Bethel and the National Training Laboratories (NTL): 1947 to 2005
March 26, 2006
The Bethel Journals
By Donald G. Bennett
The National Training
Laboratories, later NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science, arrived in Bethel
in the summer of 1947. Gould Academy
hosted the conferences with administrative support, meeting facilities and
lodgings. For a number of years NTL came
as the client and Gould Academy (Bethel) was the patron. Sometime between 1948 and 1980 roles of the
two parties reversed – NTL became the Patron and Bethel became the Client.
“In 1947, NTL
Institute was founded in Bethel, Maine as the National Training Laboratories
for Group Development, when NTL offered its first experiential human relations
laboratory and pioneered the technologies of group dynamics. Bethel was the
"cultural island" chosen by NTL's founders to develop, refine, and
practice the T-Group methodology, which serves as the foundation for much
organization development and group learning practiced today. (Funding was
secured from the Office of Naval Research and the National Education
Association (NEA) where Leland Bradford was serving as Director of Adult
Education. The planning group was named the National Training Laboratory for
GROUP development, later shortened to NTL, and eventually to NTL Institute for
Applied Behavioral Science.)
How did NTL find Bethel? Kurt Lewin (1890-1947) a major figure then and now in the
field of action research in social psychology, died just before he
was to come here to launch a new method of group dynamics study. Lewin had selected Bethel, a “cultural
island” in the mountains of Maine as the ideal launch site for this group. Why did Lewin choose Bethel? He had recently (1944) come to MIT in Boston
from the University of Iowa but we do not know if he had ever visited
Bethel. Speculation would be that either
from research papers about the Gehring clinic or learning about the Gehring
clinic from people who had been to it or knew Gehring was the reason. That it
turned out was not the case at all - see comment below.
NTL’s 21st Century
Bethel HQ
The former home of Dr. John G.
Gehring, founder of a clinic to treat nervous breakdowns and return patients to
being capable of productive careers, seemed a fine home for an modern “clinic” aimed
at enhancing group productivity.
NTL (National Training Laboratories) was given birth in Bethel at Gould
Academy in 1947.
NTL acquired the former Gehring home in 1955 after the death of William
Bingham II.
Some of the ways NTL helped and changed Bethel:
In the summer of 1947,
Bethel people woke up to the fact that a whole new event was unfolding on the
Gould Academy campus. Many NTL
participants stayed in Gould dorms while staff rented houses or rooms in town. Leland Bradford, Ronald Lippit and Kenneth
Benne the founders who had been picked by Lewin (and who survived him to carry
on his work) became regular summer residents in Bethel.
I was 12 years old in 1947. So I was
one of the 200 to 300 locals who became daily NTL watchers. Participants had come from all over the
United States and many foreign countries. Church Street was filled with a line
of parked cars. (For kids, counting all the states on NTL cars was a major
pastime.) “T-Groups”* scattered
themselves under the trees shading the main campus. Many of the overseas participants wore their
native dress or as we thought, costumes.
New people were all over the place up and down Main Street and when not
meeting they beat it quickly to the swimming holes from Frenchman’s Hole and
Artist’s Bridge to Songo Pond. NTL was everywhere. The town’s closet peeping toms were having a
field day keeping up with what was obviously to them a lot of “immoral”
activity. Gossip in the restaurants
became priceless. * What was a T-group?
From the beginning, NTL was an
economic boon to many local businesses. My family delivered milk throughout
town and to Gould Academy. Normally, in the summer the academy was closed and
the dorms were empty. Gould served regular meals in the dining room of the
girl’s dormitory and our milk business reflected that as a new benefit. Almost every storekeeper on Main Street
prospered from NTL business. Yet, it is possible that Bethel lost more than
$100,000 in profits because it was a “dry” town from 1947 to 1955. Bethel was a “dry cultural island”; maybe a
surprise to NTL’s planners?
NTL’s need for summer housing was
the “ bean seed” that grew into “Jack’s (Bethel’s) beanstalk” . Staff and some students/participants needed
houses for the summer and the rental business took off. Residents moved out of their homes to
campgrounds - NTL staff moved in. (This was happening from 1950 to 1980.) Most of the rental administration was handled
through NTL staff and Wilbur Myers at Gould Academy; there were no real estate
or rental agents involved at the beginning because Bethel had no such agents.
In 1947 Bethel was served by the
Maine Central Bus Line and the Grand Trunk Railroad. A fair number of NTL participants came to
Bethel without a car – coming by rail or bus.
Edith Seashore has told funny stories about her arrival by Maine Central
bus that stopped at Cotton’s Restaurant and Store near the junction of Main and
Church Streets. It is a story of the outside worldly person meeting a
Bethel-ite – with some culture shock involved.
In 1952, I graduated from Gould
Academy, had my driver’s license and was able to drive to town in the
evening. A number of the NTL staff
brought their kids with them for the summer.
For the town kids that mingled with the NTL families, and enjoyed the
Friday night dances at the Bingham Gymnasium, it was a chance to meet some
really nice, different people. My best
friends that summer were twins, Janet and Jim Fleet. Their mother, Beulah
Fleet, was a staff member who had come with her kids from the University of
Denver. That summer we sampled
everything that Bethel had to offer – swimming at Sunday River, dancing at the
Top Hat in Hanover on Saturday nights, NTL parties on Friday nights and raiding the kitchen for left over pies.
