If you were Lowry Howard, Head of Menlo School in 1926, and you wished to attract more students to your struggling school, you had precious few options at your disposal. In an era before preview days, direct marketing, or the internet, access to the public was best achieved through…books. And if you wanted to be featured in a book in such a way that might attract more prospective students to an all-boys boarding school in the Bay Area, you hired someone like Earl Reed Silvers, prolific author and Director of Public Information at Rutgers University.

Mr. Silvers was noteworthy for such titles as Ned Beals, Freshman and The Hillsdale High Champions and was a writer willing—for the right price—to center his books and characters at your institution in order to help you gain visibility and boost enrollment. The result of Mr. Howard and Mr. Silvers’ transaction is a wonderful little book called The Spirit of Menlo, a copy of which was gifted to our library by the late, great Duke Douglass ’43.

The book chronicles a young man named Budd Williams who was being raised in New Jersey by his single mother after his father had passed until a generous, childless doctor at the country club where Budd caddied took him under his wing and paid for him to head west to receive a Menlo School education. Read more...