The things we got away with at Linton Hall Military School

(I took this picture on Military Day, 1980.)





I've been told that I tend to concentrate on the negative aspects of my experience at Linton Hall.



This post is about the things we got away with, the times we did not follow the rules and escaped punishment.

Getting away with something even once was difficult, since (1) there were rules that covered pretty much every aspect of life at Linton Hall Military School, and (2) unlike the schools that I attended before and after, at Linton Hall "telling" or "ratting" on someone were common practice. In order to get away with something, you had to do it not only out of sight of the nuns and Commandant, but out of sight of the other two hundred cadets.


Here's what I remember, in no particular order:

At the end of one visiting Sunday, some of the older cadets were missing several buttons from their shirts and blue sweater. Seems that they had traded buttons for kisses from visiting girls (presumably the sisters of other cadets.) No one got punished; all we got was a lecture from the Commandant during Military Science class. I still remember him saying "they're not laughing with you, they're laughing at you." Only a few of us had been involved; I wasn't one of them. I also remember after class someone who commented "if I had known that girls were doing that, I would have traded buttons from my fly." (Our khaki pants had button flies.)


Some of the nuns who taught at Linton Hall Military School were young and attractive. A couple of times one of us would "accidentally" drop a pencil while she was walking past our desks, and try to peek under her habit. You had to be careful and not be too obvious. No one got caught, as far as I know. A few of us tried this. Yeah, I was one of them. Kind of sad, really, that looking up a nun's habit and maybe getting a glimpse of her knee was considered a thrill.

One time about five folk singers sang and played music during Mass, and afterwards. A couple of them wore miniskirts (this was the late sixties.) I remember some of us lying down on the gym floor (obviously after Mass) and trying to catch a good sight.

Someone actually had a couple of porn magazines in his locker! Amazing, since we weren't even allowed to have comic books. Someone squealed on him during "rest" and told an officer. The officer just told him to put the magazines away. I just happened to be nearby when the squealing and putting away took place, and very briefly saw the covers. The owner was a good friend of mine, and after that incident I asked him many times to let him look at his magazines, but he wouldn't let me. I imagine that as a condition of not reporting him, the officer who found out did get to look. The owner of the magazines did not live in the local area so he did not get to go home on weekends, so I don't know what happened to the magazines, since I can't imagine how he could have managed to throw them away undetected. Did they stay in his locker the rest of the school year?  Did he sell or trade them to someone who did go home on weekends?



Many of us smuggled candy from home when we came back to Linton Hall Military School from the weekend. I did, too. It wasn't too hard to hide it, it was just that you had to be careful not to be seen eating it. An officer saw me go to my locker during "rest" and eat something once, and he asked me for some. Obviously, I didn't really have a choice, I gave him some and in exchange he kept quiet about it.


One time my mother gave me about ten apples to "smuggle" back just so I could have one piece of fresh fruit every day. We both knew what the consequences were if I got caught. It was risky, since there's no easy way to hide so many apples. I just left them in my duffle bag in my locker. Eating them was the difficult part. I had to go to my locker during "rest" then put it in the pocket of my bathrobe, eat it in bed under the covers after lights out without anyone hearing every time I took a bite, and then dispose of the apple core either the next morning (or in the middle of the night) by flushing it down the toilet. I got away with it, but it was too risky and I never did it again. After all these years I still wish that when my mother found out that I was going hungry and that we weren't allowed to sneak in food, that she would have spoken to Sister Mary David about it. Yeah, I got away with it, but it's sad that I needed to sneak in food at Linton Hall Military School.


We got a punchcard to use at the canteen. There was more than one line, and sometimes it was possible to get in line twice. Not easy, since different companies got into different lines and people would have noticed that you were in the wrong line the second time, but I was able to do this a couple of times. This is something I figured out, and I shared the information with a couple of close friends who could be trusted not to rat me out.


One time there was some kind of visiting Sunday exhibit at Linton Hall, and one of the exhibits was about the evils of smoking. There was a mask with a lit cigarette in its mouth, and of course from time to time the lit cigarette had to be replaced. The two cadets who were in charge of the exhibit would periodically light a new cigarette for the exhibit. Actually, they were smoking cigarettes. During Military Science the Commandant gave them a tough talk in front of the whole class, and one of the things he said was that since he thought that there was a chance they would be able to convince their fellow officers that they weren't smoking but merely lighting up the cigarettes, they wouldn't get court martialed.





There was an extension phone just inside the classroom wing, by the chapel. Obviously we weren't allowed to use it, but one time someone did during study hour to call his girlfriend. Everyone in our classroom knew, but nobody told on him! I never did this since it was too risky (Mary David could have picked up the phone in her office at any time and heard the conversation.)


