It was the worst of times. The “putrid corpse of liberty,” as Mussolini called it, had already been buried in Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Innocent adults and children were being herded into concentration camps. Youngsters who only a year earlier had learned and played together at the MacJannet American School outside Paris and Camp MacJannet in the French Alps were suddenly forced to perceive each other as enemies. In France, more than 338,000 trapped British and French soldiers had been miraculously evacuated from Dunkerque to England. Refugees clogged the roads between Paris and Talloires. As Hitler’s war machine advanced on the defenseless French capital in early June of 1940, Donald MacJannet scrambled to close his school in suburban St.-Cloud and store its furniture with neighbors. For his few remaining teachers and employees, he served a last meal of canned peas, salmon, mayonnaise… and champagne. Meanwhile, in Talloires, Donald’s wife Charlotte searched desperately for an agency to operate the MacJannet Camp as a shelter for war orphans, only to find herself, despite her marriage to an American citizen, herded into the prefecture in Annecy with other now-stateless aliens,. (Charlotte’s German passport had expired several years earlier, and as a protest gesture she had refused to renew it because the document would have carried Hitler’s name.) Only with the intercession of a highly-placed friend in Paris— U.S. Ambassador-at-Large Robert Murphy, whose three daughters had attended the MacJannet school and camp for four years in the ‘30s— were the MacJannets able to make their way to Genoa, where they boarded an overcrowded American-bound freighter on June 11,1940— one day after Italy declared war on France, and three days before Hitler’s Werhrmacht marched into Paris. At this moment, the U.S. was still a neutral country, seemingly confident that the Atlantic Ocean would insulate it from Europe’s turmoil. For Charlotte, born in Germany and having married Donald in London in 1932, their arrival in New York was only the second time she had set foot in the U.S. In his later years, Donald liked to recall that upon their arrival in New York, he and Charlotte exclaimed, with customary MacJannet bravado, “We’re free!” In fact, Charlotte later recalled, Donald’s shock at losing the school and camp he had built up since the early 1920s soon began to affect him. Despite their dire financial straits, the MacJannets were blessed with a supportive alumni network as well as other highly placed American contacts (including the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, whose sons had been taught by Donald at Washington’s St. Albans School). They helped the MacJannets raise funds for the Quakers who had agreed to operate the camp at Talloires. At these gatherings, the MacJannets put on reliably happy faces— Donald showed camp movies while Charlotte spun stories dressed in her Lady of Angon costume— but privately he complained of dizzy spells and of feeling over-fatigued. At this darkest hour for the continent they had fled, with no employment and no idea how the war would end, the MacJannets at age 46 and 39 were sharing a kitchen and bathroom with four other families squeezed into an apartment on Riverside Drive in New York. Only in retrospect can we see that their sojourn in the U.S. inadvertently offered them an opportunity to test whether their novel hands-on approach to education could be exported beyond the magical environments of Talloires and Paris. A POSTER IN A WINDOW One day in the fall of 1940, while walking up Fifth Avenue in search of a job, Donald noticed a poster in a travel agency window advertising the new ski and winter sports resort in Sun Valley, Idaho. He recalled seeing a Life Magazine picture spread about Sun Valley a few years years before. The thought occurred to him: Perhaps he could get a job there as a ski instructor. Actually, notwithstanding its glamorous publicity, Sun Valley was then an idea whose time hadn’t quite arrived. The resort had opened just three years earlier to serve the Union Pacific Railroad’s need to boost ridership along its route across the American Northwest. In January 1936 the railroad’s chairman, the investment banker W. Averell Harriman, had hired Count Felix Schaffgotsch— an Austrian banker of noble birth, and a Nazi,to boot— to scout the Pacific Northwest for a spot on which to build a destination ski resort. The count chose the once-prosperous silver and lead mining town of Ketchum, Idaho, which had declined into a virtual ghost town as its mines panned out. "Among the many attractive spots I have visited,” the