Lessons learned

Following his retirement from Moorestown Friends School (MFS), Larry Van Meter spent five years as the president and CEO of the Forman Acton Educational Foundation in Salem.

The Acton Foundation provides college scholarships and funds college savings accounts for the children of the municipality, a disadvantaged Delaware River community 15 miles southeast of Wilmington.

“All three (Van Meter and his two sisters) of us spent 14 years a piece at Moorestown Friends, starting in pre-K and going through 12th grade,” Van Meter recalled. “It was a wonderful experience and I loved the place. And if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have returned nearly 35 years later to be the head of school for what turned out to be 17 years, longer than my number of years as a student.

“Ultimately, I spent 31 years, at least during the school year, every weekday being on that campus,” he added, “and it was great. It’s a wonderful school, and I think it’s even better now than it was in the ’50s and ’60s, although it was great then.”

Van Meter served from 2001 to 2018 as the head of Moorestown Friends School, his alma mater, and from 1994 to 2001 as the head of Darrow School, a small boarding institution in the Berkshires. He has a bachelor’s in history from Hamilton College, an associate of applied science degree in woodworking and furniture design from the School for American Crafts at Rochester Institute of Technology and an MBA from Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School of Business.

Early in his career, Van Meter worked for the Vermont Department of Forests & Parks, the University of Vermont’s Proctor Maple Research Farm and the U.S. Forest Service in Durham, New Hampshire. From 1981 to 1986, he was executive director of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC) in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, the 20,000-member umbrella organization for the 31 trail clubs that maintain and protect the Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia.

Van Meter also served as director of advancement at George School in Pennsylvania from 1989 to 1994. But in 1963, when he was 13, the Moorestown Mall was a new, 100-store behemoth as he described it, located on former peach orchards on the outskirts of his hometown.

“There was a lot of excitement about the mall opening and the two anchor stores where Boscov’s is now (was) a Gimbel’s store, and at the far end – which has gone through many transformations – most recently when it was only one store, it was a Macy’s,” Van Meter recounted. “That opened as a John Wanamaker’s store.

“So, two of the flagship department stores in Philadelphia set up as anchors at the Moorestown Mall.”

In between department stores, the mall also had at least a dozen shoe merchants, including Florsheim, Royce, Jarman, Flagg’s, Baker and Hanover, all owned or franchised through the shoe manufacturers themselves. The store windows featured all sorts of men’s footwear: wingtips, brogues, sneakers, desert boots and loafers.

“It was kind of a joke in town that it was the shoe mall,” Van Meter recalled. “There were just an extraordinary number of shoe stores, and then there were some clothing stores that also sold shoes, so it felt like two-thirds of the stores in that space were selling shoes and the others were selling clothes.

“It was not a highly varied set of stores as far as what they offered, but there was a lot of excitement about it.”

Van Meter was weeks away from starting seventh grade when he set his sights on buying a pair of loafers. But his mother explained that he had flat feet and other unspecified foot problems in need of correction. A few years earlier, Carl’s Shoes had opened on Moorestown’s Main Street. The independent store sold footwear that could be modified with corrections – what we would now call prescription orthotics.

It was here that owner Carl Barone would fit Van Meter for a pair of corrective shoes.

“Most of the people going to Carl’s were not buying corrective shoes,” Van Meter remembered. “That was a niche that they had. Most of the customers were seeking high-quality, conservative, well-made shoes …

“The idea at Carl’s was that you bought shoes, and you expected them to last a long time.”

For decades, Van Meter purchased and wore shoes with no corrections. One day in 2012 – as he was jogging in Maine – Van Meter experienced a brief but stabbing pain in his right foot that yielded to a lingering tenderness and general discomfort. It turned out that he had torn his posterior tibialis tendon (PTT), a rare injury. The PTT is one of the longest tendons in the human body, and it plays a major role in all the mechanical operations of the foot and ankle.

The tear was so bad that Van Meter underwent a surgical procedure that involved transferring the less important medial tendon in the same foot to replace the torn one. He spent three days in the hospital, a month in bed and had to wear a massive orthopedic boot that for nearly six months precluded driving and many other activities.

“It was a long recovery, altogether about five or six months before I could drive, and I couldn’t really walk normally or do any hiking for another six or 12 months …” Van Meter recounted. “I had to do physical therapy every day for 20 or 30 minutes to make sure that all this stuff would continue to work as it should, but I’m so glad I did it, because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to continue and complete the Appalachian Trail or do a lot of other things that I love doing.”

Now Van Meter only wears corrective shoes and he’s doing just fine. He was even able to complete the final 600 miles of the trail with custom-made orthotics in big, leather hiking boots that look and feel like the ones he had to wear as a kid.

“The orthotic inserts (in Van Meter’s hiking boots) have enabled me, in effect, to replicate the corrections that Carl put in those shoes back when I was a little kid,” he noted, “and so I had the proper support, and that enabled me, despite this elaborate surgery on my foot and ankle, to, without particular difficulty, finish the Appalachian Trail, the last 600 miles or so, and to continue to be very active.”