I have recently heard from an alumnus who attended Linton Hall Military School from 1943 to 1945. He has givn me permission to post his memories in this, the first guest post on my blog.
Guest post by H. Bernard Hartman, Ph.D.
Upon finishing third grade at the Salem, New Jersey RM Acton Elementary School in 1943, I spent the summer at activities not much different from the previous one. Mornings began with a walk up Wesley St. to Oak St., and supervised day camp on the playground at St. Mary’s Catholic School. Later in the day, my neighborhood friends and I played marbles and our usual war games. And in the late afternoon when Red came home from the mill, we picked Rutgers tomatoes at nearby farms. I especially enjoyed riding shotgun in the flat-bed truck that delivered tomatoes to the Ritter Catsup Co. in Bridgeton.
At summer's end, I returned briefly to my Mother’s second floor apartment on Craig Ave. in Baltimore, before being shipped off to the Linton Hall Military School (LHMS) in Bristow VA. Elaine and Diana remained with Mom and Red in Salem, and later Hancock’s Bridge NJ, Elaine until she was 8 years old. Why I came to spend the next two school years at LHMS was never explained to me, and those who might provide an answer, have long since expired. My sister says that I was boarded there as a “charity case.” My suspicion is that my father and uncle Harry, a former Marist Brother, paid my way because they wanted me to have a stricter Catholic upbringing. I was perfectly happy living with Mom, Red, sister Elaine, and cousin Diana in Salem NJ, and had I any say in the matter, would have preferred living with them permanently. Fortunately, my summers for the next few years were spent with them back in New Jersey.
LHMS was a Catholic boarding school for boys run by Benedictine nuns. In 1943, there were perhaps 150 boys in grades 1 through 8 living there; the faculty numbered 12, and tuition was $315/year. Most children’s fathers were in the military, or their Mothers worked in defense plants, or as government employees in the DC area. Located about 30 miles west of Washington DC near Manassas and Bull Run, it was in a very remote rural area surrounded by a dense hardwood forest. Entrance to the sprawling 1700-acre campus was by a single, tree-lined, unlit, quarter-mile long, paved road that ended on a circular, grass covered parade ground about the size of a quarter mile track. A very large and long three-story brick structure, called the Monastery Building, dominated the far end of the parade ground. It contained all the classrooms, several piano practice rooms, gymnasium that doubled as a movie theater, dormitory rooms, the nun’s living quarters, and a dining hall.
A brick church with large, beautiful, stained glass windows was to its left. To the east of the parade ground, about two hundred yards away from the Monastery Building was a large two-story antebellum house called St. Ann’s Guest House. It housed perhaps 50 cadets in two open dormitory areas, and several two-person rooms. One of those rooms on the second floor, I shared for the next two school years with fellow Baltimorean Bill Powell. Like the military, we all called one another by our last names, so he was Powell, and I was Hartman. Our “dorm Mother,” Sr. Joan Ducharme (1904-1999), had a room across the hall a few doors away.
Being roommates, Powell and I became good friends meaning that we shared forbidden candy bars, and pestered one another. In the late afternoon before dinner, Powell and I listened to daily serials on my AC/DC table-model radio, and on Saturday nights, the Hit Parade. Because we used it in the AC mode, and the large battery compartment below was empty and far enough from the heat of the vacuum tubes, we used that space to hide candy bars. Not being allowed to eat anything other than at scheduled meals, and being accustomed to my grandmother’s generous portions supplemented by Elaine and Diana’s leftovers, and jelly bread sandwiches, I was always hungry. Sr. Joan never discovered our cache when she made her daily inspections, being more interested in cleanliness, well-made beds and neatly folded blankets.
The most popular hobby of that wartime era at LHMS was assembling and flying single-engine and glider model airplanes from kits sold by the Comet, Cadet, and Guillow companies. As a result, our dorm was cluttered with balsa wood models in all stages of construction, and, the air was laden with the aroma of Testor glue and banana oil (isoamyl acetate), the latter, a lacquer solvent. The balsa stick frames were held together with Testor glue. A silk-like skin was applied over the skeleton of the finished fuselage, wings, and tail assemblies, and to make the skin taut was coated with lacquer. The aircraft I remember building were the British Spitfire, P-51 Mustang, German Stuka, and Japanese Zero. To test our craftsmanship, the final step was to wind the rubber band driven-propeller and launch the aircraft from the high sliding board adjacent to the playing field. With numerous launches and crashes the skin of our planes became torn. It was then our planes met their demise when we coated the fuselage with Testor glue, igniting it with a match before sending it on a last flight and flaming crash. Considering it was wartime, we were clearly irony impaired. Perhaps our love of building airplane models was in reality an addiction to the solvents in the glue, lacquer and enamel paint. We didn’t realize it at the time, but we may have been trend-setting glue sniffers!
