The personality of Mr. Putney has stayed with me during all these years with singular distinctness. Many other teachers, whose influence has been undoubted and deeply felt, shape themselves in memory somewhat vaguely. But Mr. Putney stands out clearly and vividly, as if the days under him at St. Johnsbury Academy were but yesterday. Here was a man quiet and unassuming, and yet I am conscious, and always have been conscious, of a certain power that flowed from him into the lives of his pupils.
Such a force does not lend itself readily to analysis. Like most fundamental things, it is subtle, undefinable. But some elements in the character of Mr. Putney in the retrospect are clear as air. In the first place, he was a born teacher. His scholarship was backed by thoroughness of application in the classroom. A part of his painstaking self passed into the mental processes, and so into the equipment, of those who sat under him. His instruction went deep. It was thorough plowing of the mind. Slip-shod methods were repugnant to his nature. Then, too, how patient he was! For every student he seemed to carry in his mind an ideal of development that made every effort on his part toward that end a real joy, and so he first grounded him in basic things and then built on that foundation.
With poise and self-control, though not physically robust, he managed a large school in such a way that it ran as smoothly as a well-oiled machine. We took it all for granted then. But we see now, especially those of us who are teachers ourselves, the meaning and the reason of it all, and we trace the fact to its source in an able and inspiring personality.
Mr. Putney had a quiet glow of humor, and many an incident comes to mind to show how large and wholesome a part this characteristic played in his career. But most of all I would pay tribute to the Christian gentleman. His idealism was not too lofty for "human nature's daily food." Rather it expressed itself in practical devotion to the best interests of his pupils, to good things, and to noble causes. He was a leader because he allowed himself humbly to be led by something above him. He moulded character because he was himself being moulded by spiritual forces. Not ambitious in the worldly sense, he came into his own long before his gentle life passed from among us. I fancy that, could he do so, he would tell us that his real ambition has been realized. In Mr. Putney we are gratefully aware of that gracious thing, the distribution of a rare personality through the lives of others, the multiplication of self in terms of helpfulness to the world.
Henry D. Wild, '84.
Those were days of exceptional privilege in the eighties and nineties for the shy but eager boys and girls of rural Vermont who found their way to St. Johnsbury Academy, there, under Mr. Putney and the able and friendly faculty of his choice, to catch enlarged vision and the preparation to fulfill it.
The quiet, unobtrusive life of such as Mr. Putney lends itself to fewer striking, outstanding memories than more brilliant careers, yet how positive the impression and far-reaching the influence, and how sweet the incidents one does recall!
My first acquaintance revealed his friendly interest and thoughtfulness. Discovering that I, a timid new-comer, was the only girl enrolled for Greek with twenty young men, he sent a kindly word of encouragement and the hope that I would not let the fact discourage me in my purpose. That pledge of sympathy on the part of one of my first male instructors had large weight in deciding me to brave the ordeal. It was, too, a pledge fully and most wisely carried out, so discriminatingly administered by daily, tactful consideration as to set me wholly at ease and to establish the most natural, unconscious comradeship with the class. The only visible evidence of his thought came in occasional approving comments upon the little rivalry in scholarship in the class and the requests that I conduct the class sometimes when he was necessarily absent. Thus he made of the experience, by his fine tact and wisdom, a happy and fruitful one.
I was early inspired with a confidence that the ideals he held for us were but those of his own life. The urgent suggestions to drill and review our lessons thoroughly were the more forceful when I learned that it had been a habit of all his own student life to review each Saturday the entire daily work of the week. A trying epidemic of colds and coughs was prevailing one winter, disturbing school exercises greatly. At the close of chapel one morning Mr. Putney told us in his quiet, earnest manner the dangers of allowing a cough to become aggravated and the possibility of entirely controlling it. Skeptical of this, I well remember with what gleeful malice I scoffed at it in the hearing of a teacher who made the lesson one of life-long practice by telling me of the heroic, thorough treatment to which Mr. Putney had in early life subjected himself, so that he had spoken out of personal experience again. When his life had been despaired of because of supposedly fatal illness he had effected a complete recovery by checking the deep-seated cough.