The Webb Schools

infobox School
name= The Webb Schools
type= Private
location= Claremont, California


motto= Principes non Homines
Sapientia Amicitia Atque Honor
established= 1922, 1981
affiliation=
district=
grades= 9-12
president=
principal=
head of school=
dean=
faculty= 49
staff=
students= 379
enrollment=
athletics= 40 teams in 13 sports
conference= Prep League of the California Interscholastic Federation
colors=
mascot= Gauls
free_label= Schools
free_text= Webb School of California
Vivian Webb School
free_label2=
free_text2=
information=
website= http://www.webb.org

The Webb Schools is the collective name for two private schools for grades 9-12, founded by Thompson Webb, located in Claremont, California. The Webb School of California for boys was established in 1922, and the Vivian Webb School for girls in 1981. Both are primarily boarding schools, but they also enroll a limited number of day students. [http://www.webb.org/CMSWebb/webb/march/admissionsub.aspx?id=614 Webb Schools: Day Applicants] ] The Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology is a part of the Webb Schools. Webb is unique in that it is the only high school in the USA and possibly the world with a nationally accredited museum. The museum curator is Dr. Donald "Doc" Lofgren.

The Webb School of California's motto is "principes non homines," Latin for "leaders, not ordinary men." The Vivian Webb School's motto is "sapientia amicitia atque honor," meaning "virtue, wisdom, friendship, honor."

The schools share a campus of approximately 70 acres in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. There are 392 students and 56 faculty members. [ [http://www.webb.org/CMSWebb/webb/march/glancebnr.aspx?id=1522&linkidentifier=id&itemid=1522 Webb website: Webb@aglance] (accessed September 21, 2008)] Annual tuition (as of the 2008-2009 school year) is $44,010 for boarding students and $31,300 for day students, including meals, books, and fees. [ [http://www.webb.org/CMSWebb/webb/march/admissionsub.aspx?id=608&linkidentifier=id&itemid=608 Webb website: Tuition and Financial Aid] (accessed September 21, 2008)]

The majority of ninth- and tenth-grade classes are taught in a single sex environment. Co-educational courses are introduced gradually after the first two years.

History

The Webb School's founder, Thompson Webb, was the son of William Robert “Sawney” Webb who in 1870 established the Webb School in Tennessee. The Tennessee school developed a reputation for challenging and unique teaching methods, and allowed students such unheard of freedoms as studying under the shade of a tree as opposed to a classroom. Sawney Webb mixed a curriculum of rigorous study programs with discipline to turn out superior students.

Thompson Webb, the youngest of the eight children of Sawney Webb, was born in 1887. He graduated from his father’s school in 1907 and continued his education at the University of North Carolina where he graduated in 1911. After college, his health and the suggestion of doctors led Thompson to move west to a warmer climate. He moved to the California desert near Indio and worked as a farm hand and eventually bought his own piece of land and started a career as a farmer.

Thompson Webb married Vivian Howell, the 20-year-old daughter of a Los Angeles Methodist minister, on June 22, 1915. She joined him in farming. The Webbs farmed together and increased their holdings until 1918, when a diseased onion crop wiped out all their savings. Broke and carrying high debt, Webb did not have the capital to farm and, because the country was involved in World War I, was unable to sell his land.

Webb then returned to Tennessee where the Bell Buckle school was experiencing a shortage of male teachers (due to the war) that threatened the school’s existence. Thompson Webb worked at his father’s school as an instructor for four years, after which he returned to California to open his own private residential school. The first suggestion that Thompson Webb start a school in California came from Sherman Day Thacher, founder of the Thacher School in Ojai Valley. Thacher told Webb that his school was turning down dozens of qualified students every year and that an empty school near Claremont was for sale. If Thompson opened a school there, Thacher agreed to refer his applicants. Through a proposal to I.W. Baughman, real estate broker for the Claremont property, Thompson Webb struck a deal that got him his school in 1922. Initial enrollment was 14 boys.

Over the years, and as word about this boys’ school in Claremont got out, Webb built the school through the support of many of the most influential business leaders in the greater Los Angeles community including the Chandlers, Guggenheims, Boeings and many others.