The punishment for using foul language was having to chew on a bar of soap, but Mexicans could say everything they wanted in Spanish, with no consequences. One time a bunch of them were hanging out with a nun who was learning Spanish, and they taught her a few words. One of the words they taught her was "puta" (which means "whore" in Spanish) but told her that it means "nun." So they were saying things to her face like "you are a puta" and she had no clue. I knew what the word meant and it was hard to keep a straight face while this was going on. All of a sudden I couldn't help myself anymore and started laughing, and someone just explained that I was laughing at her pronunciation of the word. Sounds like a dangerous kind of practical joke to play, but after all, this was the sixties, and dictionaries still pretended that four-letter-words didn't exist, and Spanish language dictionaries were probably the same way, so she couldn't have looked up the word.

There was also the time it was bitterly cold (much colder and windier than usual) during Drill, and ALL the offices from ALL the companies had enough good judgement to have us spend a lot of time on "bathroom breaks" in that smelly bathroom in the basement under the Commandant's office, just to get away from the cold. I remember overhearing them negotiating with each other about whose platoon had to go outside and march and which got to stay indoors. We couldn't all be indoors at the same time, but it was so crowded that maybe half the battallion was in there at one time. There had to be enough of us outside so that if eithe the Commandant or Mary David happened to look out the window from their warm office, they could see some of us out there marching.

There was also a group of cadets (many or most of them officers) who called themselves "Code C." They got caught breaking into a food storage area in the basementof Linton Hall Military School and stealing food. This was something the Commandant lectured the whole class about (and how I found out about it.) I know those responsible didn't get court martialed, but I don't have the details on whether they got punished. It would have been embarrassing for them to get court martialed for stealing food because they were hungry. Wouldn't have gone well with the parents either. I'm pretty sure that I would NOT have participated if given the chance, but am disappointed that those involved didn't trust me enough to invite me.

The last thing is something I have no personal knowledge of, but according to one of the nuns, who used to be principal before Sister Mary David, many years before sometimes cadets would get raisins as a treat, and one time they tried making wine. They didn't succeed and got sick from trying to drink the fermented raisin concoction, but they didn't get punished; the nuns wanted them to get rid of the stuff without fear of punishment.

Comments are always welcome. If you remember more examples of things we got away with, please add them!

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Copyright (c) 2011 Linton Hall Cadet. Please respect copyright by linking to this blog instead of just copying and pasting. Thank you!
This blog is NOT affiliated with Linton Hall Military School. The opinions contained are those of the author.

Being an Officer at Linton Hall Military School

Just like everyone else, I started out not as a private, but as a "recruit." I remember that after they had cut off your hair and taught you things like right face and about face, you actually got a piece of paper "promoting" you to Private. Kinda ironic to get called "Private" when you had zero privacy!

I remember what it was like being the low man (boy) on the totem pole, not only did I not know all the rules of Linton Hall Military School yet, but I had to follow orders from "officers." I'm putting all these words in quotation marks because it seems bizarre that we were "playing soldier" (as one of the commentators to my blog put it) just like kids play cops and robbers.

It was bad enough to have adults ordering me around and controlling every aspect of my life 24 hours a day, but even worse having some kid -- yes, not an "officer" but another child, maybe a year older, maybe my age, maybe even a year younger, telling me what to do.

Some of the officers were fair most of the time. I don't think there was anyone who was fair all of the time. By fair I mean that they expected you to follow legitimate orders such as "about face" when drilling, make your bed the prescribed way in the prescribed amount of time, they were understanding if you made an innocent mistake (hard to avoid, since everything had to be done a certain way, from how you made your bed to where you placed your toilet kit and slippers on the metal chair next to your bed.) And a "fair" officer punished you fairly, you know, maybe standing at attention for fifteen minutes, that type of thing.

I wasn't impressed by most officers, mind you, I felt that most of them were, how do I put it, a bit slow mentally since they seemed to accept and enforce rules without question, and focused on minor details instead of what was really important. I've had professors and bosses who were like that too, people who seemed to focus on whether a word was spelled wrong and not on the substance of a report.

But then there were also the officers who abused their power, the ones who used their rank to bully and intimidate, who punished and scared younger, smaller, and lower ranking children just because they had the power to do so. I know that they were acting just like some of the adults in charge, but at the same time all the officers at Linton Hall Military School were eighth graders, at least 13 years old, some as old as 15, and they could have exercised better judgement.

