George C. St. John

“To be a schoolmaster,” said George St. John to his faculty, “is next to being a king.” This was the conclusion he reached after forty years of experience as headmaster of one of the country’s most celebrated boys’ schools. Under his administration, that school had grown from an enrollment of thirty-five to one of nearly six hundred. Its alumni had come to number 3,600. These are the ponderables. The subtler effects of his teaching and his influence on boys that have become leaders known to all the world are incalculable. Among them were the late President Kennedy and the late Adlai Stevenson; there is many another who never forgot Choate School.

George St. John had an almost uncanny way of seeing in each boy the man he was to become. He made it his business to find out not only what each boy could do but what he could not. “Just what is it,” he would say to a teacher, “that the boy can’t do? And what are you doing about it? Have you worked with him alone? You can succeed with this boy if you care enough.” This was his key to each human puzzle—caring enough. A boy who was aware that his teachers cared enough would believe, unexpectedly, in himself.

George Clair St. John was born in Simsbury, Connecticut, eighty-eight years ago. He was educated at Hartford High School and Harvard College, from which he graduated in 1902. He began his teaching at Hill and at Hackley schools. He came to Choate in 1908, with his bride, Clara Seymour, sister of Charles Seymour, former president of Yale. Together, he and his wife built Choate School, which had been founded by Judge William Choate, brother of the late Centurion president Joseph Hodges Choate, from a good school into a great school.

Dr. St. John was ordained a priest of the Episcopal Church in 1929. He retired from the headmastership of Choate in 1947. He was a Centurion for exactly half of his eighty-eight years.

Roger Burlingame
1967 Century Association Yearbook