., that are offered monthly on Tuesdays, and have been a very popular outreach kind of program. So, we’re doing more of that (we’re not doing enough), but, again, we’re learning as we go. So much for that.

RD:There is one thing I’d like to ask you, Jim, as we close the interview. You mentioned at the beginning of the interview that back in, I guess it was the eighties, or right after World War II, there were fewer than 100 beds. What is it today? And what’s going on as far as the utilization of your present facilities?

JB:The hospital is licensed for 92 beds. As the one-day surgery became more and more popular in the mid-eighties, why, our census went down and we actually removed one wing, the so-called East Wing, from daily service. So, our functional capacity right now is 78 beds. But, the additional beds are used, most of them, for the one-day patients. In other words, they use that wing not as an in-house, but as a transient kind of wing. With the prospects of a major renovation and a plan we’re getting into, and we’re moving toward a campaign at the moment, why, we would keep the bed count for the hospital at least 78 beds. We are aware that the Commission in Hartford will say, “You can’t have 92 beds; we won’t allow it. We’re going to drop you to 78.” We would resist that. We’d like to stay in the 85-bed range. I think, realistically, we realize we’ll have to give up some beds. On the other hand, I think realistically looking at where we’ve been, where we are, and the best guess of where we’re going, that a capacity of 85 beds would be a good bed number for the next 15 or 20 years. No one can really look out that far, but I think if there’s been a trend of the eighties, it’s the removal of the hospital to a significant degree from the hotel functions – shorter stays, or no stays at all for people who are really patients. And that trend is going to continue.

 

 

JAMES BATESP. 10

 

I would like to see more flexibility in allowing severely ill people and elderly people to remain longer in the hospital. On the other hand, most people will be treated for shorter stays, or have operations with no stay at all, other than one day. That means we simply need fewer beds to provide the same services that we did ten years ago. Now, if we go to 85 beds, the next question is: Is this area growing? How fast will it grow? At what point will 85 beds become inadequate? If it’s ten years, then we’d be foolish to drop to 85. We should stay at 92, just because of building costs. If it looked like it’s beyond ten years, we could drop to 85, with the idea that the building program in 2010 would add more beds to it. But, beyond the next decade, I think we get into a guessing game and I think that 85 beds would be a reasonable compromise.

RD:What about the utilization of space, within the plant itself?

JB:Sharon Hospital right now has no space at all. The last building program was completed in 1974, and in terms of hospital equipment, hospital bureaucracy forced on us by Medicare, Medicaid, the Health and Hospitals Commission, simple movement of, and our adjustment to, life with the Fax and the Xerox and all these other wonderful bureaucratic pieces of machinery – there is simply no storage space. We are in desperate need ofadded square footage for pieces of equipment. There is one machine onthe third floor which is an x-ray type of machinery, and if you walk into the room, which is about 10′ by 10′, you will see over two feet from the wall a piece of linoleum that’s been cut and there’s another kind of a rubberized pad there, and that’s where the doctor stood while using this machine with a patient on the table. Now, that pad is under the middle of the new machine, and the doctor is halfway toward the door. Not only that. There are two other pieces of sophisticated machinery in this 10′ by 10′ room. There’s no room for people to work. When the room was built in 1974, it was adequate for Machine A. Now you’ve got brand new larger, much moresophisticated Machine A Prime, but you have Machine B and Machine C that didn’t exist 15 years ago. Not only that, but you’ve got all the paper, the equipment padding, this, that, tools, you know, wrenches, pliers, etc., that go with these things, and where in the world do you store them?

RD:Indeed. In closing, Jim, could you tell me about your earliest recollection of the hospital and your involvement with it?

