March 26, 2006
The
By Donald G. Bennett
The National Training Laboratories, later NTL Institute for Applied
Behavioral Science, arrived in
“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.
Circulating through the Boston academic community, Lewin probably heard
about
Bethel from one of his many new colleagues.
NTL’s 21st Century Bethel HQ The former home of Dr. John G.
Gehring, founder of the Gehring Clinic to treat nervous exhaustion, seems
a fitting symbolic “mother ship” for
a group development organization. NTL (National Training
Laboratories) was given birth in Bethel at Gould Academy in 1947.
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 Bethelite – 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,
Recently an interesting meeting
was held at
It was
agreed that
Discussion
about “what does
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 “
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
Note that during this period,
NTL’s Bethel Administrator was a Miss Nancy Co An. 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
Dick Rasor and his architect,
Larry Litchfield from
In the 1990’s NTL terrified the