The Silver Tray

The Silver Tray tells the story of Frank Stanton, who is completing his third year as headmaster of Hammond Academy, a small boarding and day school for boys in Tennessee. The setting is the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the headmaster, an alumnus of the school, wants to make some changes in the school's direction, changes that other good schools are making and have implemented. The board of trustees is composed of elderly men who consider the changes radical, and the story involves students, faculty members, and their wives, trustees, administration, townspeople, the traditions of the school, tacit segregation, and the mean, nasty things that can be perpetrated within the confines of such a school.