Forum Flashbacks: Oct. 5-11
FORUM FILE PHOTO
50 YEARS AGO: Shown is part of the North Nodaway 4-H Club, Hopkins. Front row, Lyle Blanchard, Mike Blackford, Chris Spalding, Paula Lewis, Cindy Blackford, Laurie Ingle, Jeannie Lewis, Laura Turner; back row, Mrs. Don Blackford, Steve Turner, Dave Blackford, Allen Blanchard and Nancy Blackford.
5 years ago
Three Nodaway-Holt senior girls broke ground Friday afternoon at the site of the new high school.
Just behind the current elementary and high school building, high school students gathered to celebrate the beginning of the new project with R-VII Board of Education members and Superintendent Jeff Blackford.
Jadin Messner, senior student council president along with National Honor Society Co-Presidents Breanna Day and Tillie Stanton, who also is senior class president, used golden shovels to dig into the new project.
Blackford thanked members of the Board of Education, the facility committee, the staff, students and the community.
The community voted in April to extend the $4.2898 tax levy to make the investment into the school district.
“All these groups are committed to one thing and that’s providing a quality education today for a successful tomorrow,” Blackford said. “What that does is, it ensures not only that the students of today get that education to compete in the real world, but also in the future.
“We are about to make history,” he continued. “Where you are standing there is going to be a building. Remember this the rest of your lives.”
50 years ago
More than 2,000 teachers and administrators attending the annual Northwest District Teachers Association meeting on the Northwest State University campus, Friday, heard a potpourri of advice and information from three speakers who addressed the assemblage during the day-long meeting in MSU’s Lamkin Gymnasium.
The messages ranged from author-lecturer Alex Haley’s discussion of a new book he is completing, to Dr. Donald O. Clifton, Lincoln, Neb., education researchist’s charge to the educators to help their students grow to completeness, and to Lawrence University’s Dr. George Walter’s extolling of the arts as the way to give students understanding and a challenge in developing their own styles.
Dr. Walter, former star fullback at Lawrence University and former coach, gave an animated lecture on the benefits of the arts in education. In a lecture filled with recitations of poetry, which he acted out as well as recited, Dr. Walter said, “The arts are a brilliant short cut way of saying a whole book full.”
He made a point in saying that “Casey,” the one in “Casey at the Bat,” will probably be better-remembered down through the years than will Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, or even Babe Ruth “because he had a poet for a press agent.”
100 years ago
TEACHER MUST HAVE VISION OF FUTURE SAYS GOV. HYDE
Editor’s note: 1,500 teachers from the Northwest Missouri Teachers Association gathered in Maryville for the organization’s sixth annual meeting, opening with an address from Gov. Arthur Hyde.
Asserting that Missouri has a greater reputation for mules than she has for education, Governor Arthur M. Hyde, Missouri’s chief executive, launched an appeal for a greater educational movement on the part of the people of the state, in his address before an overflow crowd in the auditorium of the State Teachers College this afternoon.
The Governor was introduced by Uel W. Lamkin, president of the Northwest Missouri State Teachers College, who said, “There have been few men in public and political life who have stood as square on the proposition of education than has his excellency, Governor Arthur M. Hyde. Therefore, it is with great pleasure that I present his honor to this body of teachers of Northwest Missouri.”
Long before the Governor entered the auditorium, all of the seats were occupied and the crowd was lined along the side of the huge room. The balcony was opened to the public and extra seats were placed in the aisles, and a part of the surplus crowd was accommodated in this manner. Several hundred people were unable to get within hearing distance of the speaker, but they remained in the halls of the College building. …
“I am always grateful to be introduced as a friend of education,” the Governor began. “I sometimes fear that Missouri has a greater reputation for mules than she has for education. Because of that, during my tenure of office I have attempted to carry on measures for the betterment of education.
“Why is it that a state can produce such great men as Mark Twain, Crowder, Eugene Fields(sic), John J. Pershing and many more and still be noted only for its mules and proposed good road plan?
The fact means more to me than all the good roads Missouri intends to build and all of our mules that in the last two years an increase of an average of 65,000 more boys and girls attended the public schools in the state of Missouri and that we held 19 million more school days.”
