Todd Seminary for Boys
Under headmaster Roger Hill from 1929, it became a progressive school that provided students including Orson Welles with a creative educational environment that emphasized practical experience over traditional academics.
[1] Reverend Todd moved to Woodstock, Illinois, from Vermont in 1847 to be pastor of a newly formed Presbyterian Church.
As headmaster, Skipper Hill developed the Todd Seminary for Boys into a progressive educational institution based on his philosophy that all young people were "created creators".
In addition to academics the school's educational plan offered a 300-acre working farm; a radio station; a theatre company with facilities on campus and tour buses that took the company throughout North America; sound motion picture production facilities; and a nearby airport with a flight simulator and small aircraft for students who were interested in flying their own plane.
The present headmaster, Roger Hill, a slim white-haired, tweed-bearing man, who looks as if he had been cast for his role by a motion-picture director, has never let the traditional preparatory-school curriculum stand in the way of creative work.
[3][7] When his parents separated Wilson lived with his grandmother, Nellie Embree Rathbun, who went to work at Todd as a house mother.
[9][10]: 107–109, 97 One of the Manhattan Project physicists, Wilson was a sculptor, writer and founding director (1967–1978) of Fermilab, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
Hill provided Welles an ad hoc educational environment that proved invaluable to his creative experience, allowing him to concentrate on subjects that interested him.
"I was passionate about the theatre—putting on plays was all I ever wanted to do with my life—and Skipper, God bless him, was the only one of my elders who encouraged my theatrical ambitions," Welles recalled.
"[14]: 70 In spring 1927 Welles became a member of the Todd Troupers, a touring company that presented shows in suburban Chicago movie houses and the Goodman Theatre.
"Edited for Reading and Arranged for Staging", the plays were shortened to acting versions of a reasonable length and illustrated with numerous line drawings by Welles.
In 1934 three plays—Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night—were published separately and in a single volume by The Todd Press and marketed strictly as textbooks for secondary schools.
[16] In 1941 a fourth play, Macbeth, was published by Harper & Brothers, which had begun reissuing the series under the title The Mercury Shakespeare.
[3][22] It was Collins who had recruited Welles for Todd in 1926, after meeting the boy at his father's hotel in Grand Detour, Illinois.
[26][27] E. D. Hirsch, Jr. (class of 1946),[3] literary critic and educator, wrote the bestselling book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987), and generated a storm of controversy.
[28] Gahan Wilson (class of 1948),[3][7] cartoonist and illustrator, transferred to Todd after one year in a public high school.
Christopher Welles spent nearly two years with the Hills and had the distinction of being the only girl to attend the Todd School for Boys.
"The conviction that my true home lay among decent, caring folk in small-town America kept me going during the early bewilderment of Rome," Welles's daughter recalled.