JB:Oh, yeah. I was a student at Salisbury from 1945 until I graduated in 1948. During my time there, there were three or four of us who were very interested in Biology, and we, actually, with a teacher, a master, Peter Ogilvie, requested permission to have a second year biology course, and George Langdon, the Headmaster, agreed that that would make sense

 

 

JAMES BATESP. 11

 

B:We were interested, Peter had developed a curriculum that made some sense, so Junior Year I took a second year of Biology, which was tremendously unusual 45 years ago. Dear God, it is 45 years ago. One of the things we did as a lab – there were four of us, and two of us went over so that either one night a week, or two nights a week, on alternate weeks, we worked at Sharon Hospital as orderlies. We went over right after dinner, and Peter would come over and pick us up at 10:30 in the evening. So, we worked there either four or eight hours a week. My first memory was working as an orderly, taking temperatures, doing essentially orderly work. Along about nine o’clock I’d go down to the kitchen. We’d make BLTs for the nurses on duty, and, believe it or not, the kitchen is exactly the same as it was in 1946, I think the year was. But, it’s a very different hospital now than it was then.

RD:Jim, thank you very much for your time. It’s evident to me, and to those who will listen to this tape, that volunteerism has been an integral part of your life. Thank you.

JB:Right.

 

 

 

under the sponsorship of generations of area residents. Dr. Jerome Stuart Chaffee was a country doctor who returned to his Amenia practice in 1903 with modern ideas about medical care after serving in the Spanish American War• Shortly after moving his practice to doctorless Sharon, he decided to build a hospital.

Community hospitals were a rarity at the turn of the century, a time when babies were born at home and the sick were nursed by their families under a doctor’s supervision. Local reaction to Dr. Chaffee’s plan ranged from apathy to outspoken opposition. Despite the doctor’s personal popularity, it took years of relentless campaigning to convince his fellow citizens that they needed and deserved a hospital in their community.

In December 1909, Dr. Chaffee opened an eight-bed hospital with an operating room in a rented house on Caulkinstown Road in Sharon. Dr. Chaffee, Dr. S.C. Appel of Dover Plains, Drs.

William B. Bissell and C.K. Peterson, both of Lakeville, and two nurses cared for 88 patients in the first year. Patients arrived by train or horse and wagon, or a lumber wagon if the patient was unable to sit up. The first ambulance in the area was not introduced until 1925.

But Dr. Chaffee was not satisfied. What he had in mind was a building specifically designed to be a hospital, not a makeshift hospital in a rented house, and he was not to be

8

 

 

under the sponsorship of generations of area residents. Dr. Jerome Stuart Chaffee was a country doctor who returned to his Amenia practice in 1903 with modern ideas about medical care after serving in the Spanish American War• Shortly after moving his practice to doctorless Sharon, he decided to build a hospital.

Community hospitals were a rarity at the turn of the century, a time when babies were born at home and the sick were nursed by their families under a doctor’s supervision. Local reaction to Dr. Chaffee’s plan ranged from apathy to outspoken opposition. Despite the doctor’s personal popularity, it took years of relentless campaigning to convince his fellow citizens that they needed and deserved a hospital in their community.

In December 1909, Dr. Chaffee opened an eight-bed hospital with an operating room in a rented house on Caulkinstown Road in Sharon. Dr. Chaffee, Dr. S.C. Appel of Dover Plains, Drs.

William B. Bissell and C.K. Peterson, both of Lakeville, and two nurses cared for 88 patients in the first year. Patients arrived by train or horse and wagon, or a lumber wagon if the patient was unable to sit up. The first ambulance in the area was not introduced until 1925.

B

But Dr. Chaffee was not satisfied. What he had in mind was a building specifically designed to be a hospital, not a makeshift hospital in a rented house, and he was not to be denied. In the words of Louise Hanson, who served as Sharon Hospital’s head nurse from 1916 to 1941, Dr. Chaffee manner was “persistent and demanding. He wanted things done right away. He was sarcastic, stern, impatient and sometimes gruff, but his bark was worse than his bite. He was dedicated to but one thing=demanding and getting the best care for his patients and obtaining equipment and bed space needed for his hospital.

Finally, in 1915, the Sharon Hospital Association was incorporated and secured financial backing from three public- spirited citizens. Mrs. Henry M. Gillette provided $10,000 toward the construction of the new hospital and $20,000 as the nucleus of an endowment fund. R.R. Colgate and Thomas B. Hidden provided equipment and supplies and helped purchase the present building site.

