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The History of Wentworth
LTC James Ahrens has written "The History of Wentworth, Volume II: 1947-2000". It is being provided to you via the web site. A new chapter will be added daily until the entire compilation is published on the website.
INTRODUCTION
Volume I of this history was essentially completed in academic Year 1946-1947. Reverend Raymond W. Settle finished his research in that year and spent the next two years writing, editing, and preparing it for publication in 1950.
Significant events were to occur in the life of the academy during the next few years to include its conversion to a not-for-profit institution, the outbreak of the Korean Conflict and the school’s response to it, and completion of the WW II Memorial Chapel. This building serves as a memorial to those that served and died in both WW II and the Korean Conflict.
This volume will detail the major events of the school years starting with 1946-1947 through 1999-2000. It will examine the major events that occur in the life of the academy in the order that they occur down through the years. Key leaders and family died or moved on and the academy continued, none-the-less, adapting to change.
A history of Wentworth must also include the expansion of the school during the 1960s, responding to the outbreak of the Vietnam Conflict, and the reduction in student numbers that followed the end of the draft in the 1970s. The institution has struggled with the effects of that reduction in numbers ever since.
The 1980s were a period of struggle and retrenchment and the 1990s saw three major changes in leadership as the day-to-day influence of the Sellers family on the school disappeared.
This volume will end with a description of the academy as it enters the 21st Century with a more stable financial footing following the creation of the Wentworth Foundation to endow the future of the Academy.
CHAPTER ONE
Preparation for Mid-Century
1946-47
This school year began at what was considered capacity enrollment for Wentworth. There were approximately 400 cadets enrolled, 375 boarding students, and twenty-five day students. In that year, thirty states were represented in the student body, and fifteen came from overseas.
Dallas C. Buck, former instructor at Wentworth for seventeen years, was reappointed to the faculty and named dean of instruction and director of the junior college division upon his return from a year teaching in a private school in Arizona. He had previously assisted the dean of the academy, Maj. Leon Ungles.
Major Ungles became assistant to Col. Lester B. Wikoff in February 1947. This move made it possible to spread the workload at the top level of management. Ungles retained his title of dean but handed over much of his work to Dallas Buck.
Mrs. Beth Hepler became hostess for the academy to supervise social functions and instruct etiquette classes for the next twenty-eight years.
The fund drive for the memorial chapel had exceeded $40,000 and would continue for the rest of the year. The actual groundbreaking for the building took place at commencement, 1947, but construction could not begin until materials became available in the aftermath of the recently ended war. Much of the construction material in the country was being used for building houses for returning veterans.
The junior college began to expand its operations in preparation for the next year. Courses, particularly in business, were reinstituted to meet the needs of the expanding junior college student body that was growing due to the benefits offered returning service personnel under the GI Bill. Wentworth began to interview and hire new faculty to teach these courses in anticipation of further increases in the junior college enrollment.
At the end of the school year Wentworth awarded nine junior college degrees and 105 high school diplomas.
1947-1948
School opened in the fall of 1947 with an increase in numbers of junior college cadets and some new faculty members. Capt. A.R. Park, hired that year, would remain teaching math until his death in 1956.
Major General William Morris Hoge, ’12, came to the school to speak at the Homecoming Banquet. General Hoge was the son of a former owner and principal of Wentworth, William McGuffey Hoge. At that time, the junior Hoge was commander of the U. S. Army Engineer School at Ft. Belvoir, VA, and would eventually rise to the rank of general before his career was over. See p.111-113 in volume I of this history for a treatment of his full background through WW II.
Major Frank Brown, commandant since 1934, celebrated his twenty-fifth year at Wentworth. He became especially well known for his fair administration of discipline to all.
1947 saw Wentworth beat Kemper in the Homecoming game on Thanksgiving Day with a score of 47-0. That earned the team a bid to play in the “Papoose Bowl” in Oklahoma City on the sixth of December against Northeastern Oklahoma A & M College. A special train was chartered to transport the team and fans from the Lexington/Kansas City area to the game.
Bobby Price was one of the leading football players that year. He had scored eighteen of nineteen points for Wentworth during the first half of the 47-0 victory over Kemper. The WMA team fought a long, hard battle against a heavier team and lost the game 32-14. Bobby Price had caught a pass and took it to the sideline on the 10-yard mark and was injured on the play. He collapsed near the bench and never regained consciousness. He had no broken bones but died of head injuries on the following Tuesday.
An estimated two thousand persons gathered in the old fieldhouse, now known as Groendyke Hall, to pay tribute to Bobby Price. He was eulogized as a person who was a fine athlete, who had the best traits of character, and was an outstanding scholar. A memorial to Bobby Price was established and an outstanding football player has been selected each year to receive an award.
Thirty-eight junior college cadets and 163 high school cadets graduated that May. Dr H. Roe Bartle gave the commencement address. Bartle was the chief executive of the Kansas City Boy Scouts and a prominent area youth leader, and later mayor of Kansas City, MO.
