By grace lee ’23
We can never predict the changes to our school- and I’m sure that our current longest living alumni would feel the same. I got the opportunity to learn about Dan Jones ‘38, a St. Mark’s alumni who recently turned 101 . Mr. Jones wasn’t the oldest alumni ever: the prize actually goes to Hamilton Fish (Class of 1906), who lived to 102. Every day, we walk the same halls and rooms as Mr. Jones did. Our school carries his experiences, as well as the new memories we are creating today.
Let’s first take a dive into what Mr. Jones accomplished during his time at St. Mark’s. Mr. Jones was on the football team during his VIth form year. In his V and VI form years, he was part of choir and the Glee club, a group for singing non-religious songs. Since St. Mark’s was an all-boys school at that time, the Glee club had only male TTBB voice arrangements - while the choir often recruited younger boys for higher voice ranges. Mr. Jones was also on the editorial board of The Lion, which is the present-day St. Marker. He volunteered at the Brantwood camp, when the camp’s partnership with our school had just started. He was also president of the St. Mark’s Missionary society. Outside of school, he enjoyed bird-watching and photography. Many of his experiences sound extremely familiar and common to us, like choir and Brantwood, but many of his interests are extremely different from ours today, like the Glee club and the Missionary society. His experiences may be different from many of us, but at the core of it all, it’s not that we as people have changed - the culture and life around us did.
Life at St. Mark’s, for most people, is convenient. We can travel anywhere we’d like to on the weekends. We can order whatever food we crave. Yet, back in the 1930’s, most St. Markers didn’t get chances to leave campus at all, with the exceptions of school vacations and special requests like a family’s wedding or funeral. On the days when they would leave campus to go home, the students who lived farther away (Pennsylvania, Chicago) would take train trips that would last about two days. Furthermore, on campus, there were small clubs of banjo playing, stamp collecting, and jazz music. If you think about the clubs we have today, St. Mark’s has expanded to almost every kind of club you can think of from academic clubs and fashion clubs to exchange/traveling clubs.
We attend evening chapel once a month and morning chapel twice a week, while St. Markers back then had to attend chapel every single day. Students in the 1930s had to wear chapel dress during all seated meals and during the daily chapel service. They had mandatory evening service every Sunday (unless some were exonerated by attending a Catholic service in the mornings). Furthermore, back in the 1930s, the student population at St. Mark’s was not diverse. Most students were from the Boston area and were wealthy and white males. Headmasters at the time actually wanted to integrate the school, but they were denied multiple times by the Board of Trustees. Despite their initial struggles, the first Asian student joined St. Mark’s in the 1950s, and black students as well as female students joined around the 60s.
St. Mark’s has also changed the admission process as well, as admission was much simpler than it is today. Children of alumni were given a simplified application of a very basic test. Most graduating classes had around 30 students, and they didn’t have the high-tech facilities we have implemented in our school today, so the tuition was only $1400 which today would be around $25,000. However, little financial support was given out, as financial aid was only given to children of alumni who had chosen less lucrative careers. After WWII, as college admissions began to slim, so did admission to St. Mark’s.
In our lives at our school, there has always been a strong connection to the real world: we hold mock elections, drive students to protests, and give the option of attending political events. Back in the late 1930s, 95% of St. Markers had enlisted to fight in WWII - as did Mr. Jones, who served in the US navy. A fun fact: many St. Markers after Mr. Jones’ time actually graduated in the fifth form in order to serve in WWII. After WWI, St. Mark’s had written a new mission statement, which encouraged St. Markers to be committed to serving others and to being leaders. Because of the mission statement, there were little to no students at our school in the time who had not performed service in Brantwood or the military. Nowadays, our mission statement has changed to focus on leading lives of consequence, since our school has expanded to include many more opportunities regarding individual talents… yet, the bravery that St. Markers demonstrated during the war times showed that students believed that a life at St. Mark’s was equivalent to a life of leadership. That same message still resonates in the hearts of all our students.
When we think about the global pandemic that is currently happening, we may wonder how Mr. Jones is dealing with it as of right now. How is he handling such a difficult period in time? As it turns out, he lived through a pandemic of polio in 1936, and had to quarantine just like us. Polio tragically infected ⅓ of the student body at the time, as they had not the medical advancements we do today, and one student had even passed away due to the crippling disease. Polio is not a commonly heard word nowadays since (hopefully) everybody has received a vaccine for it. Even so, Mr. Jones has already experienced what we are currently experiencing worldwide. Furthermore, he attended St. Mark’s at the height of the great depression. The economic failure affected affluent families more than it did poor families, which meant that the students of St. Mark’s were the ones who got struck the hardest with the effects of the great depression. Students in Mr. Jones’ time period had definitely suffered more tragedy and disaster than any other generation at St. Mark’s ever had.
Today, as we walk down the historic hallways and look back upon the wooden plaques with the names of all the recognized alumni, we must realize that we are all subconsciously carrying their experiences and impacts along with the legacy we are creating today. They lived through an extremely devastating period of our American history, and we are extremely grateful to be able to look back on those historical events today with a confident feeling that we have overcome it all as a society. However, as they say, we all bleed the same color, and what unites us at the core despite the differences in our lives and culture is that we are all St. Markers. We go to club meetings, eat in the same cafeteria, and reside in the same dorms. In the end of the day, we are not dragged down by the setbacks Mr. Jones and his class went through, and our school and mission: “lives of consequence”, are built upon and will continue to be built upon the perseverance of our alumni.