The cornerstone for a $16,787, 16-bed hospital was laid on September 4, 1915. Sharon Hospital opened seven months later, on

April 1, 1916. The operating room was pressed into service just a day later when Dr. Chaffee performed an emergency appendectomy. Dr. Chaffee seemed to be everywhere in the hospital, prowling the hallways, supervising everything, complaining that the medical staff was stealing light bulbs and that the amount of work accomplished decreased in direct proportion to the increase in the number of staff. The hospital’s indomitable head nurse, Louise Hanson, was everywhere. She managed the nursing staff, was on-call 24 hours a day for the delivery and operating rooms, resuscitated babies and delivered many herself, administered

9

 

anesthesia, sterilized instruments, mixed intravenous solutions, kept the records and answered the telephone. She was famous for her clinical skills and for her uncanny ability to keep every hair in place and her white uniform fresh and spotless, no matter how hectic her schedule.

In 1919, Sharon Hospital’s staff cared for 210 patients and delivered 42 babies. In 1920, the hospital opened its first laboratory, installed by a Yale medical student during his summer vacation, and paid off its first mortgage of $7,800. In 1922, the hospital purchased the adjacent house for use as a nurses’ home, freeing a total of 25 patient beds in the hospital and creating a separate maternity ward. Even with the nurses moved next door, the hospital desperately needed more space, and once again, the community stepped forward. Mrs. Charles G. Kerley, the wife of a prominent New York physician, and fellow members of the Sharon Hospital Auxiliary sponsored a street fair in 1924 that raised $10,750 for the hospital, which the trustees placed in a building fund. The auxiliary continued to raise funds for the hospital in succeeding years, sponsoring another street fair, illustrated lectures and card parties.

In 1927, the hospital acquired six additional acres in anticipation of the construction of a $42,000, three-storied fireproof addition, completed in 1930. The new building, which increased bed capacity to 30, included a waiting room, nurses’ room, an eight-bed ward, a complete maternity department and a new operating suite. In 1934, the hospital was accredited for

10

 

the first time by the American College of Surgeons and the American Medical Association.

By 1939, Sharon Hospital was serving 1,000 patients a year and the need for more beds and an upgraded facility again became critical. Times were particularly difficult during World War II, with the hospital caring for more patients each year, but unable to expand due to wartime building restrictions. When the war ended, plans were made to build a new addition to bring the hospital’s bed capacity to 50.

THE EVOLVING HOSPITAL

In November of 1947, with the plans for the new addition nearly complete, Dr. Chaffee died. When the new $800,000 building opened in 1949, it was named the Chaffee Pavilion in honor of the doctor whose sheer force of will had brought the hospital into being. The communities served by Sharon Hospital had clearly come to share Dr. Chaffee’s dream. By 1950, a fundraising campaign had raised $300,000 to pay the balance of the Chaffee Pavilion’s construction costs.

The ’50s brought further growth with the construction of the Harry Payne Bingham wing, funded by a bequest from the former trustee, and the Ford wing, funded by a local family foundation, at a total cost of more than $200,000, bringing inpatient bed capacity to 68. The hospital’s medical library, a gift from Boyd Hatch and the Sharon Hospital Auxiliary, was established, as well

11

 

as a physical therapy department provided by William F. Buckley, Sr.

With 3,000 patients a year by 1963, the hospital facility was again in need of expansion. The result was the hospital’s most ambitious building project to date. Through bequests from the estates of Herbert R. Fransioli, Muriel Alvord Ward and George A. Berry, and a federal grant, the project was completed without need for a fundraising campaign. Nearly 30,000 square feet were added to the hospital at a cost of $3,200,000. Officially dedicated on August 1, 1965, the Fransioli Wing housed a fully-equipped emergency department, a new obstetrics department, three new operating rooms—one for treating fractures—a post-operative recovery room, a pediatrics department, administrative and business offices, a lobby and gift shop, a medical library and conference room plus a new heating plant and engineering and shop facilities. The Ward and Berry bequests provided 27 new medical-surgical beds and made possible the renovation of the Ward C. Belcher Clinical Laboratory. In 1967, Mr. and Mrs. Louis H. LaMotte provided funds for an intensive care unit.

