RE Log Spring 2018

10 Ransom Everglades LOG SPRING 2018 The next few years flew by. Anderson helped his fellow trustees raise $150,000 so the school could re-start. He helped bring on David Pierre Guyot (Pete) Cameron as headmaster. He was there when the school finally reopened after the war – with a first class of nine boys – including Ludington’s son Townsend (“Towny”) Ludington ’53 . And he was there in 1949, with the post-war growth at a crawl and funds increasingly tight, as the board met to discuss what to do to stop the financial bleeding. The topic on the table: closing one of the school’s two campuses – either the one in the Adirondacks, or the winter campus in Coconut Grove. “It got very expensive to run two campuses on one set of in- comes,” Anderson recalled. “That was the debate that went on and on and on and on. It was debated by the undergraduates and by the faculty and by the alumni.” The board met with University of Miami President Bowman Foster Ashe. “His advice,” Anderson said, “was that there were plenty of high-ranking secondary schools in New England. We needed one down south.” Anderson and the rest of the trustees voted to close the Adirondack campus that May. Financial stability would soon return, and the Ransom School was born. Taking care of the school’s history Anderson wanted to ensure the school’s history did not get bulldozed or misplaced in the transition to a single cam- pus in Florida. He traveled by train to the Adirondack campus before it closed to collect any archival material he could find. “I identi- fied everything we should save one day,” he said. “I took the night train up, then spent the day doing that, then took the night train back to New York.” Anderson had a sense, even then, of the importance of that trip. He rescued books, photos and many other remnants of history that populate the school’s archives to this day. “It will be most rewarding to witness Ransom-Everglades students,” he wrote years later, “searching these documents for clues to the values that have sustained the school and its graduates in later life.” The Ransom School underwent a massive revival over the next two decades “It will be most rewarding to witness Ransom-Everglades students searching these documents for clues to the values that have sustained the school and its graduates in later life.” – Harry Anderson ’38 Harry Anderson ’38 and then Head of School Jerry Zank at the dedication of the Henry H. Anderson ’38 Gymnasium in 1991. Serving as a young alumnus Anderson, who had served as a U.S. Army captain during World War II, got a call from C.T. Ludington ’15 soon after the war had ended. The chair of RE’s board, Ludington asked Anderson to join him on the board as secretary. On the one hand, it was a remarkable gesture and enviable op- portunity. A Yale graduate, Anderson had just entered Columbia Law School. In his early 20s, he lacked the impressive credentials of the high-powered board members who assembled for meetings at the Yale Club in New York City. The school’s trustees at that time included Ludington, the co-founder of Ludington Airlines (later to become Eastern Airlines); Henry Timken, the head of Timken Roller Bearing Company; Joseph Roebling, the son of the engineer who built the Brooklyn Bridge; and Lithgow Osborne ’10 , the former Commissioner of Conservation in New York. On the other hand, the Adirondack-Florida School was on the verge of bankruptcy. It had closed in December 1942 because of the war, and remained shuttered until of the fall of 1947. The heirs of Alice Ransom had put the Florida campus up for sale. The school’s future was in doubt, and the work ahead seemed enormous. Yet Anderson told Ludington, yes. He joined the board in 1946, and never left.