Count wired Harriman, “this combines the more delightful features of any place I have seen in the United States, Switzerland, or Austria for a winter ski resort." The valley he described possessed many of the same characteristics that had first attracted Donald MacJannet to Lake Annecy in 1924 as an ideal educational venue: a spectacular environment, natural beauty, a sense of the past, even exposure to a foreign culture in the nearby presence of the Shoshone, Bannock, and Lemhi indigenous tribes. Within a year, the luxurious Sun Valley Resort opened its doors to hyperbolic international press attention. Celebrities like Ernest Hemingway, Clark Gable, and Ingrid Bergman flocked to this glamorous new winter wonderland, much as celebrities previously had been drawn to Lake Annecy in the French Alps. But celebrity traffic alone could not vindicate the railroad’s Sun Valley investment. The resort needed diverse other attractions, like, maybe, a boarding school. On the day Donald MacJannet walked into that Fifth Avenue travel agency in search of a job, the Union Pacific may have needed him more than he needed the railroad. HARRIMAN’S INVITATION Once inside the travel agency office, Donald introduced himself to the clerk. In one of those serendipitous moments that often seemed to befall the MacJannets, the clerk exclaimed that a good friend of his had taught at the MacJannet School at St.-Cloud, “and he has often spoken enthusiastically about you.” The clerk mentioned that Averell Harriman was interested in opening a school as a way to promote Sun Valley. He arranged to put Donald in touch with Harriman. Donald’s uncanny lifelong knack for attaching himself to prominent people had paid off once again. At that initial meeting, Harriman reaffirmed his enthusiasm about opening a school. “We’ll never get anywhere with skiing if we wait for the elderly gentlemen who have made their pile and can afford to come out,” he said, according to Donald’s recollection. “They are retired, and they’re not skiers. I’ve got to start with the children. And how am I going to get the children? I’d like to have a school for them.” With the impatience of a man who had more money than he knew what to do with, Harriman resolved then and there to commission an architect to consult with Donald and build what he called “a fine school.” Donald warned that the war in Europe might soon spread to America and wreck such plans, but Harriman waved him off dismissively. “We are going to stay out of this war,” he insisted, “just not going to get into European quarrels this time.” Donald, having already witnessed the war’s terrifying effects firsthand, didn’t share Harriman’s confidence. But at this point in his life, he was not about to look this gift horse in the mouth. Harriman invited the MacJannets to travel to Sun Valley as his guests and study the possibilities. Donald said he wanted to start small— as he had done in France— and would prefer to begin with one or two very small existing buildings that were unused in the winter. In December 1940, with their two suitcases in the back of an aging Studebaker that Donald had bought for their fund-raising tour, the MacJannets started out for Sun Valley. When they arrived there on Christmas Eve, Charlotte discovered to her delight that the resort was a replica of an Austrian mountain village, where the falling snow, lights in windows, and German carols all resembled a vision from a picture postcard. The MacJannets were invited at once to join the holiday celebration, The fashionable crowd, dressed in dirndl skirts and rough Alpine men’s clothing, included movie stars like Norma Shearer (who danced with Donald), Lana Turner and Gary Cooper. (Reminiscing about Sun Valley years later with Philip Rich, son of the MacJannets’ teacher and counselor Jack Rich, Charlotte paused and asked, “Who was that writer who was always drunk?” When Philip suggested Ernest Hemingway, she replied tartly, “Yes, that was the one.”) “You are my guests,” Harriman told them, according to Donald’s later recollection. “If you open a school, I know it will be difficult to start, and I know you have lost everything, so I will charge you a dollar a day for board and room. Laundry will be extra.” As Harriman’s “employees,” they could eat in any of the resort’s restaurants, avail themselves of maid service, and stay free at the railroad’s hotels while they traveled to recruit students. It was an offer the cash-strapped MacJannets couldn’t refuse, even had they wanted to. LEARNING FROM NATURE The “MacJannet Alpine School” opened on February 3, 1941— barely a month after the MacJannets arrived—with about a dozen pupils, all fifth graders or younger, some of them boarders, others children of the Lodge’s employees. This modest enrollment suited the MacJannets, who had always preferred an intimate student body. (The school at St.