Loomis & Kent Part I: The Spoon Game Legends

Once the Kent boys returned home, the Batchelders discovered that a silver teaspoon, one from a wedding set belonging to the Batchelders, was missing.  Mr. Batchelder wrote to Father Sill, Kent's founder, about the missing spoon. Heated words were exchanged defending the honesty of the young men at each school until finally, the matter was dropped.

In June of 1922, the guilty young Kent football player went to Father Sill and confessed.  Legend has their conversation ending with the decision to spare the Loomis School the pain of opening an old wound. Kent would hold onto the spoon, under wraps for fifty years.  

About 1937 (sixteen years after the theft) Mr. Batchelder caught wind of the existence of the spoon on Kent’s grounds. The information came quite by coincidence when a former Kent boy roomed with a former Loomis boy at Harvard (though some say Yale). The Kent boy told his roommate that Sill had given the spoon to a Senior prefect. Placed in a special metal box with an unbreakable lock, the spoon was to be hidden each year in a safe place, known only to a tiny inner circle.

One year, as legend has it, the spoon was stowed in an apple tree. When the tree was cut down, the spoon had to be retrieved in the dead of night by picking apart the remains of the tree by hand.

It has also been said that the spoon was hidden on the under side of a bridge across the Houstonic River, which flows near Kent.  In the spring, high water washed out the bridge along with the spoon.  According to an October 25, 1947, Log  article, "When Father Sill was notified, he said, 'Go get it.'  Therefore, the river was dredged (by night, of course) for a week, and the spoon was finally discovered in the mud several hundred yards from its original site under the bridge."  

At Father Chalmers thirty-fifth anniversay dinner, Kent's new headmaster told the whole story and offered the spoon back to Mr. B. who graciously declined. He insisted that the spoon stay at Kent.  Father Chalmers then suggested that a large spoon serve as a permanent football trophy to be held by the victorious school.  Kent would secure the spoon "to in someway ... return to Loomis for our keeping borrowed property."  

The lovely, large sterling silver serving spoon Kent chose was made in 1824 in York, England.

Loomis promptly won the spoon in the 1947 game (8-0) before a crowd of 1000 people and returned to the Island with the new spoon.  That first year, Mr. Batchelder served stuffing from the Thanksgiving turkey with the spoon and resolved that before the year was out, each senior would eat something served from that fabled table utensil.

The Fall 1947 Loomis Alumni Bulletin  displays photographs of the B.'s and Father Chalmers at Kent.  There is also a picture of Mr. B. showing Father Sill the Trophy Spoon.