I never ran away simply because I realized that I had nowhere to go. When you're a kid you can't just get a job and an apartment. And if I followed orders it wasn't out of any respect for the school, the majority of the nuns (there were some decent ones, not too many) or for the rules. I just saw how other cadets (I mean children) were punished. I did just what I would do if an armed robber pointed a gun at me; I would hand over my money not out of "respect" but out of fear.

I was careful about saying anything negative about Linton Hall Military School to the wrong people, and was lucky enough not to get caught that time I brought about ten apples from home, so I didn't get disciplined much.

I guess the Commandant and Sister Mary David misinterpreted my compliance for "respect" or perhaps "leadership" because when I became an eighth grader, I was promoted to officer.

I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I was proud of being an officer. You know, really feeling good about myself because I got to wear some metal on the collar of my khaki shirt, a leather officer's strap, a dull-bladed sword during drill, and I got to tell a whole bunch of lower ranking cadets what to do, and if they didn't do it I got to punish them.

I hope you can understand this, I mean, I was almost (but not quite yet) 13 years old at the beginning of eighth grade.

I tried to model my behavior after those officers who had treated me fairly. In other words, I told people what to do, but wasn't on a power trip. I succeeded doing that with most of the cadets I was in charge of, but some had real discipline problems, were real brats, and sometimes I would say insulting things to them, knowing I could get away with it, sometimes punish them more than perhaps they deserved. Not that officers were allowed to do any of the abusive things that the adults got away with, but I could make cadets stand at attention a really long time, do deep knee bends, that type of thing. I'm not proud of this, but I admit it.

Even though I tried to be fair, and was fair most of the time, and felt "proud" of my rank (whatever "proud" means) I also felt bad about being an officer, I had the feeling that I wasn't doing the right thing.

One time this realization really struck me was when I was supervising study hour for the third grade. We officers got to supervise different grades during study hour, which basically meant sitting at the teacher's desk and trying to do your own homework (without much success) since at the same time you had to make sure everyone was quiet, and you kept getting interrupted by cadets who really really had to go to the bathroom, little kids who had questions about their homework, and so on.

Surprisingly, the third grade was the hardest to supervise because they didn't have enough homework to keep them occupied for an hour and, well, these were rambunctious eight year olds, and it was hard to keep them quiet.

I remember thinking hey, these are little kids (of course I was a kid too, just five years older than they were) you would give an order like "right face" and some of them don't even know their right from their left -- and there they were having to follow this discipline. They should be home watching cartoons. They shouldn't be here having to act like they're in the military.

And then I remember several times when the whole battalion was assembled on the blacktop, and we had to watch some unfortunate soul get punished by the Commandant, having to stand at attention holding out two rifles, and whenever his arms got tired and they dropped down from being perfectly horizontal, he would get hit in the elbow with another rifle.

I don't know what held me back, but I just wanted to take the bars off my collar and the helmet off my head and walk up to the Commandant and tell him I was resigning and wanted no part of this.

I never did it. It's the type of thing that looks great in the movies, but I can't imagine him just accepting my resignation. This is just speculation on my part, but I think it's highly likely that I would have gotten the same punishment, and then would have been sent back, maybe without my rank, but I still would have been doing the work as an officer. That's what happened to a lot of officers who got bumped; they lost the rank and privileges, but still did the same work.

I could have tried giving my resignation at a calmer moment, and explained my reasons, but I cannot by any stretch of the imagination picture it going well.

With everything I've learned as an adult, I still can't think of how I could have gotten out of being an officer, not without doing something really major in order to get a really huge punishment.

I don't know if any other officers thought the way I did, if several of us could have tried resigning at the same time, if I could have found even one other officer to lend me moral support and accompany me when going to the Commandant and Sister Mary David and telling them that hitting kids with rifles was wrong, that making bedwetters wear their urine-soaked pajamas around their neck all day was wrong, that so much about that school was wrong.

Can you imagine if some of us officers had actually rebelled? Yup, folks, I'm taking mutiny here. It would have been so worthwhile.

But I didn't do it, and nobody else did either.

As usual, comments are welcome.

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Copyright (c) 2011 Linton Hall Cadet. Please respect copyright by linking to this blog instead of just copying and pasting. Thank you!
This blog is NOT affiliated with Linton Hall Military School. The opinions contained are those of the author.

Camping and Hiking at Linton Hall Military School ... and how what I learned there might have saved my life

Several of the Linton Hall Military School alumni on Facebook have said that I seem to focus only on the negative aspects of my experience at Linton Hall. I've answered that in my first blog post (March 2010, or the "About Me" section of my Facebook profile) I mentioned several positives (academics, camping and hiking, and making friends.)

