I’ve seen all the hotshot prep schools. This is mine. Most beautiful one of all.
Extraordinary place. Ruined to death, beginning in 1969.
So let’s talk about all this, shall we?
The charges against Suerken are somewhere between 30 and 50 years old. The testimony that “convicted” him was obtained during telephone(!) conversations in which the accusers were assured of permanent, total anonymity. The most extreme charges were surfaced in 2017, seven years after Suerken’s death, whose passing in 2010 was noted with profound grief in a blog here:
For Paul Suerken
Only one of the listed charges, a “sexual assault,” would have been actionable at the time it supposedly occurred, but it was never reported, documented, or investigated at the time. Now it has no more weight than malicious gossip of the He Said/He’s Dead variety. No state’s Statute of Limitations would permit legal action so many years after the fact, especially in the case of an anonymous accuser not now or ever subject to in-person cross-examination by an attorney or competent police officer. Nothing is offered anywhere about the legal or law enforcement credentials of the “outside firm” paid by Mercersburg to investigate.
In a final cryptic postscript, the outside firm reports that their findings were transmitted to law enforcement. Really? Which department? Where? Acted on how, ever? No. Of course not. The outside firm is some variety of PR agency, used by organizations of all kinds to rubber stamp decisions already made. They make some calls, write a report on impressive letterhead, and retreat into the background on the good advice of attorneys even Mercersburg isn’t rich enough to hire. Because everything in this whole affair stinks to high heaven of actionable (read “big bucks”) libel. Which the rubes in central Pennsylvania don’t know enough to be terrified about.
What else can we know? Well, interesting that the Paul Suerken memorial website was the work of a female photographer, which (hmmm) would seem to confirm the reason reported at the time of Suerken’s supposedly sinister behavior, who we’re led to believe conned young men into posing “shirtless” in paid photographic sessions. Wow. There’s a crime to stop the presses.
Can we hit the pause button for a moment here? Let’s dial the clock back to the 1990s. Well, first, let me dial it back to the 1970s. Here’s how Mercersburg used to deal with sexual transgressions by administration and faculty. I’ll name some names, because I was there. Ernest Staley. Herb Shiflet. Two staffers at Traylor Hall who vanished in the night, never to be heard from or mentioned again. The scuttlebutt was that they molested some student and were sent packing pronto. No subsequent letter to alumni and parents. Just a problem disposed of forthwith. Does this tell us anything? Maybe not much, unless we consider the case of Richard Schellenberger, a longtime teacher of English, department head in fact, who was an open joke on the Mercersburg campus.
Ah yes. I’m old myself, you see. The Mercersburg Academy tolerated Richard Schellenberger for decades. Like Suerken, he was a dorm master, living in a one-room apartment in one of the historic school residence halls. He was famous for, among other things, showering with the boys on his floor. Which Suerken never did btw. Schellenberger (yes, I had him as a teacher for a wasted year) was also famous as a grotesque sexual obsessive. I was warned abundantly in advance before I attended my first class with him in English IV. When we entered the room that first day, he had drawn a spectacularly detailed and accurate portrait of a spread open vagina in chalk on the blackboard. He took the sniggers and laughter as approval, which it really wasn’t, because everyone — and I mean every one — knew his preference was for boys. Lewd innuendos and double entendres were his stock in trade in teaching. We had to just duck them and keep going. Because everyone who encountered him eventually asked some faculty member why Schellenberger had a job. The answer? “Rick’s on permanent notice. He gets away with all the stupid weird stuff until the day he touches a student sexually. Then he’s gone. Until then, we’re all grown up enough to deal with an obnoxious lech.”
That happened to be accurate reporting. Some years after I graduated, Schellenberger did finally touch a student inappropriately and disappeared as suddenly as Staley and Shiflet. Last we heard, he was a hotel night clerk in Chambersburg, a few towns away from Mercersburg. Princeton graduate, department chair, tenured faculty, selling room keys by the hour to unfaithful used car salesmen. Poetic justice for a man who thought the height of English literature was The Miller’s Tale.
Why am I reminded of the crime of paying students to pose for shirtless photographs? All that showering with the boys, I guess. The part you don’t get. We weren’t millennials in the Seventies. We didn’t need safe places. Go to any yearbook from any secondary school in those days and you’ll see (gasp) shirtless boys in dozens of photos. Didn’t care who saw their bodies. Tender innocents who didn’t know about the danger of homosexual pedophile predation, you say? Wake the hell up. They just didn’t care. If Schellenberger or some other bent a’hole had laid a hand on them, he’d have been in an ambulance a few minutes later.