In the summer of 1948, John Readecker was hired as head football coach to replace the flamboyant E.P. “Chink” Coleman, who became head coach at Phoenix Junior College that fall after having coached at Wentworth for six years.
1948-1949
School opened for the 69th year with 385 boarding cadets, its established quota. Cadets came from twenty-four states and eleven countries. The junior college enrollment increased substantially and eight new instructors were added to the faculty in subject matter areas of psychology, speech, bookkeeping, and mechanical drawing. The demand created by the GI Bill was still strong.
The country as a whole was being affected by increased tensions in the cold war. 1948 was the year of the Berlin Airlift, and recent ROTC graduates were being called to active duty if they had had less than ninety days of continuous service.
Wentworth began a building project in 1948 to construct a service building north of what is known today as Hickman Hall. The construction project had been delayed for several years due to the high cost of construction materials and labor during the war and afterwards by the competing demands for GI Bill housing construction.
The new building housed dry cleaning equipment in one end and the other end housed the laundry and tailoring shop and pressing equipment as well as a large garage for vehicles and a boiler room in the basement. It became operational in the late fall of 1948. The building served the academy well in the next fifty years. The laundry and cleaning services were contracted out to community vendors and the building was remodeled in the 1990s to become a maintenance building with shops for the various trades.
Two Wentworth graduates, William C. Ashurst. ’16, USMCR, and R. Dinwiddie Groves, ’10, USAR, were promoted to brigadier general. Each promotion was based upon their performance in combat during the recent world war. That brought the total of general officers among WMA graduates to eight. Later that year, another “Wentworthian,” as they called them at that time, was promoted to brigadier general. E.H. Roberts, ’18, U.S. Army Medical Corps, became the ninth general in alumni ranks. General Roberts remained on active duty at Fitzsimmons Army General Hospital in Denver.
The saddest news of 1949 was the death of Mrs. Lucia Rogers Sellers, age 90. She was the widow of Sandford Sellers, who had headed the school from its founding in 1880 until his death in 1838. She had come to Lexington from Waco, Texas, as a bride following her marriage in December 1882. During the next sixty-seven years she took great joy in mothering the cadets and planting and cultivating flowers, trees and shrubbery, creating a garden-like setting on campus.
Mrs. Sellers raised five children, all of whom grew up in the family residence on the second floor of the Administration Building on the Wentworth campus. They were Ovid Rogers Sellers (born 1884), Marcia Sellers Davis (1886), Pauline Sellers Richardson (1889), Sandford Sellers, Jr. (1892), and James McBrayer Sellers (1895). All three of the sons served at various times on the faculty and staff of the academy, two as superintendent. Ovid was an instructor and administrator in the years before the First World War, then headmaster in 1919-21, thereafter serving for more than 30 years as professor and dean at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. Sandford joined the Wentworth faculty in 1913, took time out to serve as an officer in the U.S. Army during World War I, and returned to serve as Wentworth superintendent from 1923 to 1933.
James McBrayer Sellers joined the faculty in 1920 and remained an active presence on campus until his death in 1990. He served as an instructor in mathematics and Latin, as commandant from 1920 to 1928, as superintendent from 1933 to 1960, and as president from 1960 to 1990.
One hundred and forty two cadets graduated in the Class of 1949, forty-nine came from the junior college and ninety-three from the high school. The academy chaplain, Maj. James Stafford brought the cold war home to Wentworth when he, in his baccalaureate address to the graduates said, …two dangers confront us, materialism and communism. Materialism has its place in any system of economics, but man cannot live by bread alone. We must return to the ethical teachings of Christ. Communism is making converts by the millions, simply because the unscrupulous leaders appeal to people who will accept any promise to better their conditions.
These sentiments drove tensions for the next forty years until the breakup of the Soviet Union. Wentworth graduates remained in the thick of the struggle throughout the “Cold War” from the time that it heated up in the summer of 1950.
1949-1950
The 70th year opened with 349 students enrolled for the beginning of school and eleven more expected. Major Dallas Buck became dean and Leon Ungles moved to Columbia, MO, to become director of student affairs at the University of Missouri. Buck came to Wentworth in 1929 and had been assistant dean since 1941. Capt. Frank Thompson succeeded him in the assistant deanship. Capt. Lowell Stagner became assistant to the treasurer and moved up to more administrative duties while continuing to teach geology. Wentworth continued its long tradition of promoting from within to fill its vacancies.
Major Ungles had been at Wentworth since 1935 and had been dean of instruction and administration since 1940. He returned to the campus on September 1, 1950 to take over a position of associate administrator to assist Col. Wikoff with much of the detail of administration.