As the number of students grew in the ’30s and ’40s, Webb added seven major buildings, five faculty homes and two smaller structures to the campus. During this time, two of Webb’s landmark buildings were constructed: Thomas Jackson Library and the Vivian Webb Chapel.

The Thomas Jackson Library was donated to the school, as a memorial to their son, by the parents of Thomas Jackson, who graduated from Webb in 1930 but died of a heart attack while in his sophomore year at the California Institute of Technology. The library, dedicated in 1938, was designed by acclaimed architect Myron Hunt, who also built the Rose Bowl and Thompson and Vivian’s campus home. The building won an award for its architecture – a Mediterranean style with small balconies on the second floor and a mezzanine balcony around the interior – almost immediately after its dedication. From 1937 to 1948, Vivian Webb helped each graduating senior design and carve a wooden plaque bearing his name, his graduating year and some symbol of his interest. These plaques line the library’s walls. On the library’s heavy oak doors, Vivian Webb herself carved the names of the 158 boys who graduated before 1937. The library is now used as a formal reception room.

Construction on the Vivian Webb Chapel, a monument to Thompson Webb’s religious faith and his love for his wife, began the year after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Thompson was fascinated by California missions and took the mission at San Juan Capistrano as the inspiration for his chapel. With the help of a small cement mixer and two hired workers, Thompson began making 60-pound adobe bricks. After turning out 60,000 mission-style bricks and drying them in the sun on the school’s tennis courts, he built the chapel’s foundation and laid the chapel’s first brick in 1939. With the help of students, parents, visitors, prospective students and even the governor of Tennessee, Thompson Webb built the walls of the chapel.

Near completion of the structure, Webb learned that renowned sculptor Alec Miller was in the United States (because of World War II) without funds to return to his native Scotland. Miller was well-known in England because of his carvings for the cathedral at Coventry. Webb hired the artist at a modest fee, plus room and board, to design the furnishings (Miller called them “fitments”) for the chapel. Miller lived with the Webbs for three years while he designed the chapel’s “fitments” and the insets for the chapel’s entrance doors. Except for the bell tower which was added later, the chapel was completed in 1944.

The school operated as a family-owned stock company until the late 1950s when the Webb family turned it over to a non-profit corporation. After the non-profit corporation was established, Thompson Webb continued as headmaster of the school and Vivian Webb as general housemother until their retirements in 1962. Vivian Webb died in 1971; her husband died four years later in 1975.

A son of Thompson and Vivian Webb, Howell Webb, founded the Foothill Country Day School in Claremont in 1954 [ [http://www.foothillcds.org/ Foothill Country Day School website] ] . A nephew, Robert Webb, started the Webb School of Knoxville in Tennessee in 1955.

The Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology

The Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology is named for long-time Webb science teacher Raymond M. Alf (1905-1999). Alf developed an interest in paleontology while teaching at the school. In the late 1930s he and several students, including Thompson Webb's son Bill, found a fossil skull in the Mojave Desert in the Barstow area. Chester Stock, a paleontologist at the California Institute of Technology, identified the find as a new species of Miocene-age peccary, "Dyseohyus fricki". [Chester Stock, [http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/23/7/398.pdf A peccary skull from the Barstow Miocene, California] , "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences", 1937.] Donald L. Lofgren, [http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/fosrec/Lofgren1.html Students as Museum Scientists] ] That experience inspired additional fossil-hunting trips in the western United States with student groups, beginning with a 1937 trip to Nebraska and South Dakota that included students Bill Webb and Art Clokey. Alf decided to become a paleontologist and went to the University of Colorado to study the subject, earning a master's degree in geology in 1938. [http://www.alfmuseum.org/visitorpages_about.html About the Alf Museum] , Alf Museum website.]

After Alf's return to Webb, the adventures and acquisitions continued, and Alf and his students created a small museum in the basement of Jackson Library to house their collection of thousands of fossils. In 1968, this “museum” turned into its own campus building, designed by renowned California artist Millard Sheets. Currently the museum is in the process of planning renovations for the upper level; the lower level was renovated in 2002.

