From the Pillared Portals to a Brilliant World - Winchester Thurston ...

Gary Niels and the Putnams congratulate
Put McDowell.
The McDowell sisters (l to r) Martha (Murph),
Margaret (Mouse), and Barbara.
Jane Scarborough and Gary Niels, two WT
Heads.
Gary Niels greets Put McDowell and his wife,
Robin.
Kathy Zilweger Putnam ’71 catching up with Put. Gary Niels with Susan Criep Santa-Cruz ’60,
Susan Harris ’67, and Nancy Scott.
faced with such a challenge, and his response resonated with
impact nearly 40 years later.
The story begins in 1967. WT had recently built a gorgeous,
state-of-the-art school on Morewood Avenue, now known as the
Main Building at the City Campus. Unfortunately, the school
experienced financial difficulties associated with the costs, and
in the fall of that year, the Board faced the possibility of being
unable to meet its payroll. Several of McDowell’s fellow trustees
favored selling a parcel of land the school owned, across the
street from the new building at the corner of Bayard Street and
Morewood Avenue. It was an easy solution that would raise
the money needed, but McDowell realized that parting with
the land could have long term consequences. After exhausting
borrowed funds from Union National Bank, which he had
secured against pledges by individual trustees, he turned to
his boss, Henry Hillman of the Hillman Company, and, in an
impassioned personal memo, asked Hillman to make a loan to
Winchester Thurston. “I feel strongly that the School may later
regret such a sale,” McDowell wrote. “There are few institutions
of this kind which don’t outgrow new facilities faster than is
anticipated only to find land unavailable or exorbitant in price.
Once WT lets go of its lots and they are built on, it will have no
real flexibility on physical expansion.” Hillman agreed to the
loan, which set WT on the path to fiscal stability.
Decades went by. Under the direction of Jane Scarborough,
WT built a playground on the land in the 1980s. In 2002, when
the school prepared to build a new Upper School, the options
for locating the new facility were limited; in the end, only one
made sense: to build on the vacant land owned by the school at
the corner of Bayard Street and Morewood Avenue—the same
land McDowell had preserved with his actions.
Had McDowell lacked the foresight to preserve this land
for the school, the new Upper School may well have remained
an aspiration instead of the reality it has become: a beautiful,
vibrant building that has enabled WT to increase Upper
School enrollment and undertake program improvements
and expansions. McDowell understood the impact of the new
building from his own perspective as a parent as well as that of
his daughters; he recalled his own daughter, Martha, whispering
to him at her graduation, “Dad, 12 years in one building is a lot!”
Recently, McDowell wrote in a letter to Niels: “Nothing I did
during my 40 years in business in Pittsburgh made a ‘difference’
in the way that saving the WT lots did. That the property made
possible an entire new Upper School fills me with wonder.”
“It was so meaningful for Winchester Thurston, to honor
Put’s tenure and his contribution to WT as Chairman of the
WT Board of Trustees and as a man who exercised wisdom and
vision in his leadership of the Board,” says Niels.
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