I didn't elaborate on friends, since it would probably be of interest only to those who knew the people I mentioned, and I didn't elaborate about academics since past participles and isosceles triangles don't make very interesting reading.

But I have something to say about camping, hiking, and military science.

I enjoyed camping, not only because I had never gone camping before, but also because of the looser discipline. The commandant seemed much more relaxed and friendly when we went camping, and some annoying rules were forgotten, such as having a count of 30 to brush your teeth. If you wanted, you stepped a few feet away from your tent with your canteen and brushed your teeth, if you didn't, nobody got on your case about it. We had a campfire, stayed up later than normal, and several cadets would wear unusual hats and didn't get hassled for being "out of uniform." And there was that cool "Over and Under" patch. I still have mine, somewhere. If I could find it I would scan it to illustrate this note.

Many years later when I was an adult I only went camping a couple of times, and what I learned at Linton Hall Military School about setting up a tent served me well, especially how to set up the tent so it doesn't get flooded if it rains -- and it did rain, a lot.

The most important thing I learned about the outdoors at Linton Hall was during a Military Science class, when Max DuCharme taught us what do to if we got lost.

Two or three decades after that classroom lesson, I was visiting someone in Canada and we went hiking. He parked the car at one of the provincial parks, and confidently went into the woods with the rest of us following. There were five of us, including him.

After a long while, maybe an hour, it became clear that he was lost. We had been hiking through the woods, not following an established trail, and it turned out that in spite of his "confidence" our leader had been zig-zagging randomly, with no clue about where he was or where he was going. Turns out he hadn't even been to this park before!

Thinking this would be just a short leisurely hike, we hadn't brought anything. No water, no camping gear, no cell phone (still rare in those days and we might have been out of range of a cell tower anyway) and not even a book of matches, since none of us smoked.

Time to apply what I had learned at Linton Hall. First rule, a group is easier to find, so stay together. Next, climb a tree or higher ground to see if you can see any landmarks. Scratch that; there were plenty of trees but too many to see through, and the ground was flat. Another rule, don't walk randomly, decide on the best direction to go, and go in a straight line. So we tried to remember in which direction the sun had been most of the time (even though we had probably been traveling in every possible direction) and used that information to head back in the general direction we had come from.

Soon we encountered a rough one-lane dirt road. Good news, since roads don't get built in the middle of nowhere, but are connected to other roads. We followed the road in one direction, to a dead end. Good news again, there must be a road in the other direction. Even better news was that there was a big bulldozer parked at the dead end. Nobody is going to just abandon an expensive piece of equipment. Worst case scenario, the bulldozer operator would be there Monday morning and we would spend the night in the woods. We wouldn't die of thirst and we wouldn't die of cold, since it was summer. We'd just get bitten by a million mosquitos. (Canada has only two seasons, Winter and mosquito season.)

Luckily, after about half an hour we found a paved road, and after another half hour we reached the car.

What I learned in Military Science might seem pretty basic, but people tend to panic in such situations and it was good to know what to do. What might have happened otherwise? I'll never know. At best, just a little inconvenience, at worst one or more, or even all of us, might have died a slow, painful death.

Thank you Linton Hall Military School and Max DuCharme for teaching me what might have very well saved my life.

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Copyright (c) 2011 Linton Hall Cadet. Please respect copyright by linking to this blog instead of just copying and pasting. Thank you!
This blog is NOT affiliated with Linton Hall Military School. The opinions contained are those of the author.

Blind Obedience at Linton Hall Military School

My chief complaint with the way Linton Hall Military School failed to prepare me for adulthood (or even high school) was its emphasis on blind obedience, instead of giving me the basis for making my own decisions and teaching me self-responsibility.

At the time I resented being given a fixed amount of time to make my bed, brush my teeth, or take a shower. I didn't just hate having a grown woman (nun) seeing me naked in the shower, but I intensely disliked having someone there making sure that all of us soaped up and rinsed, as if we didn't know how to do that ourselves at that age.

Normal children in a normal home environment, by the time they reach a certain age, have learned to take responsibility for doing certain things, because they understand the consequence of their actions. Failing to brush your teeth leads to bad breath and cavities, failing to hang your clothes leads to wrinkled clothes (or dirty ones, if they're dropped on the floor.) But there was very little of that being taught at LHMS; the prevailing philosophy was "obey orders -- or else."

History has given us countless examples of the perils of "just following orders" ... at the Nuremberg trials where "following orders" was not an acceptable excuse for war crimes, same thing in regard to the My Lai massacre, or the Jonestown, Guyana mass suicide.

Even in less spectacular instances, the ability to take responsibility for one's own actions, to do one's workconscientiously without the need for constant supervision, to do what is morally right in face of peer pressure, are all important life skills.

