Read Online Impulse by Frederick Ramsay - Free Book Online

uniforms evolved and ended looking like those worn at West Point.
    For the first six weeks of their stay, those first students lived in tents and met for their studies in a barn. Several, seeing no significant difference between their country and urban environment, and homesick, ran away. Armiger’s first faculty members were predictably male, and, like him, the shattered waste product of war. A few younger men possessed more education than ambition and needed work. He ordered the boys by age into companies and appointed older boys as their officers. He formed the companies into a battalion. Later, as the school grew and younger, paying students were added to the mix, the battalions grew into a corps.
    The senior students elected a Corps Commander who wore, at first, a half dozen gold stripes on his shoulders, later a Lieutenant Colonel’s silver oak leaf. The officers descended in rank from there and in the same order as the army. It would be an awkward arrangement and one attacked periodically by alumni, parents, and faculty, all of whom yearned for the more easily recognizable president, vice president, student council model. But it held until the mid seventies when the school’s board decided to drop the military program. Any semblance it once had to West Point disappeared forever.
    Colonel Armiger spent most of his first year writing letters to the Board asking for money, buildings, and the services of a medical man. They, like so many groups entrusted with substantial sums of other people’s money, took to believing it was theirs and like Silas Marner, guarded it like gold, granting Armiger’s requests reluctantly and only after endless debate and haggling. When two boys died of pneumonia and the county coroner threatened to report the school for child abuse, a relatively new breach of the law at the time, the money began to flow.
    The school languished as a mediocre military school until Franklin Scott, a Midwestern railroad mogul and multimillionaire, at a time when even a millionaire was reckoned a rare commodity, visited the school in search of a lost nephew. Finding him in good health and safe, Scott endowed the Academy handsomely with the stipulation it be named after his errant nephew. The Board, exhausted by the irksome duties of managing a school for ungrateful boys, agreed. Scott quickly applied his considerable managerial skills to the school, empanelled a new Board of Directors and set it on a path that ultimately led to its recognition in 2000 as one of the country’s premier prep schools. Generations of young men salvaged from the mean streets matured and, for the most part, repaid with gratitude and endowments the school that had lifted them out of the gutter and from a life that held no possible future.
    Armiger died before his wife and was replaced by another former Army officer, this one from the Union side but who carried more substantial educational credentials and experience. Later, in the 1920s, the school began accepting paying students and the evolution from a unique institution to a college preparatory school began. Fifty years ago, when Frank attended, it had been male. Half of the student body lived in dormitories and went home only on weekends, if at all. Somewhere in the seventies, in the confused effects of Viet Nam, it shed both its uniforms and all male status.
    ***
    Frank followed the van to a parking lot behind Main. He didn’t remember the lot ever being there, but then half the buildings that stretched out before him were new also. He looked in the direction of the chapel, seeking the familiar bulk of the three story building where he grew up—where he and Rosemary Bartlett grew up. Gone. In its place a blockish building with too much glass and too little style had been erected. He checked his map and discovered his old apartment complex had been replaced with a building that housed a kindergarten and grades one through five. He thought that appropriate.
    “Can I help