The Tiffany Room at the Seventh Regiment Armory was resplendent last week with archival photos, ephemera, and memorabilia of the Knickerbocker Greys, the nonprofit leadership corps that teaches children about the armed forces. Now celebrating their 125th year, the Greys boast alumni such as Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr., Laurance Rockefeller, Averell Harriman, and John Lindsay.

The corps gives young men and women “a series of experiences that develops leadership, empathy, and character,” the commandant of the Knickerbocker Greys, David Menegon, a major in the United States Army Reserve, said.

The commandant of the Veteran Corps of Artillery, State of New York, David Ramsay, said, “It preserves a wonderful tradition of introducing young men and women into leadership roles. While it has a military flavor, it is not a military organization. It’s really an organization to build leadership, responsibility, discipline, and interest in their community.”

The young men and women of the corps range from ages 6 to 17.There are more than 40 cadets presently in the group; they meet twice a week. They begin with learning drills and a ceremony, and as they get older, they teach the younger children.

“Character is not learned from a book; it is learned from role models, and passed on from mouth to ear,” Major Menegon, a marketing executive at Xerox Corporation who was awarded two bronze stars for service in Iraq, said. More than 7,000 cadets have gone through the program, many of them becoming prominent figures in the community.

The Knickerbocker Greys were created in 1881 by Mrs. Edward Curtis to train her son and others who weren’t in military school. Her husband was a famous Civil War surgeon and one of the doctors who performed the autopsy on President Lincoln.

“I know that the Greys were a formative experience in my life, and I believe that is true of many veterans,” the president of the Knickerbocker Greys Veterans Corps, Stephen Houghton, said last Monday evening to those assembled. When the corps of cadets was founded, he said, President Garfield was White House. “The car and airplane had not yet been invented and the events that have shaped our world – the two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War – were still in the future. 1881 was the year of the fight at the O.K. Corral and of the surrender of Chief Sitting Bull.”

Council Member Dan Garodnick was on hand, as was the president of the board of the Knickerbocker Greys, Mrs. Richard Bright, and a former sergeant major in the corps, Joseph Sahid, now at the University of Pennsylvania. Sandra Packard, who was board president from 1981 to 1993, was in attendance. It was in the mid-1980s that Alexandra Utterman, also present, became the first girl admitted to the Knickerbocker Greys.

Also present were George Barker, a major general in the Army Reserve; John Mauk Hilliard, who is active in hereditary societies, including the St. Andrew’s Society and St. Nicholas Society; the president of the St. George’s Society of New York, Natalie Pray; and the executive director of Health Advocates for Older People, Nancy Houghton.A special guest was Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks Jr., whose late husband was a cadet in 1920 at age 12.

Nearby was Daisy Sinclair, who was a president of the group in the 1990s. “It made a big difference in my children’s lives,” she said. Her two boys, Duncan and Crick, went through the program and both became cadet colonels, the highest rank. One is pursuing a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins in mathematics. “It was that precision drilling that did it,” she said, tongue in cheek. She said it instills “all the good things you’d like to see in a young person: manners, discipline, neatness, and respect.”

The Greys will participate at the St. George’s Society ball tomorrow, and the commemoration of the George Washington inaugural on April 30 on Wall Street.

In his remarks, Mr. Houghton said cadet’s uniforms are hard to replace, and called on any veteran who still has his old uniform to donate it to the corps.

He concluded, “If you would all join me in raising your glasses to the Greys, to our men and women overseas, and most of all to the republic!”

gshapiro@nysun.com