Su's third Pontefract article

Teacher's past: Mr Marshall Eaton

Mr. Eaton (Marshall) has been working at Pomfret for more than 36 years. This longest time working as a faculty has earned him the title: “Senior Master”. What is interesting is that he did not plan to be a teacher. “I was interested in becoming an engineer,” he said “I actually earned an engineer degree at Tufts University and also had a job moved from Boston to Texas”. 

So what had caused a sudden career change for this young engineer to become the most steadfast faculty at Pomfret? People will wonder because the two jobs seem to be irrelevant to one another. He answered me with a smile on his face: “I never thought I would teach here. I guess it all started at one time in … during which Pomfret was kind of short on math teachers. 

Mr. Per-Jan Ranhoff, who was a math teacher and also assistant of Headmaster at that time, knew about me so he asked me to teach for 6 weeks while the school searched for a new math teacher. I accepted. After that experience, I realized how much I loved working with students and teaching math, so I stayed and became their new math teacher!”

What a simple yet unbelievable story right? Well this next fact will be mind-blowing for some Pomfret students: Mr. Eaton is also a graduate from Pomfret School! That adds four more years to his time at Pomfret.  

Through him, we can know how Pomfret has changed over a long period of time in construction and in students’ life also. “Pomfret has a history of moving buildings from one place to another”, he said. He told me about how different the school campus was twenty years ago. Pine dorm used to be at the place of the Centennial Building, and the turf field and the student center did not exist. The house to the west of the football field was moved to create the turf field, and … The school campus has changed a lot, but not as much as the students’ life. “At the time I went to Pomfret, it was an all-boy boarding school and we all lived at the four “bricks” dorms,” he said “Pomfret has grown a lot, since there was only 210 students and about 32 faculties then”. 

I gasped in surprise and also horror when he said: “ We had to dress formally to every meal, since every meal was sit-down, in which the students serve food. That is a total of 20 sit-down meals a week. Only the brunch meal on Sunday was not sit-down.”  The school has also paid more attention to students’ life, such as weekend activities now.  Mr. Eaton’s favorite teachers were Mr. Bill Hrasky and Mr. Gene Roure, both worked in the science department. He still sees Mr. Roure occasionally because Mr. Roure lives about a mile from campus. These two teachers, he said, had sparked his interest in science, math and also his dream of becoming an engineer.

Recalling his studying time at Pomfret personally, he was full of distinctive memories: “I remember being the first group of day student to go to Pomfret, since it was an exclusive boarding school then. I also remember my ‘silver’ season of football (because they lost only one game – Writer)”. 

Mr. Eaton was a 3 year varsity football player, which was pretty impressive because it was so hard back then, and even now, for a sophomore to be on the Varsity football team. He eventually earned the most Varsity letters in his class, and still holds the schools’ record for Shot Put “partly because Pomfret does not offer that anymore,” he laughed. 

Mr. Eaton also recalls participating in the math team, helping the school win second place in the Amherst math meet. In Junior year, he was one of the first students who had exposure to computers, particularly the “PDP- 8”, which literally had only eight kilobytes of memory. 

Another technology means was the tele-type machine, which punched letters the user typed onto paper ribbons, and then the ribbons are put into “readers” to translate into text again.

I offer this paragraph exclusively to cherish the two personal experiences of Mr. Eaton ,to thank him for sharing with us, and also to end the column. When he was a student at Pomfret, he was one of the few students who had a car. This made him popular to the boarding students and to day students as well. Mr. Eaton, along with his 3 senior friends used a car to do business. Together they ran “The Lower Four Food Store”, which sold candy, donuts and hamburgers…etc. That meant that the tuck shop, at that time, had to close up because Mr.Eaton’s store stole all the “customers”, making no one want to go to the tuck shop for food anymore.