22)   Granville Public Schools

Walking to a Rural School in the 1920s

(Roberta Whitehead)

[ speaking of her husband, Henry Whitehead ]  There used to be a school on practically every crossroad.  . . . Henry’s father and grandfather went to school by just walking across the fields and there’d be another mama waiting over there for them.  So if he was cold, she’d dried him off and give him warm clothes, and then he’d go on over here to Granview Road to school.  And the teacher was the best mama.  She had no family of her own. 

All 12 Grades in One School Building  (1920s & 1930s)

(Henry Whitehead)

I went to Union [ Township ] School, the same building that is there right now [ on route 37 south of Granville ].  It was all twelve grades at that time (1920s & 1930s).  There were seven students in my class and that was about average.  For the lower grades, one teacher would have three grades in one room.  The high school was on the top floor and there were two teachers for the high school and a superintendent who taught a class or two.  The high school classes included English and Latin.  And they must have had some of the sciences because they had a laboratory.

Elementary School in the 1920s

(Ruth Sipe)

One of my main memories about elementary school was marching in to Sousa’s marches.  They had a Victrola set up in the central hall playing Stars and Strips Forever.  We were segregated by sex – to march in and march out.  The girls went in the south entrance and the boys went in the north entrance.  We weren’t segregated in class though, just on playground.  There was a boys’ side of the playground and a girls’ side of the playground.  And in later years when I went down there for some reason I felt strange, I felt guilty when I went up the stairs on the boys’ side!

School Buildings, Playgrounds, and Discipline  (1920s -1930s)

(Ed Deeds)

When I was a kid, there were only two school buildings.  The high school (grades 7-12) was on the corner of Granger and Broadway.  The grade school (grades K-6) was a big brick two-story building on Granger Street, right opposite Summit Street, which is where the grade school is now.  It was on a fairly small lot, probably went back from the street only about a hundred yards.  There was a small playground, sort of gravel-paved playground, behind the building but very small. 

Then in 1933 my father, who was head of the street and grounds committee of the town, got a bunch of people together to expand the playground area.  There were farmers with horse teams and scoops that they would drag behind, and there were some tractors with blades on them; and people with just picks and shovels.  Together they leveled all that ground behind our original small playground all the way over to the golf course and made a big playground area there.  Then later on the part next to the golf course was improved and became the football field (Harmon Burke Field).  Now I think that’s all taken up with the new grade school and the place where the school busses come.

So we had just those two buildings and the enrollment was such that the classes averaged maybe 45-50 students.  And all 45 or so kids would essentially be in one room at the same time.  People are amazed now because they consider even 25 children in a room is too many for a teacher to keep order and stuff.  But back then, the children knew that if they got a note sent home from the principal, they were in big trouble at home.  So there wasn’t any problem with discipline there.  Those teachers didn’t brook any nonsense.  Some of them would just look at you and you would shrivel up!

Children today have short attention spans and pretty much have to be entertained with new things all the time.  We were just told to memorize stuff – we were used to trivia, I guess, but we all did it.  Now, I think, they would consider that terrible teaching.

We didn’t have lunch at school and I lived pretty much across town.  So you took about half the time going and coming.

Harvey Williams, Math Teacher and Football Coach  (1920s)

(Ed Deeds)

The main thing I remember about Granville High School was Harvey Williams.  He was the coach of the football team, but more importantly, he was a wonderful math teacher.  He taught geometry and algebra.  Forbes Wiley, a Denison professor who was by far the best math teacher I ever had, said that Harvey was the best high school math teacher in the state of Ohio.  And I can well believe it. 

Harvey was great for the good students, but terrible for the slower students.  The girls were terrified of him.  He didn’t mince words or waste time; he just gave a wonderful math preparation.  And it turned out that a lot of his math students at Granville High School went on to Denison and ended up getting Ph Ds, largely because of the really good math training we got at both Granville High School and at Denison.