The Fleets left Bethel at the end of the summer. In 1988, I was retired from the Army and
working as front desk manager at the Bethel Inn. Home having lunch at noontime,
I got a telephone call from the front desk. There was a Mrs. Beulah Fleet
asking for me; she was touring with a group that had stopped for lunch at the
inn. For about 30 minutes I had a chance
to catch up on 25 years. My 1952 summer
“girl friend”, Janet, had married a doctor and was living in Georgia. All of
this came to me through the auspices of NTL.
In 1957, Bethel’s industrial
economy, wood product mills, was in the doldrums. The chamber of commerce had
formed an industrial search committee.
Looking for some practical ideas in their quest for new jobs, the committee
asked NTL for help.
The Oxford County Bethel Citizen, August 15,
1957 reported the following:
Recently an interesting meeting was held at Gould Academy
for the purpose of discussing ideas that might help Bethel industrially and economically.
NTL personnel included Dr. Leland Bradford and Dr. Ronald Lippitt (two of NTL’s
founders) plus Dr. Priess, Dr. Pitkin and several members of a training group.
Bethel people were members of the original Industrial Survey Committee started
by the Chamber of Commerce. One comment noted was that NTL people showed
genuine concern for the town while only a short time before they had been
considered complete strangers. All
agreed that Bethel needed to be more progressive. Priority should be given to completing the
(industrial) survey and getting it to Augusta so that the state would be aware
of Bethel’s interest to create local industrial development.
It was agreed that Bethel should go on
record as interested in industry, dispelling the myth that we are a closed
corporation unfriendly to progress.
Discussion about “what does Bethel
have” that would attract an industrialist didn’t result in overwhelming odds in
our favor. Bethel’s assets were listed
as land, railroad, electricity, etc, but the tax rate was followed by (no
comment).
From 1954 through the 1970’s while I was pursing my Army
career and seemingly forever going to school at night, I found how much of
NTL’s programs and scholarship had seeped into the world of academia and
military personnel relations training.
The Army in its staff colleges used the NTL created “T-Groups” for its
human relations training. Practically
any book or journal on behavioral psychology published after 1949 had “Bethel”
in its index. Bethel had become known
worldwide due to the NTL Institute.
In 1979, the Greater Bethel Chamber of Commerce
established a new annual award to recognize outstanding business achievements.
The first year that this award was presented, NTL Institute was the recipient.
In the 1980’s, the times began to change for NTL in
Bethel. Bill Clough had become Gould
Academy’s new headmaster and Dr. Harry “Dutch” Dresser, his assistant. The academy planned for a summer school on
campus and passed the word to NTL. In
1979 Richard Rasor saved The Bethel Inn from oblivion when he became the new
owner. Looking to at first shore-up the
inn’s creaks and groans then modernize its facilities, Rasor worked out a deal
with NTL for off-season (spring and fall) labs based at the inn and a contract
to hold summer labs in a new conference center to be built by the inn. In the 1980’s, nearly one-third of the inn’s
summer guests were NTL participants.
Every innkeeper in town competed mightily for NTL guests.
During this period Nancie Coan was NTL’s Bethel
Administrator. I mention this because by
the 1980’s keeping up with NTL’s summer requirements had become a very
demanding job. From both a chamber of
commerce experience and a Bethel Inn experience I can say that NTL really did
dominate Bethel summer business activity. A lot of tracking of people and
coordination of lodging facilities was required.
Dick Rasor and his architect, Larry Litchfield from New
York, came up with a daring plan to build a new complex of modern guest rooms,
recreational facilities with an indoor swimming pool and a conference center –
all under one roof. This became Plan A.
Almost as soon as rumor’s of the new project hit Broad Street, the
“Victorian militia” mustered against it.
The old guard and the town planning board must not have been party to
the 1957 agreement which came from the joint committee of NTL and Bethel people
that Bethel needed to show signs of being progressive. The Bethel Inn had
already started taking reservations for the twelve new rooms when the inn’s
“Titanic” hit its Victorian iceberg.
Larry Litchfield came up with Plan B which was the conference center
building that exists (2006) on real estate joined by the Bethel Library,
Northeast Bank and the Bethel Historical Society. When the new conference center opened in the
last half of the 1980’s NTL was already making preparations to expand their
center on the south end of Broad Street, the former Gehring homestead.
In the 1990’s NTL terrified the Bethel tourist community by
whispering that NTL was planning to withdraw from Bethel. Gasps of dismay were heard all over
town. Meetings were held, old IOU’s
waved in the air. Eventually, the
pro-Bethel faction of NTL’s board prevailed and NTL continued its Bethel
presence. As the 21st Century began things were calm from the Bethel
perspective at first. In 2005, new
tremors of NTL rumor floated down Main Street.
NTL spokespeople, noting that the cost of maintaining permanent
facilities in Bethel and the concept of keeping real estate was counter to the
idea of running T-groups. As this is
being posted, Bethel’s tourist community expects to see a new form of NTL
presence in the town taking shape in the post 2006 period.
Comment: Lewin’s
choice of Gould Academy’s campus in Bethel did not come from his being familiar
with the town but from a recommendation from a former Gould headmaster. The story is that as a result of phone calls
from Boston it was learned that Gould Academy’s facilities were available in
the summer and besides being available, the rent would be “cheap”.