The museum is professionally curated and is accredited by the American Association of Museums, but students work alongside the staff in what is the only accredited paleontology museum on a secondary school campus. The museum collection features one of the largest collections of fossil animal footprints in the world, a dinosaur egg, a recently-discovered rhinoceros skull, and the original peccary skull.

Also of importance was the discovery of the Gryposaurus Monumentensis during the summer of 2003 in souther Utah. Through collaboration with the University of Utah, it was removed, identified, and is currently being studied. Every year, the freshmen class go on excursions to digging sites in the desert, and find numerous fossils, most of which go to the lab at the Raymond M. Alf Museum.

Vivian Webb School

The concept of a girls’ school on the Webb campus came up for discussion in the early ’80s. After the private Claremont Girls Collegiate School closed, a group of Claremont parents led a campaign and persuaded the board of trustees to establish a girls’ school on the Webb campus and the Vivian Webb School concept was born.

In the fall of 1981, Vivian Webb School opened with 34 girls as day students. Four years later, Vivian Webb School admitted its first class of boarders -- 34 students.

The Webb Schools today

Webb’s campus bears little physical resemblance to “The Farm” of 1922. Among the 70 acres are a buildings set in a heavily planted hillside. On the lower part of campus, visitors will find the “plaza group” consisting of the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology, the W. Russell Fawcett Library, classrooms,the Seely G. Mudd auditorium, the Price Dining Hall, the administration building, and the Frederick R. Hooper Student Center. Among these buildings is one remaining original: a clapboard structure built in 1917, simply called the “ Old School House.”

Just east of the plaza is the house the Webb family occupied for years, a girl’s dormitory and the Thomas Jackson Library. Up the hill are dorms, an Olympic-size pool, and Chandler Field, one of four large playing fields at Webb. Further up the hill are the health center, the Vivian Webb Chapel, which sits atop its own knoll, additional dormitories, tennis courts, and faculty houses. At the top of the hill is the Les Perry Gymnasium, McCarthy Fitness Center, Faculty Field at the Mary Stuart Rogers Sports Center, and a cross-country track course. A fully functional observatory sits just south of the football field.

Outdoor excursions and field trips have been a part of the Webb experience since the schools’ founding. At the freshman orientation retreat, students are not only introduced to each other and the schools’ traditions, but to basic camping and navigation skills in the Southern California mountains.

Notable alumni

* Michael Arias, noted Anime producer
* Art Clokey, creator of Gumby
* Roger Fan, actor
* Brooks Firestone, winemaker and politician, of the Firestone Tires family [ [http://info.sen.ca.gov/pub/97-98/bill/asm/ab_0051-0100/hr_80_bill_19980817_introduced.html HR 80 Assembly House Resolution - INTRODUCED ] ]
* Jordan Ladd, actress and daughter of actress Cheryl Ladd
* Josh Marshall, journalist, blogger, and publisher of Talking Points Memo
* Malcolm McKenna, famed paleontologist, former curator of vertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History
* Ron Reagan, son of President Ronald Reagan (expelled) [CSN News, [http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewSpecialReports.asp?Page=%5CSpecialReports%5Carchive%5C200407%5CSPE20040727a.html Son of Republican Icon Speaks at Dem Convention] , July 27, 2004. Nancy Reagan is quoted as saying: "We enrolled him at the Webb School in Claremont, where he slipped into some bad habits and found himself some less than terrific friends. When he broke one rule too many and left school one day without signing out, he was expelled."]
* David Lee Roth, rock musician (expelled)
* John Scalzi, science fiction author
* Nicholas Traina, son of Danielle Steel (expelled)Fact|date=October 2007
* Admiral James Watkins, 22nd Chief of Naval Operations and United States Secretary of Energy [Oral History Project of The H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, [http://test.earthscape.org/l2/ES14400/WATKINSJ.pdf Transcript of the Videotape-Recorded Interview with James D. Watkins] , May 11, 2000; Interviewer: Gary Weir.]

ee also

* Webb School (Bell Buckle, Tennessee)
* Webb School of Knoxville - Established in 1955 by Robert Webb, nephew of Thompson and Vivian Webb.

References

External links

* [http://www.webb.org/ The Webb Schools]
* [http://www.alfmuseum.org/ Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology]