One of the most exciting and enterprising events of the time took place in the year 1949–1950, when hockey coach and math teacher Len Sargent decided to build an artificial ice rink for Taft. After traveling the country on a fund-raising trip that summer, he returned to Watertown and mobilized over 3,000 hours of help from students and faculty to construct the first such facility in the independent-school world. After the structure was given a roof, the resulting quantum leap in practice time helped to ensure Taft’s dominance in the prep school ice hockey league for more than a decade.

There were many other additions and improvements to the campus during the Cruikshank years, including the purchase of faculty houses, construction of an up-to-the-minute science center in 1960, a language lab, the “New Gym”, and the interior rehabilitation of several of the main buildings.

In 1961, he hired a 20-year-old teacher named Lance Odden, fresh out of Princeton, who began offering a course in Far Eastern History. Until then, history offerings had been confined to the traditional categories of Ancient, Medieval, European and American. Russian History and Asian Studies were soon added.