Here's something that happened at Linton Hall which illistrates the dangers of blind obedience.

There were certain cadets designated as "medical corpsmen," one (at least) in each company. Presumably they had taken a first aid course, and were often entrusted in taking medication from the nurse's office up to any cadet who was sick in bed.

One evening, in the dorm, our medical corpsman (who happened to be younger than I) was going around with a bottle of pills, telling each cadet to swallow a pill. Now this was the sixties, and I had heard the lecture about drug dealers offering free samples of various narcotics, in order to get people addicted. (Pretty much an urban legend, mind you, but I didn't know that yet.)
So when the medical corpsman got around to me I naturally asked what the pill was and what it was for. I said "naturally" but apparently everyone else took it without question. "Just take it" was his response. I would have spoken to the nun in charge of the dorm, except she wasn't around in that moment. I knew better than to just blindly take it, but I also knew better than to outright refuse, since I suspected that if I refused, I would have been held down and forced to take it. (I later learned that my suspicion was right, as I will explain in a future post, if I end up writing it.) So I pretended to take it, but didn't. (I don't want to go into details, but the medical corpsman was younger than I, so he was easier to fool than an adult would have been.)

I never found out for certain what the pill was. Rumor had it that some had gotten sick from the food we had been served, and that it was some type of antidote, possibly anti-diarrhea medication. I didn't get to read the label on the bottle, so I don't know. As an adult, I've learned that many pills have printed letters or numbers which, together with the color and shape of the pill, allow it to be identified, but I don't remember what the pill looked like, or whether there were any identifying markings, or how widespread the practice of marking pills was at the time. Who knows, perhaps it was part of a psychological experiment to see how docile we were. I do know that I was just fine even without taking the pill, so it's still a mystery.

What I do know about medications is that the correct dosage generally depends on body weight, and the same dosage may not be appropriate for a seven year old as for a fifteen year old. I also know that some people have severe allergic reactions to certain medications. To have a registered nurse order the wholesale medication of all 200 or so cadets seems irresponsible to me. I am quite certain that the order to have everyone take a pill came from the nurse, and that this wasn't something that the medical corpsman had brought from home.

Since outgoing mail was censored, I wasn't about to write home about the incident, especially not the fact that I had successfully avoided taking that pill, but I made sure to mention it to my mother, and her reaction was the most disappointing aspect of this incident. "You should have taken it," she said. She was unconcerned about a possible reaction to something given to everyone, or about the fact that everyone was medicated. She had no interest in asking what had been given to everyone in the school. I felt terribly let down by her lack of concern.

Many years later, as an adult, I was asked to do something illegal at work. Twice, actually. Both times I refused to do so, the second time a bit more diplomatically. Both times I really needed my salary, but that consideration never entered my mind; I just refused, automatically. I am proud of myself for that. In a world where many people simply go along and do what they're told, I believe that my refusals to break the law (and morality, as this involved theft to benefit the company, the first time on a small scale, the second for a rather large amount) are among my biggest career accomplishments, greater than the responsibilities I took or the money I earned.

Learning to follow my own conscience was something I, as a child, had already learned before being sent to Linton Hall Military School.

Update (March 7, 2011) I have recently heard from another cadet who was a medical corpsman at the time, and he said that the pill might have been a salt pill. I still wish that whoever gave it to me at the time, had answered my question and told me what it was.

Copyright 2011"L.H. Cadet"
Please respect copyright by linking to this post instead of just copying and pasting. Thanks!
This blog is NOT affiliated with Linton Hall Military School. The opinions contained are those of the author.

Response to comments about Linton Hall Military School

I am also on Facebook, where I post these blog entries.
The following is a selection of my responses to feedback I've received from other former Linton Hall Military School cadets.
(I am not posting their comments here since I don't have the authors' permission to do so outside of Facebook.)

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Although I didn't go into detail, I do remember hiking and camping at Linton Hall Military School, and I do have fond memories of that, especially since it was the first time I had done either of those in my young life. And yes I remember drilling in the cold, especially one time when it was bitterly cold and windy and the adults in charge were irresponsible and had us drill anyway, but the eighth grade officers showed much better judgement and we spent a LOT of time purportedly having a "bathroom break" in the bathroom basement under the Commandant's office. It was a really smelly/dirty bathroom too (unlike the ones in the dorms) but it was nice and warm and I'm grateful to the officers who risked their rank by doing this.

