21 April—If I had any respect for the Nobel Peace Prize, I’d nominate myself for it. But how can anyone respect a prize that in 2007 was awarded to the charlatan Albert Gore Jr for what the Nobel website calls “his tireless campaign to put the climate crisis on the political agenda”? And, as if that’s not enough, Barack Obama got it in 2009 for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Give me a break.

So I won’t nominate myself for the Nobel Peace Prize. And, alluding to Lyndon Johnson’s grammatically correct assertion in 1968, I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination for that silly prize, though the money would be useful.

Why, you may ask, should I even be thinking of a peace prize? Easy. I have just come up with the perfect solution to the Bantam School problem. I’d call it the final solution, but that has unpleasant connotations. My solution would make (a) everybody happy or (b) nobody happy. But it just might bring peace.

Here it is. It’s so simple and obvious, it should have shot out of my senescent brain long ago. Other brilliant suggestions did, through the decades, mind you, but shortsighted selectmen chose to ignore them. To the detriment of the town, of course.

Move the Bantam School. That’s right, move the Bantam School. Where? It’s obvious: to the lot that currently contains the town office building. Am I crazy, as I asked Sam Olmstead the other night? Well, I asked him if he was crazy. Anything but. And my solution would answer the crazy question in the negative for both of us.

Now, we couldn’t just move a building like the Bantam School. It would have to be taken apart—very carefully, mind you—and stored until it was reassembled. That’s where Chandler Saint comes in. Remember when Chandler did that with the Beecher house, which had been on the parasitic Forman School campus? Well, he took it apart anyway; it’s still waiting to be reassembled. Sadly, an attempt to sell it on eBay didn’t get too far.

Ooh ooh ooh, as NYPD Officer Gunther Toody would have said, another idea about the Bantam School. But not for now.

So we take down the building, which leaves a lot in Bantam that can remain vacant until the nice people of that borough decide to cooperate with the town. At least the town wouldn’t have to waste big bucks maintaining a useless white elephant. With apologies to white elephants.

But now you’re thinking, how can the sprawling Bantam School fit on the long and narrow Town Hall lot? No problem. And we have the brilliance of the Bauhaus and Marcel Breuer’s foresight to thank for that. By its very nature, Bauhaus architecture is a series of boxes—a cheese box attached to a shoe box attached to an orange crate and so on. Pre-Lego.

Thus, when the Bantam School is reassembled on the Town Hall land, it could be done in a configuration appropriate to that long and narrow lot. And with improvements to bring it up to code, of course. Sure, some ad hoc fiddling will be required, but that’s nothing to be concerned about. A decision could be made at a later date whether to keep the current town office building, demolish it, sell it to Russ Barton, or make it into a boutique hotel.

My plan would keep just about everybody happy, from the Breuer bunch; to the town-hall-in-the-middle-of-town proponents; to the nice people of Bantam, who will easily find something else to fight about; to the taxpayers, who will find a way to cut the cost to such an extent that the reconstituted building will be in as lousy shape as it was in back in Bantam.

Proponents of a dog park behind Town Hall would have to look elsewhere, of course, but they could start by looking at the newly vacant ten-acre site in Bantam.

One hurdle could be wresting a certificate of appropriateness out of the Borough of Litchfield Hysteric District Commission. But that antisocial juggernaut should be out of business by the time the Bantam School becomes the Litchfield Town Hall . . .