The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [18]
But by the 1950s, the Knox board of trustees had set about looking for a permanent location for the school. Among the board’s criteria was that the school needed to be located on a sea or lakeshore, because many of the traditional school songs contained verses referring to looking out over the water. In 1954, the buildings and grounds of Land of Clover were purchased for the school. Mrs. Phinney formally ceded the headmistress-ship to her handpicked protégée, Miss Laura Wood, who had taught at Knox since the 1920s. Though officially retired, Mrs. Phinney remained actively involved, busying herself transforming the estate’s buildings into dormitories and classrooms, and making sure that the school’s traditions carried over to the new location. But what had seemed advanced in the early twentieth century had become dated and stodgy. By the 1950s, the life of the school was anything but progressive. Together, Mrs. Phinney and Miss Wood held tight to the reins of power, doing everything they could to see to it that the postwar changes that were sweeping the nation stopped at the school’s front gates.
Every moment of a Knox School girl’s day was considered a moment for self-improvement. Little room remained for relaxation or levity. If a housemother saw a girl sitting with her legs crossed at the knees, she would remind her that Knox girls cross their legs at the ankles. Even off campus, the girls were told that they were ambassadors for the Knox School and correct deportment was expected. On the Long Island Rail Road, a Knox girl was easy to spot by her camel hair coat and white gloves. In school, girls vied for the Poise Cup, first awarded in 1917, which honored “a student embodying graciousness and dignity of character.” In the parlors and sitting rooms of Knox, with their Persian rugs, paneled walls, and stiff brocaded furniture, Knox girls learned the life that was assumed to soon be theirs, as mistresses of the great estates at the pinnacle of East Coast society.
Knox students wearing saddle oxfords and school blazers collect their mail from the campus post office. (illustration credits 5.1)
While many of the girls hailed from the New York area, others came from out West and even abroad. There were glamorous ranchers’ daughters from Texas and Idaho, and rich girls from Puerto Rico and Venezuela. Famous names were not uncommon there: Mia Fonssagrives was the daughter of Lisa Fonssagrives, the Swedish beauty sometimes called “the first supermodel,” and the stepdaughter of Irving Penn, the famed fashion photographer for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar; the journalist and television personality Dorothy Kilgallen sent her daughter to Knox. According to one former student who attended the school during the 1950s, the only criteria for admission was the ability to pay the tuition. The school, with its isolated location and all-girls student body, was considered a good place for poor little rich girls—mixed-up girls, girls from dysfunctional families and broken homes. Knox would not get you into the Seven Sisters, the elite women’s colleges, such as Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Wellesley, that were considered the female Ivy League at the time. But parents hoped it would keep their girls out of trouble—and as one student commented, “It was like being in jail.… It was so confining.”
In the manor house, behavior was a subject of public comment, and from wake-up to bedtime the girls were never far from their housemothers’ prying eyes. By the 1950s, academic achievement had taken a back seat to cultivating the social graces. While some Knox girls went on to attend four-year