The students.
Moves every three years meant that by the age of seven or eight students in overseas schools learned to make friends quickly, but with a layer of emotional protection, because the friendships they formed would be disrupted by parental reassignments within three years.
Military families in the sixties tended to be two-parent families, which provided a measure of stability to the students’ lives.
As high school teens, the students learned how to be more open emotionally with other teens, and to maintain those friendships even after relocation moves. Students graduating from high school together tended to stay connected over the years. Some of our Toul graduates are still best friends sixty years later. Toul has averaged a reunion every three years, a total of 23 gatherings of various sizes in sixty years.
After leaving Toul, many went on to college and beyond. Toulies ended up in a wide range of fields, as physicians, military intelligence analysts, building contractors, clergy, air force and commercial jet pilots, pre-school directors, real estate and mortgage brokers, USO staffers, and even a classic-style blacksmith.
The faculty.
The range of backgrounds that faculty members brought to the school provided students with an atypical broad perspective. I grew up on a dead-end street in Brooklyn, and coming to the overseas schools to teach math got me to Europe.
Jim, who taught physics, grew up on an island in Maine with a total population of forty. George, our coach, grew up in a coal mining family in West Virginia. Pina grew up in Italy and never spoke a word of English until she was fifteen. Nita had been widowed multiple times, and was past what many would call retirement age. Wiley, from Michigan, our Principal in 1965-66, attended the 1993 reunion in Las Vegas, where he was completing his goal of 1,000 parachute jumps before he hit 70, a project he’d started nine years earlier at the age of 60.
The commonality was that we were outward looking, not content to spend our lives in the same small Indiana town or large east coast city we’d grown up in. I contend that that spirit was transmitted to our students, in the form of a wide world perspective. And our individual faculty backgrounds provided a context in which students could find a sounding board and sometimes different perspectives from those they found in their homes.
The context.
Our students were living in the middle of Europe. Some of them took advantage of that, travelling around Europe by train on their own from the age of fifteen on.
For too many, however, they could have been in Iowa. They attended the American school, and the American teen club after school, and they lived in the American housing area.
To help broaden that perspective, I designed and taught our seniors a course titled “Humanities: the allied arts.” We looked at a range of European paintings, and discussed classic Greek construction [Doric, Ionic, Corinthian columns]. We took a field trip to the Toul cathedral, an edifice larger than Notre Dame in Paris, where students touched flying buttresses. Attending the opera in Nancy each month was an assignment; I brought a GI who was studying to be an opera singer into our classroom so that he could introduce the students to the performance they were about to see. That course helped our students appreciate our European setting.
Sports were also an important part of the context. The school was small enough to accommodate students on school athletic and cheerleading teams who might not have made the team in my 7,000-student high school. School spirit around team sports contributed to a sense of unity. [Going undefeated in two successive football seasons helped too.]
About me.
I’ve worked in both academia and industry. I have taught at levels from secondary to graduate school. Toul was the best setting of all. I’m not in touch with my own high school classmates. I’m in touch with one college friend. But I am in touch and friends with a number of students from those two years in Toul, including through the half-dozen reunions I’ve attended, and also in multiple visits to and from alumni friends over the years. I was 25 years old when I taught in Toul, and my students were 16-18. Effectively a decade apart then, during several reunions we’ve become contemporaries and friends. And it was a delight to again see the now mid-thirties daughter of the Toulie who hosted this year’s reunion — she was eight years old when she attended my wedding (along with her parents) in the mid-90’s.
In sum, I would suggest that the breadth of backgrounds of both the students and their teachers helped develop a strong, broadly experienced group of graduates in the world.
