School portraits / A faculty childhood, some decades back
The Faculty Kids Took the Tunnel. Their Parents Were Waiting.
Doug Mariboe grew up on the Peddie School campus, the son of a history teacher and the school nurse. His retirement profile includes one story about steam tunnels that every parent should read.
Doug Mariboe, Peddie class of 1969, has lived or worked at the school in Hightstown, New Jersey, for more than seventy years. When he retired, the school's magazine profiled him. His father was a beloved history teacher and his mother the school nurse, and he grew up on campus from the age of six months, living in dorms and faculty houses. The gym and the athletic fields were his entertainment while his parents worked.
He was always there after school, he said, shooting baskets and watching wrestling practice. "They always knew where I was."
They always knew where he was. That is either the best or the worst sentence a child can hear, depending on the child's plans for the afternoon.
Under the campus ran steam pipe tunnels. The profile includes his memory of them. The faculty kids used to go into the tunnels that started at one building and follow them to the power house. One time a group of them did it, and "when we got to the end, we opened it up, and our parents were waiting there for us."
That, he said, was the last time they traveled in the tunnel.
The children went under the campus for adventure. The parents simply walked to where the tunnel came out. This is the entire art of parenting, and it is not taught anywhere.
He went on to become Peddie's great statistician. As a student, an English teacher nicknamed him "Stats." He kept the football team's official statistics, managed the basketball team's scorebook, and phoned results in to The New York Times, for $1.50 a game if he made the deadline. He returned to the school after college and kept covering its teams for decades.
Last month the middle one and two friends told us they were going to "the woods," which is a strip of trees behind the elementary school about four hundred yards from our house. There is only one path in and out. My wife looked at me. I looked at her.
Forty minutes later, three boys walked out of the woods and found two parents sitting on the curb at the end of the path with a bag of pretzels. Nobody said anything. The middle one sat down next to me, took a pretzel and said, "How did you know?" I said we didn't. We just knew where they'd come out.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Peddie Chronicle: Doug Mariboe retires peddie.org
- Peddie traditions: Battle of the Heads peddie.org
- Peddie school calendar, May 2026 peddie.org
- Peddie public family and alumni reviews niche.com