Pontiac, A Novel by Jim Schutze ‘64

Author’s Note: This story needs a short explainer as it was originally written for the alumni magazine of St. Paul’s School, a New England boarding school. Fellow Substacker, Jim Schutze, and I were classmates there in the early 1960’s, though - following the English tradition - classes were called forms.

John Walker, a key figure in the story, will be familiar to some, as he later became the Bishop of Washington. At the time, he was the first and only African American teacher (ironically, then called Master) at the school.

Much of the story takes place in a dormitory, known only as IV, which was located in a building called the Lower (for lower school) that, in an act of humanity, was destroyed not long after. Imagine a high-ceilinged room of perhaps 100 x 40 feet with eight foot partitions emerging at six foot intervals from the side walls. Each pair of partitions was concealed from the rest of the room by what was essentially a cotton shower curtain. Each of these was an alcove or cubical, in which resided a 12- or 13-year-old boy.

With that in mind, the rest should reveal itself.

Here We Go

Jim Schutze ‘64 began writing a memoire in his late 20s and spiked it by firing himself as the main character at age 72. Inspired by Hillbilly Elegy, he began again, but this time as a novel, Pontiac. “It was like building the Lego on the box then taking it apart and building what I wanted to build,” said the author, who describes the book as “fiction all fiction." “Roman a clef" is more accurate.

The Early Sixties

As you read the more difficult scenes (and there are many), it is well to remember that 1960, the year depicted in the book, is closer in time to the late 1800s than to today. Things were different then, more so than is easily imagined.

According to St. Paul’s: The Life of a New England Boarding School by August Hecksher, the sacred text of our school’s history, Matthew Warren, who arrived in 1954, had significant ideas for modernization and reform of the school.

Warren often differed sharply from Henry Laughlin, the head of the board of trustees, who preferred to keep tuitions low, than to raise tuitions and provide scholarships, but Warren won that battle and changed St. Paul's forever.

In the late 1950s, Russia had beaten America into space with the launch of Sputnik, an event viewed to be impossible by a country, still flush with the victory of World War II and riding a postwar economic boom. This was also a wakeup call for the most elite colleges which began to realize that they had missions greater than educating the Episcopalian sons of the Northeast. The search for talent broadened just as the civil rights movement reopened eyes to racial inequality.

The Ivy League colleges, to which New England boarding schools sent most of their graduates, exerted pressure on the schools to diversify and “search for smart” or risk losing admission slots.

Woodrow Skaggs

Woodrow Skaggs, the protagonist, arrives at St. Philip’s School in New Hampshire in September 1960. He is the son of an auto worker and one of the earliest scholarship students recruited to the school by its first African American faculty member. He describes life in a raucous dormitory, in which fights and insults are the norm. His nickname, Pontiac, derives from his hometown, which few at the school recognize as anything other than a car. Many even confuse Michigan and Minnesota. The descriptions of the clothes in which he arrived, and their subsequent replacement to conform to the norms of his peers are painful to read.

Skaggs did not fit in, because at age 13, he had no idea how to fit in to such a strange world and, at age 100 or so, St. Philip’s School had no idea how to think about, let alone accommodate, a boy of his background.

Skaggs had to strive to catch up academically and, by the brute force of grinding (when trying too hard was frowned upon), rose from the bottom of his form to the top.

His father's parting advice before putting him on a bus from Detroit to New Hampshire (by himself) was, "don't take no sh.t from nobody, and don't get kicked out." His mother, on the other hand, admonished him “not to be envious.”

We are deep into the story when Skaggs realizes that he is not going to get kicked out and that he will succeed and might even do well.

St. Philip’s School

St. Philip’s School was far from ready for scholarship boys. Like the St. Grottlesex schools, it had long been a nursery for the WASP aristocracy. The Rector (it had one too) warned of the possibility of bad table manners and suggested joining a scholarship boy in eating with one's hands if he was seen to do so.

Like all organizations, some of the faculty at St. Philip’s School was less open to change than others, and the crux of the story is the unpreparedness of these faculty members to deal with the new group of students and, significantly in a few cases, the outright opposition to doing so. Many wanted the old ways back and were actively opposed to the new direction.

Jim Schutze

The author, son of an Episcopal minister (as were many of the earliest scholarship students at St. Paul’s), checked into Dorm IV in the Lower School, a building described by Heckscher as a place of "Dickensian austerity" and found himself on the opposite side of every divide from his peers and teachers. Nobody had asked him if he wanted to go.

It was the first form of the baby boom. With more available students, admission requirements were tightening. There were fewer places for favored sons who, in prior years, had gained admission with ease. In some years, the school had not been completely full.

He was discovered and recruited by Bishop John Walker, who became his mentor and taskmaster. Skaggs’s “grinding” was autobiographical.

Schutze is a lifelong liberal Democrat who loves Hillbilly Elegy. He spent the six years after school as an assembly line auto worker before beginning a career as a local politics reporter in Dallas.

He loved St. Paul’s and thought of it as his real home, where he learned to win and lose with dignity then shake hands and say, “well played.”

"Getting plucked out of Michigan and going to St. Paul's made a real difference in my life," he said at a recent book talk.

Recommendation

Pontiac is not about finger pointing nor about victimhood. It is about learning the hard way on the part of the protagonist and taking the first awkward steps with respect to a more diverse student body on the part of the school.

The late in life change from memoire to novel enabled Schutze to exaggerate many of the scenes in Pontiac. Readers unfamiliar with 1960s boys boarding schools, generally, and St. Paul’s, in particular, will do well to keep this in mind.

The 13- and 14-year-olds muddle through the first year. Later in life, many became successful and remain friends. I will leave it to readers of the book rather than to readers of the review to find out how Schutze conveys that idea.

Alumni of that era will enjoy their attempts to figure out who is who, while the broader St. Paul’s audience will find a useful reminder that progress often requires some awkward steps.

Here is the Amazon link to buy the book.