Excerpts from "Sherman Thacher and His School"

My Grandma Edie (That would be Edith Thacher Dane) passed along to me a book about her uncle Sherman Thacher, the founder of the Thacher School in Ojai, California. In it are many excerpts detailing the lives of various family members. I'm going to pass some of them along here.

Sherman Thacher and His School, Leroy McKim Makepeace, Yale University Press, 1941

Page 2: "He (Sherman) left New Haven in 1887. He had graduated from Yale college four years before and now had no job, almost no money, no purpose and apparently no interesting future. To him the journey to California led down a blind road with no opportunity at its end. He undertook it without enthusiasm and solely for the purpose of his seventeen year-old brother (George), whose heart was failing rapidly."

Page 8: "Sherman's position in the family was unusual. By a previous marriage to a daughter of Jeremiah Day, president of Yale, Professor Thacher already had five sons, so that Sherman was in a way a youngest child. And yet, as first born of his father's second marriage, to Elizabeth Baldwin Sherman, a granddaughter of Roger Sherman, he was in some ways the oldest... the younger children, William, Bessie and George, looked up to him as their guide."

Page 8: "His mother (Elizabeth Baldwin Sherman) was an energetic and high-spirited lady with a penetrating wit. To the end of her long life she was a delightful conversationalist. Full of optimism and cheerfulness, she was never daunted by the daily problems which arise in large households. As if the family were not enough to keep her busy, she filled the house with guests at nearly every meal. She enjoyed people and appreciated the good things in life."

Page 9: "Sherman's father, Professor of Latin in Yale College from 1842 to 1886, ruled with the authority of an Old Testament patriarch."

Page 10: "Professor Thacher was not a particularly broad-minded man... Professor Thacher continued to interpret the Bible literally and to believe implicitly, for instance, the story of Jonah."

Page 11: "The strongest of all the prejudices shared by father and son was an aversion to people of wealth."

---> More to come as I read more of the book, Kyle