A word about male modesty in those days. There wasn’t any. Unlike high school, no exceptions. Nowhere to hide for anyone. Everybody saw you completely naked several times a day. We showered together in primitive bathroom facilities in the dorms, in much nicer facilities at the gym, and we changed in and out of sports togs in locker rooms without turning our backs. There were even a few dorms so old there were no doors on the toilet stalls. The only ones who cared about any of this were the youngest, the prepubescent boys, who tried towel coverups for about a day and a half and then learned how to counter the jokes with their own nasty retorts. That’s life in a pretty rough all-male world. Is it worth pointing out to Katherine Titus that if Paul Suerken wanted to ogle shirtless — and pantless boys — all he would ever have had to do was walk down the hall to the bathroom and tell them to hurry up because the breakfast bell was about to ring? No. She lives in a timeless place where even boys squeeze their legs together to hide genitals when somebody might be watching.
Prep schools. Sex. Adolescent boys. What did we know and when did we know it? Everything would be the right answer. We weren’t geniuses, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that a master with an Ivy League degree who chooses to live in one room in a prep school dormitory might be light in the loafers.
Were we homophobes? In today’s terms, I suppose so. The word “faggot” was tossed around a lot. And by that I mean all day every day. In the politically correct climate of right now and its insistence on imposing present mores on the past, we were a bad intolerant bunch. Except that that’s bullshit. In my day there were two students who were openly sweet on each other — they sat right behind me in biology class — and I never heard about a single incident in which either one was bullied, beaten up, or otherwise persecuted. Same with teachers. Most common response to personal suspicions: don’t know, don’t want to know, and that Schellenberger douche is a real douche. We had other stuff to do. That was the Seventies,
Where were we? Oh yes. The Nineties. Same deal, I’m thinking. Wasn’t there. Differences. Co-educational. Fewer rules, dumbed down SATs, more drugs. More homophobia? I kind of doubt it, don’t you? If anything, gays are giving more thought to exploring their hidden natures, coming partway if not all the way out of the closet. Let’s think a little deeper about this posing shirtless scenario. Somebody pays you, you say, for posing shirtless for photographs. And then nothing happens.
If you’re an attorney or a police officer, do you have any questions you’d like to ask about this? Of course, in the world of 2017, I can’t ask things like, “Were you gay then?,” “Are you gay now?,” “Have you ever had any guilt about any aspect of your sexuality, then or now?,” and “What on earth made you decide to come forward anonymously on the telephone to accuse an old dead teacher of having seen and photographed you without a shirt on?”
And would you have any questions for the ONE anonymous accuser of actual sexual assault? I know I would. Like, “What is your home address, and will you be there when my professional interrogators arrive to inquire in depth about the specifics, given that a man’s life and reputation are at stake here?”
Sadly, we’ll never know about these unasked and unanswered questions. Accusations are all that’s required in the age of Bret Kavanaugh and Christine Ford.
It bears repeating that there is no case here, nothing any court of law in any municipality, city, or state would pay a moment’s attention to. All that does exist is the twisted ambition of those who would dig up a dead man to desecrate his corpse with the results of a telephone poll.
One final note, touching some bases above. Staley, Shiflet, and Schellenberger (+Savage) were dealt with in the time when there was still a rule of law. None of them could have been prosecuted at the time, probably for lack of evidence and possibly for concern about the human and dollar cost of arrest and trial. Also, most likely of all, because it would have meant bad publicity for Mercersburg. What has changed? Wild, unsubstantiated charges and draconian punishments are no longer bad publicity. They are GREAT publicity, especially when the next step on your career ladder is Head of School at ancient powerful institutions battling sex scandals of their own. I’ll say the name one more time: Katherine Titus.
Last question. If, as implied, there was any evidence Suerken had done something untoward when he was still a teacher, why wasn’t he frog-marched into the night like Schellenberger and disappeared from school history at the time? Answer: Whatever they’re trying to imply now never happened.
The charges against Suerken are somewhere between 30 and 50 years old. The testimony that “convicted” him was obtained during telephone(!) conversations in which the accusers were assured of permanent, total anonymity. The most extreme charges were surfaced in 2017, seven years after Suerken’s death, whose passing in 2010 was noted with profound grief in a blog here:
For Paul Suerken
Only one of the listed charges, a “sexual assault,” would have been actionable at the time it supposedly occurred, but it was never reported, documented, or investigated at the time. Now it has no more weight than malicious gossip of the He Said/He’s Dead variety. No state’s Statute of Limitations would permit legal action so many years after the fact, especially in the case of an anonymous accuser not now or ever subject to in-person cross-examination by an attorney or competent police officer. Nothing is offered anywhere about the legal or law enforcement credentials of the “outside firm” paid by Mercersburg to investigate.
