Read, First Headmaster Of Greenhills School, Dies

Read, first headmaster of Greenhills school, dies

By MARIANNE RZEPKA

NEWS STAFF REPORTER

When families setting up Greenhills school went looking for a headmaster in the mid-1960s, they talked to Edward M. Read III.

Read, head of the Country Day Headmasters’ Association, was in town and stopped by to talk to the organizers.

“I had this clipboard, and I just asked him one question after another,” said Nancy C. Judge, one of the school founders.

“When we were done, I said, “You are just exactly what we want, but we know we can’t have you, so can you recommend someone else?’ ”

To Judge’s surprise, Read answered that, as a matter of fact, he’d always been somewhat interested in starting up a school just like Greenhills. “He said, ‘Let me talk to my wife,’ ” Judge said.

In 1968, Read became the first headmaster of the school, serving until his retirement in 1975.

Read died Monday. He was 86.

Before taking over the top job at Greenhills, Read worked at several private schools as a teacher and administrator.

Read and Greenhills were “a perfect match,” said Judge, between “what we wanted in the school and what he had been thinking about all those years when he was at those other schools.”

Every day, Read would meet the students at the door, said Greenhills’ current Headmaster Tony Paulus. At the 25th anniversary of the school last year, Read remembered the names of the students who showed up, Paulus said.

“Ed Read was sort of an American Mr. Chips,” said Judge, He so loved his work and loved his students.”

When he retired from Greenhill, Read headed off to Cleveland to fill in as interim headmaster at a private school there. After a year in Cleveland, Read filled in as interim headmaster at four different schools, then settled in Jeffrey Center, N.H., and later in Concord, N.H.

Survivors include his wife, Caroline, three daughters, six grandsons, one great-grandson and a brother.

Arrangements are being made by the Bennett Funeral Home.