This was the last Mount Hermon hockey team because 1970-71 was the last year in which Mount Hermon was a boys school and Northfield was a girls school.

On a Monday in October 1970, during Morning Chapel, Headmaster Arthur Kiendl went to the pulpit and announced to a nave full of boys that Northfield and Mount Hermon would merge the next year. 

(Four years later, almost to the day, I would experience the same thing all over again as the president of Amherst, John William Ward, went to the pulpit of Johnson Chapel and told us, “Gentlemen, we’re going co-ed.”)

The Mount Hermon faculty at that point was still mostly male, led by last-bastion old masters like Stent, Donavan, Westin, Alexander, L’Hommedieu, Weber, Baldwin.   The eldest of the elders had been at the school a long time: L’Hommedieu since 1926; Donovan since 1930; Stent since 1938; Baldwin since 1944.  The school also benefitted from having younger lions like David Burnham (at MH since 1950) and Bill Compton (1948).  All together they provided the school with a center of gravity that would soon be gone.

That year was, in some ways, Mount Hermon’s last year as a traditional boarding school. The last year of Saturday classes.  The last year of wearing jacket and tie to evening and Sunday dinner. The last year with wait service at each dinner table. The last year of required Sunday chapel.  The last year of the old school entrance on old Route 10, when Route 10 was a winding country highway, two lanes, that led to an old iron two-lane bridge over the Connecticut, on the way to Northfield. 

My Western Massachusetts 14-year-old farm-boy brain was overwhelmed my freshman year.  A Sunday morning in September 1970, at West Hall breakfast, one table mate asked another “What did you do last night, John?”

“I smoked pot.”

Wow, I thought, I have 9th grade classmates who already smoke pot.

“Where did you get it”

“From my father’s dresser before I came up here.”

What? You mean I have classmates who have parents who smoke pot?!?!

A week or two later there was an outdoor concert at the  Northfield campus, on a warm Saturday in September.  The band, Spirit in Flesh, was from the local commune, The Brotherhood of the Spirit.  There were a lot of commune members hanging around the stage and concert field, on the lawn between Marquand and what would soon be Tracy Student Center.

The commune members and most of the Northfield / Mount Hermon students were pretty hard to distinguish from each other.  It was a swaying, smoking, wafting herd of bliss. 

It was true to the Northfield spirit, in a way. Dwight L. Moody, founder of both Northfield and Mount Hermon, had been a 19th century evangelist and there was something evangelical happening on that Marquand lawn. Something charismatic.  It was a revival in which the “re” wasn’t entirely clear.  

That revival spirit was again in full evidence a month or so later when the New York Rock’n’Roll Ensemble played at the Northfield Auditorium—the same auditorium where Dwight L. Moody had once preached.  Many students felt that they belonged on stage as much as the band did, so for most of the show the musicians had to share the stage with students dancing, stumbling, groping.  The musicians were pretty good sports about it, but Jervis Burdick, school administrator and our answer to Bill Graham the Fillmore concert promoter, was cross-eyed with bewilderment

By the end of the night Jervis Burdick had seen enough and so for Deerfield Weekend Concert, he booked Paul Mauriat & His Orchestra, with harpsichordist Paul fresh off his hit “Love Is Blue.”

No students jumped on stage for that one.

That fall, the dark side was starting to exact its tolls.  At one meal in West Hall, one fellow assumed the duty of mounting the dais to announce that Jimi Hendrix was dead.  This was probably September 19th, the day after Hendrix died. News traveled more slowly then, especially to our riverbank setting in the Berkshires.  No internet, no cable TV, not even sure we got all three major networks on the few TVs scattered around campus.  Just two weeks later or so, another student (or maybe the same guy) got up on the dais at West Hall to announce that Janice Joplin was dead. 

Amidst this, the 1970-71 Mount Hermon Hockey Team was a safe harbor. My guess is most guys were on scholarship.   I’m sure they had their fun, but most of them were PGs or 2-year seniors and they had come to Mount Hermon to do a job:  study, play hockey and get into a college where they could continue to play shinny and then eventually get a good job. 

They were purposeful.