Mount Clare mansion. Charles Carroll of Carrollton (Baltimore, Maryland)

Mount Clare. Another mansion owned by Charles Carroll of Carrollton, in Baltimore Maryland, perhaps 15 or 20 miles from the Brooklandwood estate. Austere architecture in what I suppose is called the Federal style.

The picture at left is the horse stable at Charles Carroll of Carrolton's Brooklandwood estate, where St. Paul's School for Boys now is. (Have they torn the building down by now? I for decades have wished General Curtis Lemay had saturation bombed the whole place.) It looks innocent enough, and it probably was when it housed horses.

But it became the St. Paul's School Upper School (grades 8 thru 12) when I was there, and I presume the inside classroom concrete block walls were added by the new occupiers. But concrete block walls in themselves do not a Hanoi Hilton make. It's the proprietors who make the place be whatever it is, for good or for evil, or just no account.

This courtyard became the place where St. Paul's School varsity contact sports team propaganda mass meetings – what they euphemistically called: "cheer rallies" – were held. These were all students on deck mandatory attendance events where about 3 students did a little gig on a little deck portico just a little to the right of the right edge of the present picture. The 3 were not cute teeny-bopper girls with happy blossoming little teenage estrogen saturated bodies flashing pom-poms. No! These were pubescent manly males egging on all their fellow teenage manly male compeers in the school to get all testosterone hyped up to cheer for the school's varsity contact sport team (football or lacrosse) in true belief in the ideology of: "school spirir", to, e.g.: "Beat Gilman!". (I, BMcC[18-11-46-503], on the other hand, did not care one iota about "school spirit" or Gilman, and if St.P. lost the game that would be fine with me. But I did find single-gender instinctual aim-inhibited public nudity unappealing.)

It was like something Dr. Joseph Goebbels would have scripted. And everybody seemed to love it. I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) did not love it. I was required to attend in that walled courtyard space which I was forbidden to leave until the mass propaganda event would end. But, perhaps because I was an "A" student, I was tolerated to sullenly stand apart from the crowd which would be at right in the picture. I would stand about where the left side horse is, as distant as possible from the amented hoard, and just itching for the damned thing to get over so I could be done with it. Die for a winning goal! Then go back to the public gender apartheid nudity but homosexual sex unthinkable locker room in victory! St. Paul's teams almost always won. Sieg, Heil! (Did somebody impolitely demur that a man had been nailed to a wooden cross somewhere a while before? NIMBY!)

After my time in this institution was up, just inside that door in the center of the picture, where the main entrance to the Upper School itself was, they installed a glass faced display case in which they worshipped their Golden Calfs → I mean: they displayed their varsity contact sport victory [a]trophies. Not a single crucifix there, however. Did St. Paul play varsity lacrosse or just J.V. football? IHS!