-Cloud had never enrolled more than 60 students, and the camp on Lake Annecy never exceeded 80.) Nevertheless, the new school was trumpeted on the front page of the local newspaper. “The first Alpine school in America, of the same type for which France and Switzerland have long been famous, will be established this winter under the direction of Mr. and Mrs. Donald MacJannet,” the local Hailey Times breathlessly announced two weeks before the school opened. Then the paper attempted the daunting challenge of explaining what the school was all about: “The MacJannets believe in education as a preparation for complete living in a democratic society. Their aim is the all-around development of the individual so that his talents may bring the most happiness to himself and his fellows. Fundamentals are stressed, but an eager interest in learning is encouraged through practical and immediate application of the knowledge acquired. Every advantage will be taken of the possibilities for vivifying classroom lessons by contact with the many-sided and fascinating life and natural phenomena of the Sun Valley region. Ranches, mines, farm factories, lava flows, hot springs will be visited and studied.” That description, surely provided by Donald MacJannet himself, summarized the “learning by doing” and “learning from nature” philosophies that the MacJannets had practiced in France and that their followers have promoted ever since. But could the MacJannet vision be transplanted from the Lake of Dreams in France to the Valley of Dreams in Idaho? That question begged a larger question that has challenged MacJannet acolytes to this day: Can the MacJannet philosophy be bottled and exported beyond Talloires? MAGINOT LINE MENTALITY The new school held its classes indoors in the morning, but once the day warmed, students and teachers alike went skiing, ice skating, or swimming in the resort’s heated and sheltered outdoor pool, with the mountains looking down on them. In the spring, the students went hiking and horseback riding along mountain trails— activities assiduously documented by Donald on film, both for his recruiting purposes and for the Union Pacific’s use in its own Sun Valley publicity. In this haven for celebrities, the MacJannets themselves became celebrities. Invited to speak to the local Rotary Club, Donald presciently warned that the U.S. was “in the same position today as France was at the time of the German blitzkrieg last spring.” The notion that the Atlantic Ocean could protect Americans from Hitler, he said, “is much the same as the French took toward their fortifications on the Maginot Line.” Less than a year later, with Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Donald’s dire prediction became a reality. The summer school program, called the MacJannet Alpine Chalets, resembled the MacJannets’ camp in France in the sense that it was essentially a school disguised as a camp. It attracted between 24 and 28 boys and girls, a few of them as old as 14. The MacJannets enlisted Jack Rich, who had been a counselor at the Talloires camp’s last two years, to assist them in the 1941 and 1942 summer schools. But otherwise the faculty appears to have consisted of Donald and Charlotte— mostly Donald, who also provided individual counseling and semi-tutorial sessions outside the classroom. The day-to-day administrative burden fell largely to Charlotte. However grueling their schedule may have been, the MacJannets were relieved of financial concerns, thanks to Harriman’s deep pockets and indulgent attitude. If the summer school’s schedule called for an all-day hike or ride, a phone call to the Sun Valley Hotel’s kitchen assured that large lunch hampers would be delivered to the group by car at some rendezvous point along the route, so Donald could focus his attention on pointing out traces of beasts and plants along the trails. WAR INTERVENES Just when the school seemed on the verge of establishing itself permanently, Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into the war. By the fall of 1942— some nine months later— jittery parents began withdrawing their children. By Christmas 1942, the school’s enrollment had dwindled to half a dozen. At this point, the Navy requisitioned Sun Valley as a rest and recreation area for wounded Navy fliers. At the suggestion of Donald’s sister, Jean MacJannet Foster, Donald flew to Caracas to consider a Venezuelan waterfall as a possible