58 Years Later, A “New Teacher” Revisits Fay

Steve Waters is the first one to admit that when he graduated from Yale in 1956, he was in need of a little guidance. “I took myself to the teacher placement office at Yale,” he recalls. “I had no idea what I was doing or where I would end up!”

 

Where he ended up was Fay and his very first teaching position. Under the guidance of Headmaster Harrison Reinke, Steve spent the first three years of his career teaching history to Fay boys and living in the dorms.

 

This spring, Steve and Alice, his wife of 53 years, returned to Fay to visit the campus and take in the many changes. We here at Brackett House were delighted at the opportunity to get a teacher’s perspective on what it was like to live and work at Fay in the 1950s. “I remember being surprised at the notion that boys as young as third and fourth grade could be sent away to live at boarding school,” Steve said. “I quickly learned that Fay was modeled on the tradition of the British boarding schools, and teachers like Doug Mann and Seaver Gilcreast were wonderful about helping me adjust to life at school.”

 

If the spring 1959 issue of The Pioneer is to be believed, Steve was a popular teacher. In a light-hearted article entitled “Five Bachelors in Search of a Wife!” a student writer noted that “Mr. Waters is a great guy, tall, fair, and somewhat handsome. He teaches history and does a fine job at it. His sense of humor is at the point of no return. He also has a wonderful way with children. If they make him mad, he calmly knocks them cold and peace is restored once more.”

 

But unfortunately for the Fay boys, Steve was not long for Fay. “After three years, I worried that I would become a lifer,” he recalls, and so he departed for Englewood School (later Dwight Englewood) where he taught for 11 years; then, he moved on to St. Andrew’s School in Barrington, Rhode Island, where he was head of school for 21 years, and after that he served as head of school at Charles Armstrong School in Belmont, California. At both St. Andrew’s and Charles Armstrong, Steve championed the development of strategies to serve students with learning disabilities.

 

In a thank you note following his visit, Steve reflected on the many positive changes at Fay since his time here in the 1950s, noting, “For me, who has never left the profession for something other than ‘schools and kids,’ to see the changes from my beginnings to the present day is more than a matter of interest; it served as a reminder of what a blessing it is to serve in schools. Clearly Fay has survived, prevailed, and grown into a leadership role for the population it serves.”