Hart Day Leavitt

Hart Day Leavitt died October 10, 2008, in North Andover, Massachusetts. A memorial service was held at Kemper Auditorium at Phillips Andover on November 15.

In his faculty role on the Andover campus, Leavitt wore several hats, including five years coaching the varsity hockey team (1945–50). The team normally played on Rabbit Pond as an ice hockey rink had not yet been built. Following his stint as a coach, Leavitt switched gears, and embracing his love of carpentry and theater, headed up the stage crew at the old George Washington Hall theater. In his one on-stage performance, the English teacher appeared as one of the gangsters in Kiss Me, Kate, crooning "Brush Up Your Shakespeare" in a thick gangster accent.

But when Leavitt joined the Andover faculty, jazz was somewhat outré. "Back in the 1940s the school was run by old conservatives, most of whom thought jazz was evil music", Leavitt later told musician and Andover graduate Thomas Chapin, recalling an invitation by some of his students to play with their band. "So I decided to go in and ask the headmaster who hired me if it would be all right to perform with the boys and their band. The boss looked at me disapprovingly. 'Well, Hart if you want to do that kind of thing!' So I had to refuse."

Hart Day Leavitt (1909–2008) was a longtime English teacher at Phillips Andover Academy, amateur jazz musician, the author of a bestselling book on grammar and writing, and the professor of many notable Andover graduates, including Jack Lemmon, H. G. Bissinger and President George H. W. Bush.

A native of Concord, New Hampshire, where his father, Congregational minister Ashley Day Leavitt, was pastor of a church, Leavitt was born December 29, 1909. Ironically, he attended Andover's archrival, nearby Phillips Exeter Academy, and subsequently graduated from Yale University, his father's alma mater, in 1934. Following his Yale graduation, Leavitt studied at the Bread Loaf school at Middlebury College.