Word: thornton
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Chefoo to Cheesecloth. Thornton was certainly different. Whatever school he attended-the Kaiser Wilhelm School in Shanghai, where his father served as consul general, the missionary school at Chefoo, the public schools of Berkeley, Calif., the Thacher School at Ojai, Calif.-he was the delight and despair of his teachers. A shy, skinny boy in knee pants, he was wrapped in a cloud of make believe; his greatest pleasure was to dress his sisters up in cheesecloth and get them to act one of his own one-act plays...
...imaginary friend called George: "I must go now as I am up for a fight with a boy named Saul who called me a freak and announced his intention of making a dessert for pigs of me if I did not take off my hat before him . . . Lovingly, Thornton Niven Wilder...
Pigs & Princesses. At the Thacher School, Thornton wrote a play called The Russian Princess-An Extravaganza!, covered his first-year algebra book with the tables of contents for imaginary books ("Quadratics in those days could be supported only with the help of a rich marginal commentary"). By that time, Mr. Wilder had decided that Thornton should spend his summers working on a farm. Thornton worked-after his fashion. He fed the pigs, dreamily pitched the hay, declaimed "to the cows in the stanchions the judge's speech from Barrie's The Legend of Leonora...
When the time came for college, Mr. Wilder decided that Yale, his own alma mater, was too worldly for his boys, so Amos and Thornton went to Oberlin.There Thornton fell under the spell of a great teacher. Professor Charles Wager was a kindly, quiet man who described himself as an "umbratile nature" (one who lives in the shadows of great men); but when he spoke of Victorian literature, or carried his students on the tide of his enthusiasm from Homer to Dante, the shadows vanished. From Wager, Thornton learned a lesson he was never to forget: "Every great work...
...After two years of Oberlin, World War I took Thornton into a coast-defense unit ("I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal"). But by that time he was a Yaleman after all. Thornton wrote for the Lit, joined the Elizabethan Club, quoted Goethe with Sophomore Robert Hutchins. Thornton's room became a salon, where he would read his plays aloud or hold forth on the gloomy beauties of George Gissing. Professor William Lyon Phelps exclaimed: "I believe he is a genius." Mr. Wilder demurred: "Oh, tut-tut-tut, Billy, you're puffing...