When We Were Boys: from David Merrill to Jerry Katz of Park School

Sunday, December 14, 2008

from David Merrill to Jerry Katz of Park School

Jerry Katz

Headmaster

Park School

Dear Jerry Katz,

I want to thank you for your robust response to George Peabody’s raising of the issue of Mr. Davis’s sexual abuse of Park School Students in the ‘60s. I thought your immediate respect for what he had to say and your immediate move to action is to your credit. I was most touched.

I was a classmate of George’s and also a victim of Davis. I largely share George’s current approach to the matter and am happy to have my name associated with his when the school deals with this topic. I can still remember specific instances involving Davis’s sexual advances both on the School premises, at this home and elsewhere. They all took place during my sixth grade year when he was my class room teacher However this is not the time to go into them. The point is that I am also a source of evidence of what Davis got up to.

I do want to say though that my overall feelings for Park are positive in fact better than for the school I attended afterwards, B&N. There were a number of features that made your school an attractive place when I attended it which had to do with the time, its smallness and a certain degree of experimentalism.

My message is though that I wanted to say that I was very impressed with how you reacted to George’s approaches. Also I should say I salute George for taking up this matter and keeping at it. Perhaps his efforts along with yours as well as the new sensibility reigning today about such matters will stop a repetition of such behaviour as Davis’s in the future.

Best wishes,

David Merrill

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What Happened

This is George Peabody. For two years during the mid Sixties, I was sexually abused by an English teacher at Park School in Brookline, Massachusetts. His name is Richard Neville Davis. What happened to me was the most difficult and damaging event in my life. It lasted for over two years. Its impact has echoed on for over forty more. At last, mostly healed, it’s time to tell the story.

I do so for two reasons. First, to make sure no others are in harm’s way today and, as important, to help those others who were abused by RND find peace and healing of their own.

In 1996, I reached a crisis point of depression. Knowing part of the cause was the abuse, I started to tell the story to family and friends. One of these was my childhood friend John Howland (we met when we were three!). John, to my utter astonishment, told me the same thing had happened to him. Here I was, thinking I’d been the only one, and John tells me that he, too, had been abused by RND.

In 2002 or so, at a Park School reunion, David Merrill, another long-time classmate at Park School, approached me and told me that we had RND in common. From a class of perhaps 15 boys, RND had abused three of us!

I was blessed to work with a remarkable therapist from 2003 to 2006. At last, I felt healed, no longer fundamentally broken. And have, since then, felt compelled to do something, to not simply walk away from all the work. To tell the story perhaps to give a purpose to the pain and hard work. But still I did nothing about it. While never completely out of my mind, life gets busy.

But earlier this year, David Merrill sent me the link to Daniel Weinreb’s Opening BBN Minds. The three of us met last summer, had breakfast in Watertown and then walked in Cambridge’s Mt. Auburn Cemetary to tell our stories. Daniel had bravely confronted Buckingham Brown & Nichols over its handling of the Washburn affair. His effort met with resistance until this fall when, after over a year of telling his story and gathering community support, the BB&N administration turned around handsomely.

And that was inspiration enough for me to finally move. I contacted Jerry Katz, headmaster at Park School, a week later. He committed to communicating our story to alumni/ae from that era and to his school community. He also put me in touch with the Brookline Police Department and Sergeant Detective Bill Riley with whom I met a couple of weeks later.

Where We Are Now

Detectives have met with RND. They are satisfied that children are not in his way. The Brookline Police are trying to establish if the statute of limitations has expired or not. Given that it was just six years in those days (I didn’t tell anyone for five years!), it is a long shot but one I expect the police to pursue. I pursue an action simply as a means to find the others who RND abused. There were three of us at Park. I saw him with two other boys from other schools. I know there are many more than five of us.

What We Want

To find the others.

To let them know they are no longer alone.

To help them, as we can, find support.

To see that justice is done.