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I too cared about winning ribbons but I wish it had been for something other than drill. I saw and still see that as a mindless activity meant to teach not much more than blind obedience to an officer saying "about face" or "platoon halt." As I get older and appreciate the value of time more, I wish the time had been spent on other activities, such as sports, time for quiet reading in the library, arts and crafts, hiking in the woods, or any of the activities that boy scouts do. Forty years later I still remember how to do about face and the whole rifle drill, but wish I had been allowed to use my time otherwise while I was at Linton Hall Military School.

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The blanket incident was significant to me because my family could barely afford to send me there. Today, with the educational and business opportunities I've had (which my parents never had) it wouldn't be a big deal, but it was a lot of money back then. Mostly it has to do with the nuns at Linton Hall, who were placed in a position of being parent substitutes, who were trusted to look after us, who purportedly dedicated their lives to serving God, would act that way.

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I stopped being bitter about a year ago when I found other people's Linton Hall Military School memories on Facebook, and saw that things had changed substantially at LHMS over the years.I had often fantasized that when I grew up I would be rich, buy the school, and force them to change things. I'm very happy it has changed and that future generations did not suffer like we did.

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‎"Courage" to reveal my name? (Various people brought this up.) First, others have confirmed the bad memories, and have even brought things up that I didn't, such as: being made to hold out two rifles, bucket on head, chewing up a bar of soap for using profanity are all things that I never had to do but observed, since the whole battallion was made to watch. Also, the nuns all went by first names only, no last names in the yearbook. And it's quite common for someone to become known as "Sister Mary" when joining a convent, but her legal name might be "Jane Doe" and she keeps that name on her driver's license, so no one outside a couple of people in the convent knows her real name. Speaking of "courage" a woman in her forties beating the living daylights out of a seven year old second grader with a wooden paddle is definitely NOT courage. Now grabbing the paddle out of her hand would be courage, and I'll admit I never did that. Though if there is one thing I regret not doing at Linton Hall Military School, that would probably be it.

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I never tried to run away. Basically because I knew that if I succeeded in getting home I would have been immediately been sent back. But I loved fantasizing about how I would do it.

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As far as the roots and wings concept, I agree with you about it being for the family to provide, but at the same time it was a boarding school and we only got to go home every other weekend (some people like the Mexicans or a couple of kids whose parents did not live in the local area, maybe just went home for Christmas and Summer vacations.) So in a way Linton Hall was like a substitute family and I wish I had gotten from LHMS what I did not and could not get from home.

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I believe that those sent to Linton Hall Military School (at least at the time I went there) fell into three broad categories:
1) Those who had behavioral problems, and were sent there to be "straightened out."
2) Those who were there to be "babysat", i.e., whose parents did not want to go through all the work of parenting, and who were "abandoned" at least in part by their parents. I fell into this category, as difficult it is for me even today to admit this fact.
3) Those sent there to learn English, most of them Mexicans, many of them sent there with absolutely zero knowledge of English.
As in all generalizations there are exceptions.

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I agree that life isn't always fair, or that we pay frequently for the mistakes of others (or even others' intentional misdeeds, not just mistakes. It's not even a matter of me "agreeing" ... what you've said is actually a reality of life. However ... I also believe in striving for justice, and in giving people the benefit of the doubt, and not in punishing the entire classroom or battallion when the guilty person cannot be found, which is something that happened more than once when I was there.
The fact that this happened made me lose respect for the adults in charge. (I use the word respect in the traditional sense, to mean esteem or high regard.) As I said in my first post the Commandant always treated me fairly (although I observed him punishing others excessively.) Sister Mary David did not. I remember one time when she beat me with her paddle. Perhaps one day I will describe where and how severely she hit me, but what hurt even more was that she rushed to judgement and punished me for something I was not guilty of.
The fact that she didn't punish me further shows that she later realized her mistake. Needless to say, there was no apology. That and a few other things made me lose what respect I had for her. She was a good teacher in the classroom, I'll admit.

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As always, comments are appreciated. Please include the approximate years you were there, since Linton hall Military School has changed over the decades. If you went to "Linton Hall School" I would love to know how the school has changed from the time I was there!

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Copyright (c) 2010 L.H. Cadet. Please respect copyright by linking to this blog instead of just copying and pasting. Thank you!
This blog is NOT affiliated with Linton Hall Military School. The opinions contained are those of the author.

Linton Hall Military School's declining enrollment

I have just found some interesting statistics about enrollment at Linton Hall, as well as Linton Hall tuition figures.

Note how it reached its peak in the 1950s and declined to half that number by 1988-1989, the last year that it was a military school.

The school had eight dorms, each with a capacity of around 50 beds, so it looks like it never reached its full capacity of 400 resident cadets.

