Ice Time in Andover

By Dan Covell

I realized I finally needed a new wallet. The one I had was at least 15 years old, and while still serviceable, was deeply worn and frayed. Luckily, I was in Andover, Massachusetts, and that meant I could go to The Andover Shop and see what they had in stock.

Why was I in Andover? Readers of this site might recall that part of my job as a college professor is to conduct research on topics relevant to my field of sport management, and to publish books and journal articles as evidence of my scholarly activities and acumen. I had come to the town, specifically to Phillips Academy (henceforth “Andover”), to conduct archival research on an Andover alumnus, Daniel George “Danny” Bolduc. Born in Waterville, Maine (my hometown) in 1953, Bolduc is the state’s first-ever major league pro hockey player. He starred at Andover and Harvard University, was a member of the 1976 United States Olympic hockey team, played in just under 200 games over parts of six seasons in the National Hockey League (NHL) and the defunct World Hockey Association (WHA), and played and coached in multiple seasons in affiliated professional minor leagues.

Danny came to be at Andover after his first season at Waterville High School, when he was contacted by two rival local college coaches – Charlie Holt of Colby, and Sid Watson of Bowdoin. The pair, both of whom years later would be inducted into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame, came to the Bolduc house for a “fireside chat” with Danny and his parents. “I thought that they were trying to recruit me,” recounted Bolduc, “but they essentially said to me, ‘Danny, we know you’re not going to play for Colby or Bowdoin. We’re here to talk about a strategy.’ And they said to my father: ‘If you want your son to be a successful hockey player, he needs to explore greener pastures and play hockey at a higher level of competition.’”

Even though the Waterville High School program was competitive regionally (the Purple Panthers would win several New England titles in the next few years), and Bolduc was an honor roll student, the pair told him, “You need to go to Andover. You’ll play a tougher schedule, and you’ll be better prepared academically and athletically for college.”

“That was the very first time I had ever heard of prep school,” said Bolduc, “but I immediately kind of liked the idea. So, I applied, and I was euphoric when I got in.” That is what led Bolduc to Andover, and that is why I was there. I wanted to find out more about what Andover life was like for Bolduc in the years from 1968 to 1972.

Andover, founded in 1778, was and remains one of the nation’s most selective private secondary boarding schools and is also wholly part of American hockey’s elite prep school heritage. The school’s founding document expressed that the school was to exist for “the purpose of instructing Youth, not only in English and Latin Grammar, Writing, Arithmetic, and those Sciences, wherein they are commonly taught; but more especially to learn the GREAT END AND REAL BUSINESS OF LIVING” (author’s caps). Most founders had graduated from or were connected to Harvard, twenty miles away due south. “In a very real sense,” Frederick S. Allis, Jr. wrote in the history of the school penned in 1979, “Phillips Academy was founded as a bulwark against change, and agency for maintaining the virtues of the past.”

I couldn’t recall if I’d been to Andover since my post-grad year at Northfield Mount Hermon, when our football team had lost there, and I had no memories of the campus or its environs. I arrived at the Andover Inn on the north edge of the campus around 4 p.m. A few days prior the region had weathered a blast of snow and rain, and while the late February sun was hanging in the sky longer each day, it couldn’t push the post-storm temps past the freezing mark. The resulting chill had left most sidewalks sheer-ice luge runs punctuated by jagged ruts and slabs, which made the dark evening walk down Main Street to dinner an exercise in injury avoidance as I shuffled and slid down the hill, then eased back up after.

The walk from campus through town reminded me of a passage from John Knowles’s A Separate Peace, a work acknowledged by Dame Lisa Birnbach et al., as part of the canon of prep lit (it is in fact #2 on the “Basic Reading List” just after some book by Salinger). Knowles, a Phillips Exeter Academy (henceforth “Exeter”) alum, wrote of the fictional Devon School and declared: “Like all old, good schools, Devon did not stand isolated behind walls and gates but emerged naturally from the town which had produced it.” I didn’t agree with the sentiment when I first read it, nor do I now, but that didn’t mean that Andover was not without its well-tended charms, even though it lacked the arresting scenic vistas I grew to love during my NMH campus days.

The next morning, with temps still frosty and ice still locked in place, I made my way back down the hill for breakfast – noting the location and hours of the Andover Shop as I passed and decided to visit after lunch – then back up to check in at the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library for my 8:30 a.m. appointment with Andover’s crack archivist, Paige Roberts. The files I studied were of interest, and I uncovered a few things of value, and before I knew it, it was lunchtime and time to visit the Andover Shop. As readers of this space know, when I go to a school campus, I have a “when in Rome” approach to my apparel. As a result, I was featuring Andover’s blue liberally, including a navy silk J. Press necktie with alternating wide and narrow white stripes over an L.L. Bean light blue OCBD. Other than the shirt, I was J. Pressing it with my sport coat and cords and felt a little sheepish as I walked into a competitor’s place of business. This store’s location, the friendly salesperson told me when I revealed that this was my first visit, predated the more famous Cambridge shop by a few years. The wallets were on display right at the checkout desk. “Men tend to hold on to their wallets to the bitter end,” he said by way of a pardon as he looked at my ragged version.