In a final cryptic postscript, the outside firm reports that their findings were transmitted to law enforcement. Really? Which department? Where? Acted on how, ever? No. Of course not. The outside firm is some variety of PR agency, used by organizations of all kinds to rubber stamp decisions already made. They make some calls, write a report on impressive letterhead, and retreat into the background on the good advice of attorneys even Mercersburg isn’t rich enough to hire. Because everything in this whole affair stinks to high heaven of actionable (read “big bucks”) libel. Which the rubes in central Pennsylvania don’t know enough to be terrified about.
What else can we know? Well, interesting that the Paul Suerken memorial website was the work of a female photographer, which (hmmm) would seem to confirm the reason reported at the time of Suerken’s supposedly sinister behavior, who we’re led to believe conned young men into posing “shirtless” in paid photographic sessions. Wow. There’s a crime to stop the presses.
Can we hit the pause button for a moment here? Let’s dial the clock back to the 1990s. Well, first, let me dial it back to the 1970s. Here’s how Mercersburg used to deal with sexual transgressions by administration and faculty. I’ll name some names, because I was there. Ernest Staley. Herb Shiflet. Two staffers at Traylor Hall who vanished in the night, never to be heard from or mentioned again. The scuttlebutt was that they molested some student and were sent packing pronto. No subsequent letter to alumni and parents. Just a problem disposed of forthwith. Does this tell us anything? Maybe not much, unless we consider the case of Richard Schellenberger, a longtime teacher of English, department head in fact, who was an open joke on the Mercersburg campus.
Ah yes. I’m old myself, you see. The Mercersburg Academy tolerated Richard Schellenberger for decades. Like Suerken, he was a dorm master, living in a one-room apartment in one of the historic school residence halls. He was famous for, among other things, showering with the boys on his floor. Which Suerken never did btw. Schellenberger (yes, I had him as a teacher for a wasted year) was also famous as a grotesque sexual obsessive. I was warned abundantly in advance before I attended my first class with him in English IV. When we entered the room that first day, he had drawn a spectacularly detailed and accurate portrait of a spread open vagina in chalk on the blackboard. He took the sniggers and laughter as approval, which it really wasn’t, because everyone — and I mean every one — knew his preference was for boys. Lewd innuendos and double entendres were his stock in trade in teaching. We had to just duck them and keep going. Because everyone who encountered him eventually asked some faculty member why Schellenberger had a job. The answer? “Rick’s on permanent notice. He gets away with all the stupid weird stuff until the day he touches a student sexually. Then he’s gone. Until then, we’re all grown up enough to deal with an obnoxious lech.”
That happened to be accurate reporting. Some years after I graduated, Schellenberger did finally touch a student inappropriately and disappeared as suddenly as Staley and Shiflet. Last we heard, he was a hotel night clerk in Chambersburg, a few towns away from Mercersburg. Princeton graduate, department chair, tenured faculty, selling room keys by the hour to unfaithful used car salesmen. Poetic justice for a man who thought the height of English literature was The Miller’s Tale.
Why am I reminded of the crime of paying students to pose for shirtless photographs? All that showering with the boys, I guess. The part you don’t get. We weren’t millennials in the Seventies. We didn’t need safe places. Go to any yearbook from any secondary school in those days and you’ll see (gasp) shirtless boys in dozens of photos. Didn’t care who saw their bodies. Tender innocents who didn’t know about the danger of homosexual pedophile predation, you say? Wake the hell up. They just didn’t care. If Schellenberger or some other bent a’hole had laid a hand on them, he’d have been in an ambulance a few minutes later.
A word about male modesty in those days. There wasn’t any. Unlike high school, no exceptions. Nowhere to hide for anyone. Everybody saw you completely naked several times a day. We showered together in primitive bathroom facilities in the dorms, in much nicer facilities at the gym, and we changed in and out of sports togs in locker rooms without turning our backs. There were even a few dorms so old there were no doors on the toilet stalls. The only ones who cared about any of this were the youngest, the prepubescent boys, who tried towel coverups for about a day and a half and then learned how to counter the jokes with their own nasty retorts. That’s life in a pretty rough all-male world. Is it worth pointing out to Katherine Titus that if Paul Suerken wanted to ogle shirtless — and pantless boys — all he would ever have had to do was walk down the hall to the bathroom and tell them to hurry up because the breakfast bell was about to ring? No. She lives in a timeless place where even boys squeeze their legs together to hide genitals when somebody might be watching.