Life at LHMS was very regimented. Each morning we were roused from our slumber at 6:45 to wash up in a common area. After donning our khaki uniforms, consisting of shirts and black ties, riding-style trousers with leggings, and brown shoes, we marched across campus to the church for a 30-minute mass, then on to the Monastery Building dining hall for a cafeteria-style forgettable breakfast cooked and administered by the nuns; in springtime, the milk fresh from a nearby farm had a garlic taste and odor. Then it was off to class, where we received a solid academic experience but a far too generous dose of Catholic religious indoctrination. When classes were over at 3 PM, we spent an hour drilling and marching on the parade ground after which we engaged in unsupervised games, and/or went to music lessons.
Classes met six days a week, but for only a half-day on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Afternoons of those days were spent performing close-order marching drills with fake rifles. Army officers who were headquartered in the DC area coached us on Saturday afternoons, and led combat drills and maneuvers in the poison ivy infested surrounding woods. On one occasion I contracted a terrible case of poison ivy in my crotch area, and had to be attended to by a nun who doubled as the school nurse. I was greatly embarrassed when she had me drop my pants and applied calamine lotion to my nether parts. I suspect she rather enjoyed telling the other nuns about that experience. The officers taught us how to hide, camouflage ourselves, and to ambush. In hindsight, we were being prepared to be the American equivalent of the Hitler Youth Corps. Of course, Hitler was also a Catholic.
The only film that I recall seeing at LHMS was Frank Capra’s World War II propaganda film, Why We Fight: The Battle of Russia. Who decided showing such a film to grade school kids was appropriate; was it the Benedictine nuns or the military officers who trained us on Saturdays? It was a terrifying movie featuring the siege of the city of Leningrad by the German and Finnish armies from 1941 to 1944. It depicted grisly scenes of hundreds of civilian corpses strewn on the streets, including soldiers killed defending the city, and the poor souls who died from starvation in the 871day siege. Scenes included German soldiers who had been captured and hanged by the vengeful Russians. One of my favorite composers Dmitri Shostakovich was a fire warden during the early days of the Leningrad siege. His Symphony #7, subtitled “The Leningrad”, is a harrowing musical evocation of those terrible days, and when I hear it, reminds me of that graphic film, and LHMS. Times have changed since those innocent pre-television days. Children today, as a result of constant exposure to television, movie and computer game violence have become inured to guns, murder, slaughter and mayhem. Sad.
My fourth-grade teacher was Ms Voight*, a layperson from Galveston TX. She was a strawberry blonde, middle-aged lady whose drawl sounded somewhat like the Virginia locals. In contrast to the nuns, she was much less stern, and had a pleasant sense of humor. Certainly, the most memorable story she told was about her parents surviving the great hurricane that swept over and devastated Galveston Island in 1900, killing more than 6000 people. It was in her class that I authored a poem “immortalized” along with contributions by my classmates on mimeographed handouts distributed to parents. My Mother kept a copy for many years. Here is my naïve opus:
Shipwrecked Sailor
If I was a sailor who sailed the ocean blue,
If shipwrecked on an island, I’d know what to do.
I’d build a house of logs that might look pretty funny,
And eat wild animals from the woods,
I wouldn’t have much use for money.
I often wondered what became of her after I left LHMS. An online search reveals Catherine Voight (1915-1992) was a graduate (probably 1942) of Marycrest College in Davenport, Iowa. She left LHMS in 1947, and spent the rest of her life as an educator, usually associated with Catholic schools operated by Ursuline nuns in Texas.