First Sergeant Weldon W. Perry began his long association with Wentworth when he was assigned to the staff of the military department in the spring of 1950. He returned after retirement from the Army in the 1960s
One hundred and thirty-one students graduated in the 1950 commencement. Fifty-nine from the junior college and seventy-two from the high school met their academic requirements in May and joined the ranks of the alumni.
The first volume of The History of Wentworth, by Rev. Raymond W. Settle, was published and delivered to the campus in the summer. The volume remained available in the quartermaster store well into the 1980s and will be followed by this continuing history of the school.
1950-1951
The Korean Conflict began in June 1950. This was unique in our history to that time in that it was limited in scope, geography, and level of violence. It seemed to have little effect on the campus in Lexington, except for an occasional mention of an alumnus or former staff member being called up for active duty or becoming a casualty. Otherwise, there was little mention of the conflict in The Trumpeter.
The first edition of the school year carried an account of the death of Ray Richards, ’10, an International News Service (INS) reporter on 10 July. He was a veteran correspondent in the Far East. Another issue of the Trumpeter related that Lt. Col. W.G. Gibbons, son of Mrs. Anna P. Gibbons, long-time business teacher, and recruiter at WMA, was now commanding an armored battalion serving with the 7th Infantry Division. The division, along with the 1st Marine Division, constituting X Corps, would land at Inchon in the middle of September. Wentworth graduates were in the thick of another war.
To illustrate how times have changed in fifty years, the December 13, 1950, issue of the Trumpeter carried an article detailing a letter received by Mr. John Carter, principal of the Douglass school in Lexington, from Pfc. Carl January. The article referred to January as “…one of the colored boys who was formerly a waiter in the academy dining hall and is now slugging it out in Korea.” In the years after the Brown v Topeka Board of Education by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954, the Douglass school would disappear along with segregation and references to “colored boys” have become unacceptable in society.
This same conflict will be the first one in which integrated units will fight after President Harry S Truman issued a executive order desegregating the armed forces which took effect before the Korean Conflict broke out.
School opened in September of 1950 with an initial enrollment of 385 and soon peaked at 420, capacity for that era. As usual, students came from a cross-section of twenty-one American states and from ten foreign countries. Twenty-five local students attended that fall.
Col. James McBrayer Sellers, superintendent, suffered a severe heart attack in late August after playing in a tennis tournament. He would spend a month in the Lexington hospital before returning to campus. Col. Sellers returned to very limited duties and appeared in uniform at the office and mess hall in November. Col. Wikoff and Major Ungles filled in for the ailing superintendent for much of the first semester.
Wentworth chartered a special eight-car train to take the entire corps to Kemper for the annual Thanksgiving contest, winning the game 12-0.
Probably the biggest event of this school year was the inauguration of the Wentworth Show in the arena of the Kansas City Municipal Auditorium on February 22. This show attracted approximately four thousand guests. Admission was not charged, but people were admitted with reserved tickets.
The February 28, 1951a issue of the Trumpeter noted that guests came from a twelve state area and included parents, alumni and friends who were welcomed by the master of ceremonies, Col. Lester Wikoff and the superintendent, Col. J. M. Sellers. They heard a band concert and then a number of variety acts before being treated to a demonstration of the band '’snap drill.” Maj. Frank Brown, commandant, was the instructor for the drill in those days. The Honor Guard followed with a demonstration and then the Kansas City Council of The Boy Scouts of America presented the “Mic-o-say Tribe” in a number of Indian dances.
The program ended with a parade of all 426 cadets who then proceeded to a reception and dance. This was the first of twenty-eight Wentworth Shows that ended in 1978. Proposed increases in the charges for the auditorium in following years and bus transportation would make it prohibitive. Audiences over the years numbered over 10,000 for many of the years in a period of increasing anti-military sentiment among the population.
Maj. Gen. William Morris Hoge, ’10, ended his tour as commander of U.S. forces in Trieste and was appointed to command IX Corps in Korea. Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, newly appointed commander of the 8th U.S. Army in Korea sought him out for this assignment. Ridgway was a classmate at West Point with Gen. Hoge and the two had served together a number of times previously, including the Battle of the Bulge in 1944.
The Trumpeter issue of 11 March 1951, carried two interesting feature stories. One stated that within the previous twenty-five years, all children born to faculty officers had been boys, except for one girl. They did not give the total number but noted that the tradition had been kept up with the son delivered to football coach Capt. Dick Nines.
The second feature detailed a story about research that tabulated the number of Wentworth alumni who had gone on to graduate from West Point over the years. It stated that forty-four had been commissioned from the U.S. Military Academy to that date and that six more were in residence there. at that time, the Ted Messmore Award carried an automatic appointment to that institution.
The school year ended with 155 graduates, eighty-one from the junior college and seventy-four from the high school. Their ranks included Ike Skelton, IV, who would become Fourth District of Missouri U.S. Representative and was, as he likes to say it, “the slowest two-miler” ever to graduate from Wentworth.