Riding the School Bus in the 1930s

(Gib Blackstone)

In 1936, I started school.  Oscar Lantz owned the school bus.  And Mr. Spray owned one, and Mr. Conner owned one.  And Williams owned one.  I think there was six of them that covered the whole area.  All seats were along the sides and one seat down the middle of the bus.  At that time all school buses were owned by the people that drove them, until late 1940s when the school board took them over.

High School Teachers in the 1960s

(Eric Jones)

One of my favorite high school teachers was Irv “Gunner” Chotlos.  He was the history teacher and he started a golf team up in 1962 that included among others, Rod McPeek and I.  And we’re still proud seeing the high school golf team reach state championship level here in the last couple of years.  We were never that good but we weren’t too bad either.  And so I kind of feel like that was a legacy of the team that we started up in ’62.  Our coach, Gunner Chotlos was one of the worst golfers that I’ve ever known but he was great at putting together a team and keeping us organized and it was a good growing up experience. 

The football coach, Don Miller, was quite a character and he taught biology.  He was one of the more popular teachers in the school.  Fanchion Lewis, who gave part of the property to the village for a park on Jones Road, was one of my favorite teachers.  She was the librarian and taught history and political science.

Noon Siren Terrifies New Student

(Fred Abraham)

Students at the old high school [ 130 N. Granger St. ] used to walk uptown for lunch.  But when I first moved here, it was pretty scary.  I remember walking down the street the first day that I was in school.  Didn’t know anybody.  I’m walking uptown and I’m walking behind the stores in the alley up there and, you know, trying to be kind of cool.  It’s noon, and here goes that siren.  Scared me to death!  I’m down on the ground.  I’m flat down on the ground looking around.  “What the heck was that!”  I’m right THERE, you know.

[In 1971] we moved to the new high school, which was on New Burg Street.  And I was the first person to graduate out of there.  I was the first person because of my initials of my last name.

A “C” in Granville is Worth a Lot

(Greg Dixon)

I think we had good education.  And I was not an over-achiever in Granville.  The way I put it to my parents, “I didn’t want to drag you to all those honors things.  You’re busy people!”  But actually, I didn’t apply myself.  It was always the “Has Potential” kind of thing.

But I knew it was a good school system when I went to college and in my packet the first day it said I needed to take a remedial English course, because of my grades.  I probably had a nice solid “C”.  So I went to the class and took the pre-test in this little course and the prof pulled me aside after she had graded them and said, “You don’t have to take this class if you don’t want.  You did well on this.”.  So it turns out my “C” was worth a good deal more than some other people’s probably “B’s” and “A’s” and I ended up writing papers for people that had never written a paper before.  I mean it was extra money and stuff!  I knew that despite all my efforts to the contrary, I’d learned quite a bit in Granville and was ahead of some of these other people from other schools.

Support for the Schools

(Fred Karaffa)

I spent eight years on the school board in Granville and felt that that was a real privilege because the tremendous community support for the board.  We don’t fail levies in Granville school district; we pass levies here, even with the current controversies going on with.  I think Granville as a community, since I’ve been here, which is now thirty-seven and a half years, has always been concerned with its children and especially their education and has gone the full mile in making sure they have more than adequate educational experiences before they leave high school.

At a Small School, You Could Do It All

(Laurie Kissack)

Our son got so much from the Granville school system – it was a wonderful, wonderful experience for him.  And he went off to college, took classes, and called us saying, “Oh, I learned all that in freshman biology in Granville High School.  So now I’m tutoring all the kids on my floor.” 

He benefited tremendously from the Granville music program and he was in all the plays and he was in all the athletics and we asked him, “Would you’ve wanted to go a bigger high school?”  And he said, “Not on your life, because I got it all.  If I’d gone to a bigger high school I couldn’t have been in the plays and played baseball and wrestled, and played basketball and played football and sang in the choir.  I would have had to pick one thing and do just it.  But at Granville I got to do it all.” 

And his friends come here and they say, “In Granville you walk down the street and there’s your third grade teacher and she gives you a hug!”  They love it.  They think it’s the coolest thing ever!

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