THE MODERN HOSPITAL

In the 1970s, the last remaining section of the original 1916 structure was demolished, and the hospital became essentially the building we know today. Begun in the fall of 1973 and completed in 1976, the “Sharon Hospital Modernization

12

 

Program” added 39,000 square feet of new construction and renovated approximately 20,000 square feet of existing space. Included in the project were a new emergency room, a new radiology unit, an enlarged intensive care unit, an improved obstetrics unit, a new laboratory, central storage and sterile supply facilities, the gift and coffee shop, a new lobby and administrative offices. A capital campaign, the first public fundraising effort of this magnitude in the hospital’s history, raised more than $2,000,000 toward the $5 million cost of the project. Capital campaign monies, hospital reserves and a bequest of over $900,000 from the estate of Samuel B. Howard enabled the hospital to pay all construction costs without assuming long term debt.

SERVING THE AREA

Sharon Hospital’s service area includes fifteen towns in the northwestern corner of Connecticut and eastern Dutchess County in

New York.

ConnecticutNew York

Canaan (Falls Village)

Cornwall

Goshen

Kent

Norfolk

North Canaan

Salisbury/Lakeville

Sharon

Warren

Amenia

Dover

Northeast (Millerton) Pine Plains

Stanford (Stanfordville) Washington (Millbrook)

Since 1980, the total population of Sharon Hospital’sservice area has increased by 7%. —Acco-rding–to.-the—X>i-tchf-ted-d

13

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ostpial

 

s

 

P. 17

J

Hospital’s head nurse from 1916 to 1941, Dr. Chaffee’s manner was “persistent and demanding. He wanted things done right away. He was sarcastic, stern, impatient and sometimes gruff, but his bark was worse than his bite. He was dedicated to but one thing— demanding and getting the best care for his patients and obtaining the equipment and bed space needed for his hospital.”

Finally, in 1915, the Sharon Hospital Association was incorporated and secured financial backing from three public- spirited citizens. Mrs. Henry M. Gillette provided $10,000 toward the construction of the new hospital and $20,000 as the nucleus of an endowment fund. R.R. Colgate and Thomas B. Hidden provided equipment and supplies and helped purchase the present building site.

The cornerstone for a $16,787, 16-bed hospital was laid on September 4,1915. Sharon Hospital opened seven months later, on

April 1, 1916. The operating room was pressed into service just a day later when Dr. Chaffee performed an emergency appendectomy. Dr. Chaffee seemed to be everywhere in the hospital, prowling the hallways, supervising everything, complaining that the medical staff was stealing light bulbs and that the amount of work accomplished decreased in direct proportion to the increase in the number of staff. The hospital’s indomitable head nurse, Louise Hanson, was everywhere. She managed the nursing staff, was on-call 24 hours a day for the delivery and operating rooms, resuscitated babies and delivered many herself, administered

9

 

anesthesia, sterilized instruments, mixed intravenous solutions, kept the records and answered the telephone. She was famous for her clinical skills and for her uncanny ability to keep every hair in place and her white uniform fresh and spotless, no matter how hectic her schedule.

In 1919, Sharon Hospital’s staff cared for 210 patients and delivered 42 babies. In 1920, the hospital opened its first laboratory, installed by a Yale medical student during his summer vacation, and paid off its first mortgage of $7,800. In 1922, the hospital purchased the adjacent house for use as a nurses’ home, freeing a total of 25 patient beds in the hospital and creating a separate maternity ward. Even with the nurses moved next door, the hospital desperately needed more space, and once again, the community stepped forward. Mrs. Charles G. Kerley, the wife of a prominent New York physician, and fellow members of the Sharon Hospital Auxiliary sponsored a street fair in 1924 that raised $10,750 for the hospital, which the trustees placed in a building fund. The auxiliary continued to raise funds for the hospital in succeeding years, sponsoring another street fair, illustrated lectures and card parties.

