Head of School's Letter 2023-2024
October 2023
Dear St. Bernard’s Community,
Can you picture the songbooks? No, I don’t mean the hymnals, though I love those too. I mean those thin red volumes–booklets, you could call them–bound together with staples and terribly prone to the not-so-gentle wear and tear of schoolboy life. Our boys tend to keep them tucked just inside the front cover of their hymnals, in case they’re needed at Friday assembly for the singing of our school songs. Those songbooks. It turns out that we’ve had them for a century now; they made their debut in 1923. Every St. Bernard’s student and every Old Boy knows those songbooks and knows–or once knew–those songs, gifts to us from Messrs. Tabor and Halliday so many years ago.
If you’re reading this, you don’t need me to tell you that St. Bernard’s has and does many things that other schools don’t. Among those special St. Bernard’s things are our school songs, thirteen in all. Plenty of schools have an “alma mater” that they sing at graduation ceremonies and on other special occasions (maybe). We have one of those, of course, though we tend to sing the “Old Boys’ Song,” sometimes forgetting that there is, in fact, No. 11, “Alma Mater.” Unlike the other schools in New York, however, we have a whole songbook of songs that are just for us, and have been for a hundred years.
Each division of the school has its own song: the “Junior School Song” (“For St. Bernard’s good name / For St. Bernard’s fair fame, / Remember, remember, / You must play the game”); the “Middle School Song” (“Here we go, / Fast or slow, / Off to St. Bernard’s School.”); and the “Upper School Song.” That last one has admittedly fallen out of favor in recent years, and for understandable reason: a song with a “sneezing chorus” (you read that right), during which everyone achoo!s together, would have seemed rather tone-deaf, so to speak, in the midst of a pandemic, when singing itself was deemed a high-risk activity.
Old Boy George Plimpton ’40 famously sang the “Football Song” to his teammates during his brief stint on the Detroit Lions, as recounted in his book, Paper Lion–a seemingly appropriate song unless you know that the “Football Song” is about soccer. The boys love the “Baseball Song,” with its chorus requiring something between singing and shouting (the grown-ups prefer singing, while the boys prefer…well, you can probably guess). In the “Sportsman’s Song,” the boys sing about the importance of hard work and perseverance in athletics and academics alike, eventually belting out a line about conjugating verbs. How very St. Bernard’s.
At assemblies, even before we reach the charmingly odd lyrics, we begin most of the songs with an unannounced round of synchronized group whistling, always a disorienting experience for the uninitiated. The songs are amusing, sentimental, even didactic. They help bring us together each week at Friday assembly, and, like so many of our traditions, they bring us together across the decades. At St. Bernard’s we value the community of today and the community of years past with a special fervor. We know that our strength in the present relies on the strength of our past, and we are grateful for both.
In the words of Francis Tabor, one of our school’s founders and the lyricist of most1 of our school songs, a St. Bernard’s education is built upon “the contact of mind upon mind” between teacher and student. We value the humanities, yes, but we also value humanity, and the relational nature of a good education. To me, the sight and sound of boys and teachers joining together in song every day of every week captures the humanity that is central to our work. There is more to a St. Bernard’s education than our songs, but there is no true St. Bernard’s education without them.
We must never take for granted the place that brings us together and the people–hard-working and curious students, caring and brilliant faculty and staff, supportive families, devoted friends, proud Old Boys–who keep our traditions vibrant and strong every year. To preserve the magic of St. Bernard’s requires the commitment of many, and we are grateful that we can rely on the support of thousands who believe in what we do every day.
Last year we hoped to raise $2.9 million to bridge the difference between tuition and our total expenses. We should have known better: you surpassed that goal and supported the St. Bernard’s annual fund with more than $3.3 million in gifts. On behalf of our school, I thank you deeply and sincerely, and I ask for your help once again. It is our hope to raise more than $3 million this year to ensure that we can keep being the peerless, excellent school that we are. Please consider making a gift. My colleagues and I pledge to keep fostering good hearts and sharp minds in the St. Bernard’s boys of today. And we will always make time for singing.
Sincerely,
Joy S. Hurd IV
