Page 208 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
Before I met Roger Scott, for example, I had never really encoun- tered a WASP before (other than Linda Lee, who probably didn’t think of herself as one), but in the weeks to come, I would not only encounter hundreds of what appeared to me to be WASPs on campus, I would learn that some WASPs, especially the High Episcopal WASPs, were the captains of industry and movers and shakers in this country. Indeed, the then chairman of the board of trustees of Amherst was John J. (which, believe it or not, stood for Jay) McCloy, whom the political writer Rich- ard Rovere dubbed “Mr. Establishment.” (McCloy is believed to have been a key member of FDR’s administration who specialized in obstruct- ing efforts to aid Jews struggling to escape from the Nazis.) The school’s president was Calvin Hastings Plimpton, who was Ambassador Francis T. P. Plimpton’s brother, George Plimpton’s uncle, and a descendant of American colonists.
All Plimptons, it seems, went to Phillips Exeter (not, I hasten to add, Phillips Andover), which, naturally, brings us to a new subcate- gory: preppies. Preppies, for the non-cognoscenti, were graduates of preparatory schools—usually such boarding schools as Andover, Exeter, Lawrenceville, Groton, Hotchkiss, and Deerfield. Horace Mann and Riverdale were not boarding schools, but they were also good at turning out preppies. (One of the first forms that I had to fill out during orientation week asked me where I had been “prepared,” and it took me a while to figure out that Midwood would be the correct answer, although what I had been prepared for remained open to question.) It seemed that at prep school one learned how to dress, to drink, to speak, to drink, to date preppy girls, and to drink, all in ways that were alien to me. Some preppy ways were attractive; for example, it wasn’t long before I was taping my loafers and wearing a tweed sport jacket over jeans. Some preppy ways seemed impenetrable. It was, for example, very long before I dated a preppy girl. And maybe that never actually happened.
But I digress. My point was that the population of the school was clearly different from the population to which I had become accus- tomed at home.
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