Prep schools. Sex. Adolescent boys. What did we know and when did we know it? Everything would be the right answer. We weren’t geniuses, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that a master with an Ivy League degree who chooses to live in one room in a prep school dormitory might be light in the loafers.
Were we homophobes? In today’s terms, I suppose so. The word “faggot” was tossed around a lot. And by that I mean all day every day. In the politically correct climate of right now and its insistence on imposing present mores on the past, we were a bad intolerant bunch. Except that that’s bullshit. In my day there were two students who were openly sweet on each other — they sat right behind me in biology class — and I never heard about a single incident in which either one was bullied, beaten up, or otherwise persecuted. Same with teachers. Most common response to personal suspicions: don’t know, don’t want to know, and that Schellenberger douche is a real douche. We had other stuff to do. That was the Seventies,
Where were we? Oh yes. The Nineties. Same deal, I’m thinking. Wasn’t there. Differences. Co-educational. Fewer rules, dumbed down SATs, more drugs. More homophobia? I kind of doubt it, don’t you? If anything, gays are giving more thought to exploring their hidden natures, coming partway if not all the way out of the closet. Let’s think a little deeper about this posing shirtless scenario. Somebody pays you, you say, for posing shirtless for photographs. And then nothing happens.
If you’re an attorney or a police officer, do you have any questions you’d like to ask about this? Of course, in the world of 2017, I can’t ask things like, “Were you gay then?,” “Are you gay now?,” “Have you ever had any guilt about any aspect of your sexuality, then or now?,” and “What on earth made you decide to come forward anonymously on the telephone to accuse an old dead teacher of having seen and photographed you without a shirt on?”
And would you have any questions for the ONE anonymous accuser of actual sexual assault? I know I would. Like, “What is your home address, and will you be there when my professional interrogators arrive to inquire in depth about the specifics, given that a man’s life and reputation are at stake here?”
Sadly, we’ll never know about these unasked and unanswered questions. Accusations are all that’s required in the age of Bret Kavanaugh and Christine Ford.
It bears repeating that there is no case here, nothing any court of law in any municipality, city, or state would pay a moment’s attention to. All that does exist is the twisted ambition of those who would dig up a dead man to desecrate his corpse with the results of a telephone poll.
One final note, touching some bases above. Staley, Shiflet, and Schellenberger (+Savage) were dealt with in the time when there was still a rule of law. None of them could have been prosecuted at the time, probably for lack of evidence and possibly for concern about the human and dollar cost of arrest and trial. Also, most likely of all, because it would have meant bad publicity for Mercersburg. What has changed? Wild, unsubstantiated charges and draconian punishments are no longer bad publicity. They are GREAT publicity, especially when the next step on your career ladder is Head of School at ancient powerful institutions battling sex scandals of their own. I’ll say the name one more time: Katherine Titus.
Last question. If, as implied, there was any evidence Suerken had done something untoward when he was still a teacher, why wasn’t he frog-marched into the night like Schellenberger and disappeared from school history at the time? Answer: Whatever they’re trying to imply now never happened.
If you'd like to reach me sometime, you can contact me at stevenjcohn@yahoo.com I was Paul's close friend for many years, and I think I can address certain things that you've brought up. I absolutely loved (and love) Paul, and I know he felt the same way. The story is a little bit more complicated than I'd like it to be, but perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between, as the old expression goes. In any event, you have my email address.
ReplyDeleteAnother quick note: Ernie Staley was at Mercersburg until the mid to late 80s, and became the school's archivist. I knew him and his wife quite well, too.
ReplyDeleteI stumbled on this on the date of my wedding anniversayr. I am a widow and was nostalgic about Paul who had lived on my MALS floor at Dartmouth for at least 2 summers maybe 3, He played the violin at my wedding in 1978 and we attended classes together. I came to Mercersburg to see his play "Godspell." Maybe he was gay, Okay. I find it hard to believe that he would compromise a student. If only other people had his curiousity, his sense of humor, and his joy for life! I grieve that he had such a diifficult death- I cried when I learned that his violin had been stolen-I'm sorry if he acted inappropriately, but i don't know how to condemn this gentle, sweet man...I the #Metoo era, we need to find a way to identify and understand what is assault.
ReplyDelete