National Training Lab staff including Macky Chapman, on left and Tom Remington, center, in Bethel circa 1968. Submitted photo

BETHEL — Psychologist Kurt Lewin, one of the modern pioneers of social, organizational and applied psychology,  and the founder of the National Training Labs (NTL) chose Bethel to administer his training, but died of a heart attack before his arrival in 1946.

Despite Lewin’s sudden death, the work continued as planned starting in 1947. NTL eventually moved into the Gehring House, called “The Founder’s House” in 1955.

The buildings behind Gehring House were called The Clusters. They used other spaces, too, like at Gould Academy and the Norseman at Sunday River. Leland Bradford, Ronald Lippitt, and Kenneth Benne continued the work of Lewin, returning with each year with the Seashores, who owned the Bingham House, and the Weirs.

According to NTL literature, Bethel was a cultural island in the mountains of Maine. Lewin chose this place as his training site because he believed that, “change could more readily occur if the learning happened some distance from the participant’s home environment.”

For several Bethel residents Lewin’s life work which continued in his absence, left a lasting impression on them, despite living here and “not having travelled some distance.” While it was simply a job for some, it was a life-changing experience for others like Janet Willie of Bethel.

NTL was strange and otherworldly to many locals who saw people walking down Broad and Main streets blindfolded with a guide. Others saw participants on the lawn curled in a fetal position. Sometimes the visitors that locals encountered from faraway places did not have to be held accountable to anyone, so were rude, or partied too much. Some of the organization’s methods went too far and were inappropriate as was Tom Remington’s experience.

Tom Remington

It was the summer of 1967 when 16-year old Tom Remington worked in the kitchen at NTL. “I was shy and scared to death they might speak to me,” he said of his thirty female co-workers. He worked with locals Macky (Cummings) Chapman, Betsey (Fox) York and and Copper Coolidge. Sally Rice and Pam Douglas (both now deceased) worked there, too,  He said the first summer was fun. The following summer was not.

Tasked as NTL’s audio visual technician the second summer, Remington ran hundreds of Wallensach tape recorders (the creme de le creme”) at multiple labs. He said, “The job was good and I learned a lot from it, but I was exposed to a lot of things I shouldn’t have been exposed to,” he said, “but I won’t go into details.”

He didn’t tell his parents what he saw behind the video camera,  “because they were religious, church-going people and they’d probably make me quit and I couldn’t do that. I needed the money. So I just dealt with it, tried to laugh it off.”

NTL gave him a car to schlep around all the audio-visual equipment. One day he was driving behind the Gehring House. “There was a lawn that went down and morphed into the golf course. There were  30 or 40 people out there bollicky, bare-assed. Most of them were covered in body paints. It was funny as hell at the time. But it really isn’t funny when you stop and think about the things they were trying to do…”

Remington said when NTL was in town, “they would take over everything. They would take over what few restaurants we had. They would buy out the stores. I mean this was good for the businesses. They were always walking between the conference center and Gould Academy in groups of six to 20 people right down the middle of the street. You would toot the horn. They wouldn’t get out of the way. They were in their own world and that was it.”

The strong connection between NTL and Gould ruffled feathers, too, he said. Around that time local, non-paying students were asked to leave Gould’s campus and go to Telstar. At the time he was a junior at Gould and couldn’t finish high school where he’d started.

Macky Chapman

Chapman said she was 15 when she got a job washing dishes and waiting tables (with Tom Remington) for the summer at the NTL house (behind the Gehring House). She said she was too shy and sensitive to work where they had the labs.

She remembers that Charlie Seashores [one of NTL’s leaders] held a meeting for the staff to explain how they needed to adjust to NTL’s idiosyncrasies. For instance,  “They would play volleyball without the ball. They were very far out.” One group, she said, were not allowed to talk for the entire week.

When a group of participants was leaving for the week they held hands and walked around the staff standing [somewhat awkwardly] in the center,  as a way to thank them.

“I was a teenager, it was enlightening. [It was] Flower Power. The conferences were very intense. A lot [of the participants] were hippies, but there was a variety of people from all walks of life, including from overseas.” Chapman worked with a girl from India and another from Kansas who she became close with.

Bridget Remington

Bridget Remington was a young single mother “not making hardly any money” when she returned for her second stint working at the National Training Labs. “It was one of the best things that happened to me,” said Remington of her interaction with a couple participating in the NTL programs. They told her, “every year on our anniversary we like to do something nice for somebody else because we feel we’ve been blessed. This year we decided we are going to give you $100.”

“Now that I’m old and I have money, I could do that for anybody, anytime. At the time it was a big deal. I didn’t have an extra hundred dollars to do anything. I could dream, what will I do with this? Or am I just going to get more diapers?”

Bill Allen

Bill Allen, of Florida, father of Bethel residents, Bill Allen and Laura Allen Tummon was a participant in a seminar in the mid- 1980’s at NTL in Bethel. He said the week-long seminar used the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and “was delivered by Myers and Briggs, the two people that invented it!”

Allen said he went on to use the Myers-Briggs testing extensively in his consulting business. “It is a very useful tool in many ways. including doing some counseling with couples.” He said when you see a couple on two sides of the [Myers-Briggs] spectrum you know there is going to be trouble.

At the second seminar he attended he was placed in a room with about 15 people. “It is meant for you to get feedback from the ‘T-group’, pioneered by National Training Laboratories.” Allen said the administrator would come in the room for just a few minutes to welcome everyone. “‘I hope you have a good experience here,’ he’d say, leaving 15 people sitting there, it’s amazing what happens.”

Allen said he’ll never forget some of the dynamics including an interaction where a man lit a cigarette. When a woman in the group objected saying she had asthma and allergies, his response was, ‘That’s your problem, not mine.’  Said Allen,  “All kinds of things come from these group interactions. You get all kinds of people. People who are strongly introverted or strongly extroverted. They will drive each other nuts. The spontaneous people versus the planned people. “What you’re doing is getting feedback by 14 other people on your behavior.”

Allen said it was very valuable, because it’s not easy to get feedback from other people. “Even your friends aren’t going to tell you stuff that might be negative.”

He said he remembers that NTL had a warning to people undergoing therapy not to sign up for T-groups because they would likely not be able to handle the intensity.

At age 94 and more than twenty years following his retirement, Allen still remembers his Myers-Briggs score,  “ENTJ. [Meaning] I’m more extroverted than introverted; and I’m more thinking then feeling; and I’m more organized than spontaneous,” he said.

To be continued…