Why Hockaday Girls Are Different And whether that’s good or bad. In my small East Texas town in the late ’50s, admitting that you went to Hockaday was just a cut above confessing that you had done time at the State School for Girls in Gainesville. From my provincial 15-year-old perspective in those tranquil days before court-ordered integration and busing, the only plausible reason for sending a girl away to boarding school was her delinquent behavior. Some boys in our town from wealthy families went east to Exeter or Andover for academic or social reasons, and other males with less promise got “straightened out” at Allen Academy, Peacock, or TMI; but the unruliest girl I ever knew was dispatched to Hockaday. And when she came home at Christmas and crashed a party at the Country Club, chain-smoked, drank Scotch on the rocks and performed a totally uninhibited dirty bop in front of the chaperones, we thought she was a wondrously sophisticated creature.