In contrast, my 5th grade teacher was Sr. Genevieve, a humorless person with a very short fuse. As a result, anyone clowning, snickering, laughing, whispering, passing notes, talking out of turn in class, was punished. Being typical boys, we were always goading one another in an effort to test her patience. She “rewarded” transgressions, depending on the severity of the offense, in one of two ways. Minor offenses meant sitting on a stool facing the corner at the left front of the classroom. What she judged to be a major offense resulted in corporal punishment. Paddling! Being the George Carlin of the class, I came to experience both penalties. Offenders were sent to the Principal’s office; Sr. Genevieve was the Principal. Hanging on the wall of the office was a wooden fraternity paddle. Holes had been drilled through its flattened blade to increase bat speed, therefore inflicting maximum pain. She then issued instructions that went something like this. “You are to bend over and grasp your ankles. I am going to give you five swats with the paddle. You will receive an additional swat each time you let go of your ankles.” In spite of the pain, I learned quickly to concentrate on grasping and holding onto my ankles, and to ignore my stinging fanny. After her assault, needless to say, sitting at my desk was a bit painful, and delayed for a time, my next infraction. Sr. Genevieve missed her real calling by about 500 years. She was born too late to participate in the Spanish Inquisition.
Roommate Powell and I got into a big squabble in gym class that was witnessed by the gym teacher, Mr. Bill Farquhar. He had heard enough of our bickering and decided to have Powell and me settle our differences once and for all. To do that, he produced two pairs of huge, heavy boxing gloves, and laced them onto our hands. Then with the gym class forming a circle around us and cheering us on, had us duke it out. Both Powell and I were so angry, that we proceeded to punch one another with enthusiasm initially, but harmlessly, because the gloves were so heavily padded. Worse, after only a minute or two, both of us were so exhausted from throwing increasingly ineffectual punches with the heavy gloves, we could hardly lift our arms. However, Mr. Farquhar wouldn’t stop the fight, forced us to continue until both Powell and I with our arms dangling harmlessly at our sides, began crying, not from injury, but exhaustion. It was then Mr. Farquhar ended the bout, removed our gloves, and had us shake hands. The fight didn’t end our friendship; we still remained roommates, and continued pestering one another until we both left LHMS in the summer of 1945.
When not in class, I sang in the choir and took weekly piano lessons with Sr. Marcella. How I came to be enrolled in those two activities, I don’t know. After all, there were only about eighteen music students among the 150 or so enrolled at the school. Why should I be included in this minority? Perhaps my uncle Harry had arranged it. I particularly enjoyed choir. Except for the older boys, the singers my age were male sopranos. We sang Gregorian chant, the words being in Latin. And while I had not the slightest idea what the words meant, our glorious sound and its reverberation in the chapel was magic to my brain and psyche, and a transforming experience. It doubtless planted the seed for my life-long love of music, classical music.
In contrast, Sr. Marcella’s piano lessons were an unpleasant experience. Her large music room housed a baby grand piano, and one wall of the room was dominated by several tall glass cabinets containing numerous World War I souveniers - helmets, hats, guns, bayonets, flags, iron cross medals, and uniforms – all from the German army! Whose side was she on? Sr. Marcella’s teaching method matched her severe surroundings, being based on intimidation and torture. For example, sometimes while I played my assigned pieces with the accursed metronome mercilessly beating time, she sat next to me, sometimes with a wooden ruler at the ready, to strike my fingers when I erred - which was often. I wanted desperately to play the piano well enough to impress uncle Harry, who played piano beautifully and taught it for many years. Alas, much as I practiced those two years, and I practiced at every opportunity, my dexterity and ability were not up to the challenge.
Each April, piano students gave a recital. As the 1944 event approached, Sr. doubled her efforts to “whip” her charges into readiness with extra practices. The recital program was arranged in order of pianist excellence from worst to best. So, I got to play first! My stumbling rendition of a piece called “Tune In” was followed by a sparkling duet version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” played by La Fontaine and Lawrenson. In yet another duet, Castle and I made mutton of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Shortly thereafter, doubtless to the relief of everyone within earshot, I concluded my contribution to the recital by playing “The Clock,” a rendition the critics might have called “timeless.” The quality of musicianship steadily improved as more advanced players mounted the stage. Semi-finally and finally, Freddy Barstow played a Mozart Minuet, and Jerry Flood concluded festivities with a Strauss Waltz. They garnered well-deserved, prolonged and enthusiastic applause for their excellent performances.
The following school year I moved on to John Thompson’s 2nd piano book, a book that contained many simple versions of classical piano pieces. I spent many hours trying to perfect Liszt’s “Liebestraum” and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumble Bee.” By the April (1945) recital, my musicianship was judged sufficiently improved, that I was entrusted with playing the “Minuet from Don Giovanni” by Mozart to accompany eight of my fellow music students, four dressed as girls with gowns and curly wigs, as they danced with four male partners. Like many minuets, its construction is AABA. That is, the “A” theme is played twice in succession, followed by the “B” theme, and concludes with return to the “A”. Seems simple enough, right? Well it isn’t if the pianist, me, because he has forgotten how to get to “B”, plays “A” four times in succession. As I was concluding the fourth playing of the “A” theme, and about to launch into it a fifth time, Sr. Marcella walked across the stage and struck the first note of the “B” theme, thereby jogging my memory enough to play it, happily, only once, finally concluding with the “A” section. I was told later that the dancers were only momentarily befuddled by my repetitions of “A,” and danced on gamely. Thus, my career as a concert pianist ended ignominiously.