After making my wallet choice – a basic gray leather model made locally – I then wandered the store to review the remaining goods. Spring and summer items were not yet on display, but winter sale items were, and I zeroed in on some Italian cotton corduroy trousers, and then of course circled back to the neckwear table, which can never be ignored. There I spotted ties made expressly for Andover. Can anyone buy one of these, or do I need an Andover ID card or something? I asked. Assured they were available to all, I chose the bowtie version, a silk model of Cambridge blue, with an emblematic design of bees and a beehive embroidered in silver, an homage to the Andover school seal. “You know who designed that?” the salesperson queried. Since I’d been on the research kick, I did, but I didn’t let on. “Paul Revere!” he responded.

My prior reading of Frederick Allis’s Andover history had revealed that two of the school’s founding trustees were neighbors of Revere, “the leading silversmith of the day,” and that while Revere had indeed cut the school seal, the creator of the design is not known. The circular seal depicts the sun with spreading rays in the top left corner – upon which is inscribed Non Sibi (not for self) – shining down on a series of plants from which bees buzz to and from an adjacent hive perched on squat Doric column. Under this tableau, a banner reading Finis Origine Pendet (the end depends on the beginning) stretches around the bottom of the circle. But what to make of this imagery? Allis writes that the school’s patron founder, Judge Samuel Phillips, “deemed idleness to be the most insidious and demoralizing of the vices,” and the that visual represents the example set for the in the poem of English Congregational minister and theologian Isaac Watts: “How doth the little busy bee / improve each shining hour / and gather honey all the day / from every opening flower?” The poem ends with the final lines: “In books, or work, or healthful play / Let my first years be passed / That I may give for every day / Some good account at last.”

I paid my bill and said my thanks, and by then it was time to take in some hockey. I drove south on Main Street the mile or so to the rink – or should I say rinks, since the facility, named for longtime hockey coach, athletics director and housemaster Fred H. “Ted” Harrison, Andover ’36, has two ice sheets. Andover’s opponent, the team from the Brooks School, had just arrived from their campus on the far side of Lake Cochichewick about 15 minutes to the northeast, and were unloading gear from their bus as I arrived. A man in a jeep pulled up next to me in the facility parking lot and started unloading some video filming equipment. “Is this a cold rink?” I asked, knowing from years of experience that not all indoor facilities are created equal when it comes to temperature. “Not bad,” he said, so I grabbed my dark charcoal cashmere-and-wool knee-length topcoat, blue and black scarf, steel blue wool flat cap, and left the gloves in the car.

I always like to arrive early to games, enjoying the opportunity to walk around the facility and watch pregame warmups. Once I determined on which sheet the game would be held, I found a perch at the top of the bleachers opposite the team benches and the penalty boxes. I then spied on the opposite wall behind the benches 10-foot-long banners for Andover and all its opponents – Andover in navy, Brooks in green, Choate in navy and gold, Exeter in maroon, Milton in royal and orange, St. Paul’s in red and black, and several others. Each school name was displayed in a simple Sans-serif font, aligned between two horizontal stripes. I love the presence of banners (I had in fact enjoined my mother, a wizard seamstress, to make a set for the gym where I was an high school athletics director years ago), as it brings not only color but also a sense of courtesy, as if to say, “Welcome to our venue, you are one of us, and we are proud to recognize that fact.”

The banners also brought me back to something I’d seen in the archives earlier that day. I had been looking for notes from a meeting between headmaster John Kemper, Danny Bolduc and his father concerning Danny’s eligibility to try out for the varsity ice hockey team as a “junior” (what most would call a freshman or first-year). Paige Roberts had handed me a copy of Time magazine from October 26, 1962, the cover of which featured a close-up pastel drawing of the then-50-year old Kemper, graying at the temples and 15 years into his Andover headship, staring into the distance beyond the viewer’s left shoulder, with Andover’s Memorial Tower and autumnal foliage in the background, and sporting an outfit likely purchased just a block or so down the hill on Main Street at the Andover Shop: dark sport coat over a white OCBD and a navy-and-white rep tie (not wholly unlike the one I was wearing).