replacement location for the school, but he found it unsuitable. After less than two years in operation, the MacJannet Alpine School was forced to close. The MacJannets spent the remaining three years of the war in Washington, where at first Donald found work as an administrator in the Civil Aeronautics Administration’s war training service while Charlotte helped organize foreign diplomats’ wives into an “International Women’s Service Group.” Eventually, both of them turned to raising funds for Donald’s alma mater, Tufts University, in which capacity Charlotte visited nearly every American state— her first real introduction to America. After the war, under the MacJannets’ direction, the camp on Lake Annecy remained a refuge for French war orphans. Not until 1949 were American campers readmitted, alongside the war orphans. In effect this arrangement endowed the camp with a new benefit: In addition to mixing children of different nationalities, it also mixed children of different economic classes. (When this writer first attended the camp in 1952, half of each American camper’s fee subsidized a camp summer for a French war orphan.) The MacJannet American School in St.-Cloud outside Paris — the stately old former Jules Verne mansion known as “The Elms”— never reopened, having been wrecked during the German occupation. The camp in Talloires flourished through 1963. But Donald and Charlotte, by then in their 60s, were just getting started. Ahead lay their restoration of the abandoned 1,000-year-old Prieuré in Talloires; its reincarnation as a uniquely elegant global conference center and then as Tufts University’s European campus; the MacJannet Foundation; Les Amis du Prieuré; the MacJannet Fletcher Fellowship exchange program at Tufts; the global Talloires Network of Engaged Universities, and the MacJannet Prize for Global Citizenship. TANTALIZING QUESTIONS Was the Sun Valley interlude merely a speed bump along the highway to these remarkable achievements? Or did it lay the groundwork? There in Idaho— in the worst of times and halfway around the globe from their home base— the MacJannets had reinvented themselves. In the process, they had not merely survived and flourished; they had expanded their basic purpose: “Bringing the world to Talloires” had evolved into “Bringing Talloires to the world.” Charlotte, for her part, subsequently viewed each decade of her life as a distinct chapter that built on her previous chapters: as a child in Germany, a dance teacher in Scandinavia, then Donald’s wife and partner in France. “In my 40s, due to the war, we lived in Sun Valley and adapted our school and camp there while still raising funds for orphans in France,” she recalled, concluding: “You are where you are supposed to be right now, and each new door will open at the right time.” (See Les Entretiuens, Spring 2021.) One tantalizing question must remain forever unanswered. Suppose the Sun Valley school had succeeded. Would the MacJannets have remained there after the war and left the camp on Lake Annecy in the hands of its Quaker caretakers? Would they have hired someone else to operate the camp for them? Or would they have returned to France and hired someone else to manage the Sun Valley school? None of these options seems likely. Throughout their lives, the MacJannet steadfastly resisted efforts to expand their operations, preferring to keep things small and intimate. (After the war, the MacJannets’ longtime teacher and camp counselor James Halsey Sr., who expanded a tiny junior college in Connectuct into the vastly larger University of Bridgeport, urged the MacJannets to do the same with their camp model, without success. See Les Entretiens, Spring 2013.) Both Donald and Charlotte were Alpha personalities who steadfastly resisted collaborative ventures— sometimes even with each other— that might dilute their control. In retrospect, the closing of the Sun Valley school was a blessing in disguise: It taught them that they could start again from scratch without forcing them to choose between two spectacular venues on two sides of the globe. At Donald’s 90th birthday celebration in Talloires in 1984, a letter arrived from Averell Harriman, who in the intervening 42 years had served as U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Secretary of Commerce, and then governor of New York State. It was addressed to “My young friend, Donald MacJannet.” That label was literally correct— Harriman was then 93— but also reflected the perpetually infectious youthful enthusiasm the MacJannets managed to convey to nearly everyone who crossed their path, even in the strange remote world of Sun Valley.