Year..... Enrollment Faculty Tuition

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1934-1936. 84 ...... 12 .... $ 315

1940-1944 152 ...... 12 .... $ 315

1951-1953 250 ...... 15 .... $ 500

1962-1964 225 ...... 13 .... $ 720

1970-1971 210 ...... 20 .... $1,580

1980-1981 173 ...... 26 .... $2,310-$4,235

1987-1989 109 ...... 21 .... $2,186-$6,396

Source: "The American Pre-College Military School; a history and comprehensive catalog of institutions"

by Samuel J. Rogal, 2009, page 202. ISBN: 978-0-7864-3958-4

Note: I found this by searching for the book's title in Google Books. The entry on Linton Hall takes up only about half a page, with a short paragraph describing it, and the above statistics.

Copyright 2010 "L.H. Cadet" Please respect copyright by linking to this post instead of just copying and pasting. Thanks!

This blog is NOT affiliated with Linton Hall Military School. The opinions contained are those of the author.

Linton Hall Military School, and how it sucked up our parents' money

Although the land on which Linton Hall was built was donated for the purpose of building schools for poor boys and girls, Linton Hall was an expensive boarding school. I wouldn't begrudge them charging a lot, if we had gotten a commensurate value in return. But that was not the case. What we observed outside the academic and military program, was the hypocrisy of the nuns' living a purportedly religious life while in fact acting towards us in very un-Christian ways.

Specifically, I felt as if we (or our parents actually) were a resource to be milked for as much money as possible. I mentioned in my first post the many times when we smelled something good on the way to dinner, steak or roast (a smell I could not have been mistaken about) and ended up getting something entirely different, bologna or hot dogs. The delicious food that we smelled was obviously only being served in the nuns' dining room.

Point is, this wasn't a charitable institution. I have a copy of the 1979-1980 list of expenses. (The school was known as Linton Hall School by then, but there was still a military program.) The fee for room and board at the time was $1,645 for the nine-month academic year. (Tuition, supplies, uniforms, canteen, etc. were all billed separately.)

By then I had long left Linton Hall Military School and was a recent college graduate living on my own. My rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the Washington D.C. suburbs, only a few miles outside the Beltway, was $275/month, including utilities. My food expenses averaged $150 per month. Actually this was for food as well as cleaning supplies and toiletries, all of which I bought at the supermarket. And I ate good food, including pot roast, a couple of steaks a week, fresh fruit and vegetables. It wasn't caviar and champagne but neither was it macaroni and cheese or tuna casserole. And, as any man in his early twenties, I had a good appetite. (Yes, I kept track of expenses and still have the information.)

How do my expenses compare to what Linton Hall was charging? Let's say that I was eating twice as much as a child, so a child would have spent $75/month on food. I believe Linton Hall spent much less than that, since I certainly wasn't living on hot dogs and beans and canned vegetables, which was the type of food we typically got fed; not to mention that I was buying my groceries at a supermarket and they were buying groceries in bulk.

Let's also say that eight cadets shared the same square footage as my apartment, and that the ratio of cadets per toilet, sink or shower was six to one. (As I recall, there were eight toilets and eight sinks in the bathroom, and approximately 48 cadets in each dorm. There were approximately twelve shower heads in the shower room, but the shower room was typically shared between two dorms.) So dividing my $275 monthly rent by six, I come up with $46/month. I'm not taking into consideration the fact that my apartment was in a DC suburb, not out in the sticks like Bristow, and that I had a kitchen. The apartment complex also included a pool and tennis court, as well as parking and grassy areas.

To come up with an annual cost per cadet, I will multiply $46 rent by 12 (even though we only lived there six months of the year) and multiply the $75/month for food by eight. (we were there nine months a year, less Christmas and Spring vacations, and alternate weekends.) There were also five dorm prefects, plus (I believe) four full kitchen workers, including Sister Benedict,and I will value their work at $3,000 per year. At the time, the minimum wage was under $1/hour, so I am being generous in assuming nine months of full-time employment, or 1,500 hours, at $2/hour. Total labor value of the prefects and kitchen workers of $27,000 per year, divided by 200 cadets, gives $135/year per cadet. The total cost per cadet would be $1,287 per year, which is substantially lower than the $1,645 they charged; as a percentage it's just over 75%. Do you think that they could have fed us a little more, an extra scoop of mashed potatoes with each meal, another slice or two of bread at breakfast, one banana or apple a day? I'm talking about spending an extra dime a day (bananas cost a nickel each back then) which works out to $25 over the 250-day academic year. Couldn't they have gotten the plumbing fixed so that showers always had warm water? I remember how so many times that water was freezing.

