If you were a Mount Hermon athlete in 1970-71, no matter how hard-assed your coach might have been (and Deane and Al didn’t’ fit that bill), you always knew there would be at least two kind men to look after you:  the school’s trainer, Red Crouse, and the school’s equipment manager, George Payne.

Red acted his name: an always high-spirited ginger who ran the training room as a one-man combination of MASH unit and comedy club. The training room, right off the locker room (which itself had none of the dividing walls that it now must have to serve both boys and girls),  had a couple of training tables,  a couple of whirlpool tubs, a counter and cabinets for Red’s potions.

And as you can see from the photo above, Red had a somewhat makeshift approach to training table organization, with a folding chair placed on top of the training table to make it easier for Red to tape ankles.

In Red’s training room you always smelled “analgesic,” the term Red used for the heat-providing lineaments that he applied to just about every injury we presented him with, and you always heard the sound of Red’s needle.  He could be quite sharp and a bit scary with guys he didn’t’ know yet or guys who acted like they, not Red, owned the training room, but with guys he did know and like, he was a ceaseless josher.   

He was the sort of adult who is critical to the health of a boarding school—not a teacher who awards or punishes with grades, not a coach who awards playing time or praise, not an administrator who metes out justice or injustice, but instead an adult who provides care and sustenance, both physical and emotional in Red’s case, in a pretty much unconditional way.

Compared to Red, George Payne was quiet and straight-forward.   As equipment manager, George ran the “cage,” an area that was divided from the locker room by a low half wall and a wire screen that went up to the ceiling.  In that cage, George dealt with all the stuff of games: uniforms, balls, pylons, down markers,  towels, sweat pants and sweat shirts.  He took in the dirty stuff and gave back clean stuff.  For us hockey players he also sharpened skates.

George was quiet but almost always in a good mood, and unlike Red, who dealt only with interscholastic athletes in the training room, George dealt with every boy in the school, given that every boy, every semester, had to participate either in an interscholastic or intramural sport, which meant that George was one of the very few people in the school in a position to know, to some degree, every boy in the school.  He treated every one of us well.