The most venerable
The Stockbridge School gives associate's degrees to its pre-1961 graduates.
“She always has her shears with her,” said Ruth Nawrocki of her mother Mary Bangs ’43. “As we were leaving the house to come here, she was going to get them, just in case she saw something that needed a snip here or there. She probably has them in her bag right now.”
Other attendees of the Stockbridge School degree-granting ceremony June 10 may have had more conventional belongings than garden shears with them, but none had any more symbolic. Like her cohorts at the Mullins Center, Bangs, who studied floriculture at Stockbridge, had been awarded a certificate upon completing the school’s rigorous two-year program. In 1961, Stockbridge began awarding associate’s degrees. Forty-five years later, about 300 Stockbridge pre-1961 grads came together to be given their degrees, too.
Sporting dogwood-flower earrings, Bangs said of her time on campus, “I had a wonderful time! I loved being here, I got a good education.” The Maine native, who still lives there today, spent her Stockbridge years boarding in the Cosby Avenue home of one of its professors, the late Alden Tuttle, and his family. At Bangs’s invitation, Tuttle’s daughter, Deborah Tuttle Jacobs, came for the ceremony. Graduating during World War II, Bangs joined the Emergency Farm Labor Service, which later became the Women’s Land Army. She married and had four children and worked as a professional gardener. Officially retired, she still “always has her finger in the ground,” says Nawrocki.
Allan Johnson ’42, from Berlin, Massachusetts, also made the most of his Stockbridge training in floriculture. His business, Johnson’s Greenhouses, specialized in the propagation of geraniums. He had lunch—part of the festivities—with his wife, Katherine, and classmate John Bean Hussey, who studied animal husbandry. Hussey went into the military after graduation, became a fisherman off Cutty Hunk after the war, did some farming, and in 1951, graduated from UMass with a bachelor’s in animal science. Eventually he got into sales, of seeds, herbicides, and pesticides: “I got tired of milking,” he explains with a laugh.
Hussey remembers a very different campus when he arrived there for the first time: “There were almost still cows on the common; ninety percent of the present-day campus was not here.” Hussey played football and credits the university’s strong curriculum, particularly, a public speaking course, for his success in sales.
Joe Broughton ’37, worked his way up the ladder at a paper mill, and later went into politics. He traces his ability to speak in public to a class play he was in during his Stockbridge years. The eldest in a family of eight, he made it to Stockbridge through the generosity of people he worked for during high school. They insisted he finish high school, even as the Depression deepened, and when he graduated they said they’d arrange for him to go on to college. “They asked, ‘Where do you want to go to school?’ and I knew the answer: ‘Stockbridge!’”
Waiting with Broughton for the ceremony to start was Bob Smith ’37. He fell in love with farming as a child, scooting over the backyard fence to the farm next door. His mother was a widow and money was tight; his aunt financed his Stockbridge education. Still, it was hardly a free ride. “I drank a lot of water from Sunday noon to Monday morning,” he recalls, smiling and shaking his head, because where he boarded, he didn’t get any Sunday supper and couldn’t afford to buy it. He made his career in farming, mainly in Michigan. He and his wife, who graduated from Mass. State College in 1938, moved there in 1941. Eventually, they were in charge of 800 acres and 20,000 turkeys. Smith took along a frozen bird as an icebreaker on sales calls for Travis Tender Turkeys. Although he switched to insurance sales, he continued to sell turkeys as a sideline: “I had over 50 years in the turkey business.”
As part of the ceremony, guest speaker Jack Smith ’60, former chairman of General Motors, talked about his late father, Frank Smith ’29, for whom he was accepting the Stockbridge degree. The life story of Frank, who died in 1978, had much in common with those told by Bangs, Johnson, Hussey, Broughton, and Smith, and other Stockbridge grads. He grew up on a farm and came from a big family, with “a lot of mouths to feed and little money,” in Jack Smith’s words. He loved Stockbridge and put the education he got there to lifelong use, as a ice-cream manufacturer and in his public health career. Because he “revered education as the means to a better life,” because “college symbolized the means to pursuing the American Dream,” he urged his children to go on to college, too. Said Smith, “I like to think we did not disappoint him.”
Certainly no one seemed disappointed at 3:00 or so on Saturday, when every attendee’s name was read and the associate’s degrees were conferred. The crowd of friends and family members in the audience rose to their feet to give the awardees a standing ovation. As Chancellor Lombardi pointed out, the event was more than a graduation, it was an occasion to celebrate the attendees’ achievements. He gave expression to what everyone in the audience was doubtless thinking: “Unlike at other graduations, I don’t have to guess how it works out, or hope that it works out. You have earned this degree many times over.”