I spent the weekend in St.Louis with 17 of my classmates from the Class of 1971 of the St. Louis Priory. Since there were only 29 of us in the class, that was actually an excellent turnout. Lots of laughs and lots of stories from a group of truly excellent storytellers. It was good to reconnect with everyone.
Priory was and still is an all-boy Catholic prep school run by Benedictine monks. The founding group of monks were from Ampleforth Abbey in England and they had no reservations about transplanting English prep school practices and expectations to the Midwest. While the practices back in the 1960s extended to a belief in the efficacy of corporal punishment in focusing the attention of distractable young men, the high expectations of what we were capable of intellectually set us up for college, law school, medical school, business school, and graduate school experiences that were substantially easier than they otherwise might have been.
There is at least one other Priory alum that you know besides me. Kevin Kline, the actor, was a senior the year that I entered the school as a lowly first former (7th grader in American parlance).