After my 5th grade class ended at LHMS in 1945, I again returned to Mom and Red in New Jersey where on late afternoons when Red returned from the mill, as in prior years, we worked at nearby farms planting tomato starts in the early summer, and later, picking tomatoes that we trucked to Bridgeton, there to be offloaded at the P.J. Ritter Company by German POW’s and turned into catsup.
Linton Hall Military School Revisited
In June 2009, Makiko and I made a three-week circumnavigation of the USA from our home in Medford OR. A major goal while in the Baltimore/DC area was to visit Linton Hall Military School (LHMS) to examine their archives.
We left my sister Elaine and husband Martin’s place early one morning for the 80-mile trip to Bristow VA, site of the school. We found the entrance road without difficulty to what was now the co-ed Linton Hall School (LHS), and drove up the familiar tree-lined, quarter-mile long entrance road to the parade ground. The road in my time was used as an exit for boys running away from the school. The grounds were just as green and lush as I remembered, however as I later learned the campus had shrunk from 1700 to 120 acres. And instead of the stately three-story Tudor-style Monastery Building dominating the far-end of the circular parade ground, there was a long, ugly, nondescript two-story brick building of undistinguished pedigree. The anti-bellum St. Ann’s Guest House where I roomed with Bill Powell for two years was gone, replaced by a sign hanging from a tree that said simply, Guest House. The chapel was the sole (soul?) building remaining from my day. We went inside and found the pews had been removed for a summer event, but the raised choir loft, altar, stained glass windows, and familiar stations-of-the-cross plaques were as I remembered, but of course everything seemed smaller.
At the LHS office Sr. Ann Marie and the Principal Mother Chandra directed us to a hallway lined with photos of individual Benedictine nuns dating back to 1922 when the school was founded. Alas, missing were photos of my music teacher Sr. Marcella, my 4th grade teacher Ms Voight, and 5th grade teacher/principal Sr. Genevieve. I did see the photo and learn the name of the physical education instructor who refereed the “famous” fight between Powell and me. Mr. Farquhar was in his 90’s and lived near the school.
Next, Mr. Jerry Barrett, Director of Development and a math teacher led us to a small room where archival materials were stored. Makiko and I spent an hour looking through a disorganized hodge-podge of memorabilia before finding several volumes of photos organized according to decade. I sought photos of Sr Joan and Ms Voight and my tormenters Sisters Marcella and Genevieve. However, notably absent from the 1940’s volume were any photos of faculty from the years I was there. No photos. Nothing! Why? I was very disappointed, and suspicious.
While a student at LHMS I obviously missed Mom, Red, sister Elaine and cousin Diana in New Jersey, and my Mother and dad in Baltimore, I found my time at the school to be tolerable. I was not aware of, nor subjected to the cruelty that some cadets claim they experienced in the Monastery Building. One of the cadets from my time at the school was John Phillips of “Mamas and Papas” fame who wrote such late 1960’s pop rock classics as California Dreamin; Monday, Monday, and San Francisco (be sure to wear flowers in your hair). He was subjected to harsh discipline and beatings and claimed (as did others) that the nuns watched the boys take showers; he hated the place. There is a book titled Linton Hall Military School Memories by a Linton Hall Cadet who was there in the late 1960’s. He documents the cruelty he and other cadets were subjected to by bullying senior cadets. Having read his online blog, it is my feeling that the author has a low threshold to pain. My opinion is bolstered by the blogger Bart Rutley who writes that when a student at LHMS he behaved as combination of Denis the Menace and Bart Simpson, and deserved, indeed earned, the spankings and paddling’s administered by the nuns. So did I!
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This guest post Copyright 2026 by H. Bernard Hartman, Ph.D.. Used by permission fom the author.
Please respect copyright laws by linking to this post instead of copying and pasting. This blog is not affiliated with Linton Hall Military School and all opinions are those of the author. Comments are always welcome; please do not use your name or names of others.
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