In 1927, the hospital acquired six additional acres in anticipation of the construction of a $42,000, three-storied fireproof addition, completed in 1930. The new building, which increased bed capacity to 30, included a waiting room, nurses’ room, an eight-bed ward, a complete maternity department and a new operating suite. In 1934, the hospital was accredited for

10

 

the first time by the American College of Surgeons and the American Medical Association.

By 1939, Sharon Hospital was serving 1,000 patients a year and the need for more beds and an upgraded facility again became critical. Times were particularly difficult during World War II, with the hospital caring for more patients each year, but unable to expand due to wartime building restrictions. When the war ended, plans were made to build a new addition to bring the hospital’s bed capacity to 50.

THE EVOLVING HOSPITAL

In November of 1947, with the plans for the new addition nearly complete, Dr. Chaffee died. When the new $800,000 building opened in 1949, it was named the Chaffee Pavilion in honor of the doctor whose sheer force of will had brought the hospital into being. The communities served by Sharon Hospital had clearly come to share Dr. Chaffee’s dream. By 1950, a fundraising campaign had raised $300,000 to pay the balance of the Chaffee Pavilion’s construction costs.

The ’50s brought further growth with the construction of the Harry Payne Bingham wing, funded by a bequest from the former trustee, and the Ford wing, funded by a local family foundation, at a total cost of more than $200,000, bringing inpatient bed capacity to 68. The hospital’s medical library, a gift from Boyd Hatch and the Sharon Hospital Auxiliary, was established, as well

11

 

as a physical therapy department provided by William F. Buckley, Sr.

With 3,000 patients a year by 1963, the hospital facility was again in need of expansion. The result was the hospital’s most ambitious building project to date. Through bequests from the estates of Herbert R. Fransioli, Muriel Alvord Ward and George A. Berry, and a federal grant, the project was completed without need for a fundraising campaign. Nearly 30,000 square feet were added to the hospital at a cost of $3,200,000. Officially dedicated on August 1, 1965, the Fransioli Wing housed a fully-equipped emergency department, a new obstetrics department, three new operating rooms—one for treating fractures—a post-operative recovery room, a pediatrics department, administrative and business offices, a lobby and gift shop, a medical library and conference room plus a new heating plant and engineering and shop facilities. The Ward and Berry bequests provided 27 new medical-surgical beds and made possible the renovation of the Ward C. Belcher Clinical Laboratory. In 1967, Mr. and Mrs. Louis H. LaMotte provided funds for an intensive care unit.

THE MODERN HOSPITAL

In the 1970s, the last remaining section of the original 1916 structure was demolished, and the hospital became essentially the building we know today. Begun in the fall of 1973 and completed in 1976, the “Sharon Hospital Modernization

12

 

Program” added 39,000 square feet of new construction and renovated approximately 20,000 square feet of existing space. Included in the project were a new emergency room, a new radiology unit, an enlarged intensive care unit, an improved obstetrics unit, a new laboratory, central storage and sterile supply facilities, the gift and coffee shop, a new lobby and administrative offices. A capital campaign, the first public fundraising effort of this magnitude in the hospital’s history, raised more than $2,000,000 toward the $5 million cost of the project. Capital campaign monies, hospital reserves and a bequest of over $900,000 from the estate of Samuel B. Howard enabled the hospital to pay all construction costs without assuming long term debt.

SERVING THE AREA

Sharon Hospital’s service area includes fifteen towns in the northwestern corner of Connecticut and eastern Dutchess County in

New York.

ConnecticutNew York

Canaan (Falls Village)

Cornwall

Goshen

Kent

Norfolk

North Canaan

Salisbury/Lakeville

Sharon

Warren

Amenia

Dover

Northeast (Millerton) Pine Plains

Stanford (Stanfordville) Washington (Millbrook)

Since 1980, the total population of Sharon Hospital’sservice area has increased by 7%. —Acco-rding–to.-the—X>i-tchf-ted-d

13

 

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JAMES BATES

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JAMES BATES

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JAMES BATES

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JAMES BATES

P. 17

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