Education: St. Paul's Fifth

Haughty Episcopal St. Paul's School (Concord, N. H.) is famed for its hockey players and austere headmasters. From its founding in 1855 until Rev. Dr. Samuel Smith ("The Drip") Drury died last February, it was headed by four successive churchmen. Since then its trustees have argued whether they should break precedent by appointing a layman rector. Meanwhile, Layman Henry Crocker Kittredge, son of Harvard's renowned Professor George Lyman ("Kitty") Kittredge, served as acting rector.

Last week the trustees made up their minds, appointed a fifth churchman, Rev. Dr. Norman Burdett Nash, 50, professor of Christian social ethics at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Mass. But while Dr. Nash is an ordained minister, his resemblance to his predecessors ends there. Dr. Drury was high church. Dr. Nash is low church and anything but austere.

Norman Nash's birth was hastened two months by the jolting of a train on which his mother traveled to the family's summer house in Maine. When he had grown up, his father, also a minister, was fond of saying: "He was born in a hurry and has been in a hurry ever since." Tall, lean and bounding with energy, Norman Nash was graduated from Harvard and Episcopal Theological School, studied at Cambridge in England, was a chaplain in the War and went back to teach at Episcopal for 19 years. Meanwhile he raised two daughters and a son, three nieces.

Until two years ago he played touch football twice a week with his students. To his students Dr. Nash is known also as a man with an encyclopedic memory and a sense of humor, brusque in speech, sharp in thought. His favorite expression: "It's as plain as a pikestaff, gentlemen." Liberal in politics, he is president of the Massachusetts Council of Churches, a charter member of the Church League for Industrial Democracy. He was surprised but glad to get the St. Paul's job, for he believes religion should be the centre of education and St. Paul's is one of the few prominent U. S. preparatory schools that still has the same belief.