In the Beginning

    Seemingly halfway to Charlottesville, Collegiate opened shop that fall on roughly 55 acres of rustic terrain on the outskirts of the nascent Sleepy Hollow neighborhood.
    Tall pines and oaks surrounded freshly cleared fields.
    Landscaping was almost non-existent.
    Sounds of construction still filled the air.
    Bob Goodman, who served as math teacher, track coach, and jack-of-all-trades the first three years of the coordinate structure, remembers well, and one morning recently, he dropped by at my invitation to share some thoughts about the good ol’ days when life was simpler but no less hectic and exciting than it is today and when necessity was often the mother of invention.
    He brought a stack of well-worn yearbooks and set them on the corner of my desk, but once we got going, it was clear from his musings and self-deprecating recollections that he didn’t need visual aids to rekindle memories of experiences long past and people whose guidance, dedication, and personal style laid the foundation for the Collegiate of today.
    He recalled the early weeks of that first term when he taught in the building which now houses the Middle School and is named in honor of Malcolm U. Pitt Jr., who headed Collegiate from 1960 until 1987.
    “I went into my classroom," Goodman said, "and the tiles hadn’t been put in place completely.
    “There were just enough for an island to set the desks on.  The rest of the floor was that black stuff you stick the tiles to.
    “The window putty was still soft and made good ammunition.  I had to make sure the guys didn’t take so much putty out (to craft high-tech spitballs) that the panes fell out.
    “Collegiate opened, but the buildings were a long way from finished.”
    Goodman served as the first summer school director, and on one otherwise uneventful day he received a visit from Aubre Kramer, the maintenance foreman.
    “He came down and said, ‘We have a problem,’” my friend recalled.  “We walked to the gym (now named for venerable coach and athletic director A.L. ‘Petey’ Jacobs) and took a look.
    “When the floor was put down, they didn’t allow for expansion caused by Richmond humidity.
    “It looked like a blimp was parked under it.  It was making a creaking sound that was the wood trying to expand. It was almost frightening. You didn’t want to go near it.”
    In short order, workmen tore out and replaced the bulging basketball court, and by September, all was good to go.
    Amidst the sylvan setting, there was an almost grassless landscape that served as outdoor athletic facilities.
    “Grover (Jones, Collegiate’s first football coach) and I did the fields,” Goodman said.
    “Petey, of course, took care of the baseball diamond.
    “When I got to Collegiate, I was named track coach, but I was really a track organizer.
    “I got the job because I was a math teacher and could swing an arc.  Straightaways were 110 yards.  Arcs were 110 yards.  That’s how you got your 440.  
    “The track back then was grass, which wore down and became a dirt track.”
    Did you ever run track? I asked.
    “Heavens no,” he responded, “but I had a book.
    “And if somebody else had been the math teacher, he’d have been the track coach.”
    Then there was the blending of the Girls School steeped in 45 years of tradition and the Boys School with hardly any tradition at all.
    “There was almost an iron curtain between them,” Goodman recalled.
    “Were there breaches in the iron curtain?  My statement has always been, ‘If the school can stay only two steps behind the students, we’re doing about as well as we can expect.’”
    His first year at Collegiate, Goodman sponsored the sophomore class and moved up with his guys until they graduated.
    “They had senioritis every year,” he said with a laugh.
    Each day, he taught five periods (with five different preparations) in the Boys School and even offered trig to a group of girls during their lunch period because it wouldn’t schedule anywhere else.
    Almost a half-century later, he remembers the Kleenex story.
    “I’d been at Staunton Military Academy and Christchurch,” he said.
    “I’d never taught girls, and they’d never had a male teacher.
    “There was one girl who sat in the back of my math class who would sometimes tear up when she couldn’t pick up on a problem.
    “I didn’t know what to do, so I’d hand the box of Kleenex to the girl in the front who would pass it back in the row.  No one said anything, but everybody knew what was happening, and it actually ended up as a good chuckle.”
    After he left Collegiate in 1963, Goodman, a Philadelphia native, led Presbyterian Day School in Memphis, Augusta (GA) Prep, and the Arlington School in Atlanta before returning to Richmond in 1972 as the first head of Trinity Episcopal School.
    Since his retirement in 1986, he’s developed outreach programs for the Community School of Performing Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University, worked with his wife Jinny and later son Carey with the family-owned Southern Teachers Agency, and served as a well-respected elder statesman for a host of educators who have profited from his wit, wisdom, and mentorship, always delivered in his humble, it’s-not-about-Bob Goodman style.
    You’ve been part of establishing traditions at both Collegiate and Trinity, I said as our visit was coming to an end.  That must be very gratifying.
    “Looking back,” he replied, “it’s a splendid memory to see something start, keep on going, and flourish.
    “It’s a very good feeling.”
    It’s been many years and several stops since you left the employ of Collegiate, I added.  Hope you still have a warm spot in your heart for the Green and Gold
    “Oh, I do,” he said with a smile.
    “I root for Collegiate in any and everything…unless, of course, they’re playing Trinity.”
                   -- Weldon Bradshaw