And we "cadets" did out own cleaning of bathrooms, shower rooms, dorm floors. Those of us who were officers also were a source of unpaid labor, child labor, forced labor (we had no choice) in supervising the younger cadets. We spent so many hours doing grunt work instead of time which could have been better spent developing our academic skills, engaging in sports and other extracurricular activities, or even building up our social skills, especially with girls, which is an experience that is very important as someone enters adolescence. Officers worked as live-in nannies in the dorms, at study hour, during drill and free play. Eighteen officers were in charge of approximately 200 children, or more than ten per officer. How much would you expect to pay a nanny to supervise ten children -- if you could find someone willing to be so overworked? We, the officers, did it for free.

So our parents were told how much was being charged for room and board, and this is America after all, free market capitalism and all that.

But what was wrong is the ways that they found to nickel and dime our parents with all kinds of extra expenses.

First of all uniforms. Roughly twice a year (I don't remember exactly) it was time to go through our uniforms and see whether anything had become worn or we had overgrown it. In the two years I was there, I did not gain a single pound (due to the severely limited amount of food we got) and I did not grow much in height, maybe an inch or so. Yet I remember many times being told by some nun that I had "overgrown" my clothes and ended up with way too large, ill-fitting clothes. Then there was the expensive dress uniform used for parades, and we even had to buy a pair of white trousers ("white ducks" they called them) which we wore just once a year, on Military Day.

I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth, and never received a penny in financial aid from Linton Hall Military School, but I would have expected the nuns to exercise more responsibility with other people's money, especially since many of the parents (mine included) were far from wealthy.

There were also frequent haircuts to keep our hair short, and charges for "canteen." We each had a canteen card that was punched every time we received a piece of candy after school. Sometimes an officer would rip up a cadet's canteen card as punishment (it happened to me) so that the remaining value was lost to the coffers of Linton Hall.

Once in a while one of the nuns would set up a "toy store" in the visiting room next to the principal's office and the younger kids would be invited to purchase toys which would be billed to the parents. I'm not clear on the details since I was one of the older cadets and we didn't get to visit the "toy store" but here was a nice little profit center where little children got to decide to spend their parents' money without permission!

Any insignia we received (stripes or bars, for the officers) apparently wasn't really an award, just something they lent to us while at Linton Hall. I'm saying "apparently" because I still find it hard to believe, but that's what my dorm nun told me on my last day there! I had a choice of either turning everything in or paying for it. I paid for it. Was that also the case with the ribbons and medals we earned? I don't know.

I'm suspicious of that nun because of something else. One thing we needed to bring to Linton Hall Military School was two military olive color blankets. We hadn't been able to get those, and when I arrived at LHMS, dorm nun #1 offered to sell me two blankets. These were used blankets, which I suspect someone had just happened to leave behind when leaving Linton Hall. One of them was in pretty bad shape (torn and cut) but was still usable not as the main blanket, but as the one that was folded over our pillow when we made the bed. The price was $5 each, which was then (late 1960s) a hefty amount. The minimum wage was just under a dollar, and our monthly local (landline) phone bill was $3 and change. I would say that $5 back then was the equivalent of $30 to $50 in today's dollars.

When I left Linton Hall, I was in another dorm with another nun. As I was packing my stuff on my last day there she informed me that the blankets had actually been rented and that I couldn't take them.

I believe I also mentioned in an earlier post that when I arrived at Linton Hall, the principal, Sister Mary David O.S.B., asked me if I had any money, and took it. I still remember that my mother was there with me and I asked my mother to take my wallet (and money) home, but Sister Mary David talked me into leaving it with her "for any expenses." I was naive and believed her, but never saw that money again. Did it end up in my canteen "account" or not? If it did, it means my allowance was used to pay for me to stay there, adding insult to injury. All I know was that I had three one-dollar bills, which was six weeks' allowance, and I never saw it again.

I had also taken a little brown paper bag with candy to Linton Hall. Lots of Sweet Tarts and other goodies. The dorm nun told me candy wasn't allowed and told me she'd hold my candy "for safekeeping" and give it back to me the next time I went home. I had to ask for it, and a lot of it was missing.

What did this nun see when she looked in the mirror and saw the face of someone who lied to a naive, innocent child, so she could steal the candy that he had bought with his own allowance?
Did she or any of the other nuns have a conscience?

One of this blog's readers recently posted about Linton Hall attempting to charge his father for a birthday party that never happened. It appears as a comment to my first post on this blog. I will let readers find out that boy's father's reaction to this.

Copyright 2010 "L.H. Cadet"
Please respect copyright by linking to this post instead of just copying and pasting. Thanks!
This blog is NOT affiliated with Linton Hall Military School. The opinions contained are those of the author.