The six-page article, entitled “Excellence & Intensity and U.S. Prep Schools,” penned at the point after which Ivy Style’s golden era would soon fade, outlined the admissions processes at Andover – characterized as “the nation’s best prep school” – and assessed the school’s goal of becoming “the nation’s public school” rather than a habitat for “Social Register dullards.” “Our job is to be available to anyone who wants to use us,” stated Kemper. “We must be of service.” This was Danny Bolduc, I thought. The uncited author also notes the rivalry with Exeter, noting that Kemper refers to Exeter head William Gurdon Saltonstall as “a fast friend and a mortal competitor.”

But to me the most salient element of the piece is a third of a page map of what was deemed “Prep School Country.” I have always been fascinated with maps: I’m told the first birthday gift I ever requested was a book of maps, and these days I delight in drafting chalkboard drawings of states, regions, and countries in classes to illustrate points. My favorite such trick is when I draw a map of the lower ¾ of New England to demonstrate the location of the first-ever intercollegiate athletics event (Harvard-Yale crew at New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee in 1852) and its proximity to both Cambridge and New Haven. The Time map covers the same territory, and highlighted are two-score all-boys schools, denoted by size of enrollment, with a cadre demarcated as part of the “St. Grottlesex” clique, described as “supposedly ultra-swank as well as churchy (Episcopal).” Certain schools also merited a brief parenthetical qualifying phrase, such as “J.F.K.’s school” for Choate, “F.D.R.’s school” for Groton, “has famous crew” for Kent and “hockey” for St. Paul’s.

In that article six decades old, Time declared that Andover and Exeter were at the center of the (all-male) prep school universe, and the map gave the reader a cartologist’s verification. Over a half-century later, are things any different? Some things were. Certainly, co-education’s advent ten years after the piece (for most schools) was one, the dropping of dress codes was another. But some things were the same. I had talked to a few Andover administrators during my visit and learned that Andover kids were still doing great things, and some kids still ran into trouble for making bad choices – as kids have always done, especially so as the winter term drags on in the days before spring break – leading the school to determine the best ways to teach kids the ways of appropriate comportment. At the hockey game I got to observe this current crop of Andover kids. Alas, there was no Ivy Style present at Harrison Rink, as there had been no such dress code since Danny Bolduc’s era. But the kids, dressed mostly the same in North Face, Canada Goose and athleisure pants and footwear, clothing lightly layered but still impervious to the cold, arrived and departed in pairs and small groups, migrated from one end of the rink to the other to be proximate to the goal at which Andover was shooting, cheered for the action, looked at their phones, and were just hanging out.

The video man’s read on the rink temperature was accurate, and following a brief Senior Day recognition ceremony, with players hailing from California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Texas, Virginia, and New Brunswick, reflecting both hockey’s spread and Andover’s reach, the action commenced. The play was even, but Andover was a bit bigger and a bit more skilled offensively. After a scoreless first period, Brooks struck first in the second, then Andover equalized on a soft goal that flummoxed the Brooks netminder. Andover potted two in the third, and prevailed, 3-1. A good account from this healthful play for the team in blue. Isaac Watts would have approved.

What had all this taught me about Danny Bolduc’s Andover days? By all accounts, Danny had thrived there, captaining the Andover varsity his senior year (Andover called seniors “seniors,” just like much of the rest of us) and chose to attend Harvard (as did 38 of his 251 fellow grads; 35 went to Yale, 15 to Princeton). But his time was times of tumult at Andover and on campuses around the country. John Kemper resigned in the spring of ’71 and died of cancer that fall after a lifetime of chain-smoking cigarettes. Cultural mores regarding alcohol and drugs were rapidly changing, but Danny and some of his pals ran afoul of the still-strict Andover conduct rules, as kids always had and always will. Danny’s classmate, noted author Buzz Bissinger, told me that the Class of ’72 was “most hated class in Andover history,” and in his yearbook farewell, Danny wrote, “The times were good but most often the good times turned to be bad.” More than a few others conveyed similar sentiments. “I had two friends who got kicked out, but they went on to become successful and productive citizens,” Danny texted me when I sent him the quote.

When I left the next morning – I had moved to a different hotel, one in a nondescript office park/no-man’s land near the crossing of paths of interstates 93 and 495 – I stopped at the front desk to let the staff know I was out of my room. The manager – Bobby, a big guy with a shaved head and a local accent (which I always love to hear when I get back to the area) – asked: “Ah ya headin’ anyweah waum?” “Unfortunately, no.” I answered “Just down to Connecticut. Not much warmer down there, Bobby.”  But I had my new wallet and my bee-and-hive bowtie, perhaps as a bulwark against change, or perhaps as an agency for maintaining the virtues of the past.