Marvin Carey

Marvin Carey, who is my father's first cousin, was one of a number of wonderful relatives with whom I got acquainted during my family's cross country vacation trips in 1949 and 1953. I can remember stopping off in Springfield, OH, on my way to enter the Navy in 1958 and shooting hoops with him in the gym at Snowhill School. We lost touch for awhile but, thanks to my mother's keeping a complete and accurate address book, began corresponding in the 1980's. When I visited him and Alice in 1993, they had lost none of their enthusiasm for life or interest in education.

This article, from the 5 Feb 2001 issue of the Springfield News-Sun, is a better tribute to Marvin Carey than I could ever write.

Throwback thrown back into old role

by Tom Stafford

Even for a lifelong educator like Marvin Carey, it was a class move.

The first principal of Snowhill Elementary had returned to the school last Monday to answer questions about its early days.

And there, in front of a gymnasium full of students, Carey listened as a member of the student council dutifully read a potentially disarming query:

"How old are you?"

The adults in the room smiled and the children innocently awaited the answer. But Carey? He was working.

"I was 38 years old when I came here, and the building's 50 years old. So how old am I?"

The answer: Not too old to teach children.

The son of a Quaker preacher, Carey came to Springfield in 1931 and entered Wittenberg College, wanting to be a coach.

"The tuition was $120 a semester, and I got it for half of that because dad was the pastor of a church," Carey said. "And I had a hard time finding $60."

When it got even harder the second year, one of his instructors, Thelma Dunn, suggested Carey consider becoming an elementary school teacher. Men were needed, and he could finish sooner through the Normal School.

With the help of English teacher Rose Cadwgan -- "I painted her bathroom so many times, I was ashamed of myself" -- Carey made it.

At graduation, "nobody knew I had patches on my pants, because I had that robe on," he said. And the next year, he patched together a living substitute teaching for $3 a day. Only the following fall did he earn the privilege of facing 54 youngsters in a third and fourth grade for an entire year at Springfield's Southern School in exchange for $675.

"I remember we had a couple of earthquakes when I was there," Carey said, quakes that left a gap between the floor and wall of the building. His wrist watch disappeared down the crack one day during a timed math test. "So, naturally," said Carey, "the whole testing program came to a screeching halt."

But not for long.

Carey sent some students to the corner store to get chewing gum and instructed the class to chew it "until the sweet is gone." He then collected the wads, stuck them en masse to the end of a yardstick and fished the watch out of the crack.

Math problem solved.

There seemed no such easy solution to the numbers driving the Depression-era teachers strike that lasted nine days the next year, a strike Carey entered with four cents in his pocket. But a levy was passed, and Carey went on with his career. He became a traveling principal of sorts, visiting Northern Elementary School in the morning and Emerson in the afternoon, then, when an opening came, moving to Western School to teach sixth grade while being its principal.

"I just loved that place. I was 10 years there, counting three years I was off in the Navy," he said.

Later, Superintendent E. E. Holt -- whom Carey called "the best thing that ever hit this town" -- tapped him to be principal at the new Snowhill school.

The first day of school, Jan. 29, 1951, was snowed out.

Carey recalls with fondness the first student he let into Snowhill School the next day, a fourth grader named Bill Stewart, who had arrived early because his parents both taught school and picked out a seat near a picture of a paramecium.

"I called him Little Bill," Carey said. "Now he's a doctor out west."

In like fashion, Carey has seen Dean Anstine, his fourth and fifth grader at Kenwood Elementary, turn into a minister and Ron Murphy -- the kid Carey enjoyed shooting baskets with on the muddy playground at Western School -- become head football coach at Wittenberg.

He's watched boys brought to the office for smashing peanut butter sandwiches become attorneys. And he's grieved for students, among them a favorite who came home to his family to die of AIDS. Said Carey, "I never see the one brother that I don't think of the other."

His oddest memory?

Discovering that ink was disappearing more quickly from Robert Knox's inkwell at Southern School not only because Robert had such beautiful penmanship but because he had a taste for ink: He drank it, and a purple tongue was the proof.

Carey's lone regret?

Accepting $100 more years ago to leave the classroom: "That's where all the fun is."

Carey said he has had a partner all the way, his wife Alice.

"She deserves a medal," he said. "Thirty-seven-and-a-half years, and any time there was a PTA meeting -- any school I was teaching -- she would go."

She was at Snowhill Monday, too, on a day when her husband, walking the halls again, found himself both transported back and taken aback.

He was hopelessly outgunned when second grader Alex Merz looked at him with an admiring smile and said, "I wish I was a student when you were principal here."

And moments later, student council members Cassandra Lloyd and Anna Jean Petroff did him a greater honor than they knew when they asked permission to shake his hand.

Such treatment "kind of gets you choked up," Carey said as the girls were receding down the hall.

"I'd cry," he added, crafting a second answer to that disarming question asked earlier about his age. "But like Adlai Stevenson once said, 'I'm too old to cry.'"

While attending Wittenberg College, now known as Wittenberg University, Marvin was on the baseball team. He pitched and played shortstop. Although he never made it to the major leagues, he once played in the home of the Cincinnati Reds, Crosley Field, against the University of Cincinnati. His first start as a pitcher was a 12-6 complete game victory over Denison U. in 1935. In 2002, the Wittenberg coach invited Marvin back to his alma mater to throw out the first pitch for another game against Denison. He strode to the mound in his Wittenberg letterman jacket and received a standing ovation from the players of both teams when he delivered a pitch, only slightly low and outside, into the catcher's mitt. Way to go, Marvin!

During the summer of 2006, Tom Stafford got back in touch with Marvin to obtain information for another News-Sun article. Tom wanted to write an article about the broom industry which used to thrive in Urbana, but when you start talking with Marvin Carey, you sometimes get more than you bargained for. The result was nearly a full page of Marvin's reminiscences of his father, his childhood, life in early 20th century Ohio, etc.:

Located at Russell and Gwynne streets in Urbana, this building housed the Perry, Perry & White and, finally, the Whlte-Valentine Co., all of which made brooms. Built about 1883, the plant was closed in 1925 and subsequently demolished. Courtesy of the Champaign County Historfcal Society

The Rev. Charles Carey made brooms to help make ends meet.

By Tom Stafford
Staff Writer

To Marvin Carey, memories of his Quaker preacher father and "the greatest man I ever knew" are as closely wrapped as broom corn gathered and stitched into place around a stick.

"Preaching always came first to him, then farming, then making brooms, I guess," Mr. Carey said.

If that seems rather an odd trinity, the world of a century ago was a very different place.

On the prairie

Mr. Carey, a long retired school principal who at 93 is living on Springfield's northeast side, said that before he was born, the Rev. Charles Carey farmed at a place northeast of Urbana called Pretty Prairie.

He must have been a tenant farmer who worked family land "because he never had enough money to rent a farm," Mr. Carey said.

"I wouldn't be surprised if he had some broom corn on that farm," Mr. Carey said.

Histories of Urbana's broom industry (see story at right) indicate the prairie sections of the county are where broom corn, a variety of sorghum, was raised.

It was the way the Rev. Carey raised Marvin, the youngest of five children, four boys and a girl, that most endeared his youngest son to him.

"I was 18 days old when my mother died," he said. Charles later married a widow with a daughter "because he was in the ministry and felt he needed a helpmate," Mr. Carey said.

Despite a busy life, the Rev. Carey never neglected his duties as a father.

Marvin remembers going hunting and fishing along Mad River north of Urbana and being taken out to gather sassafras and chestnuts.

"My dad, he taught me how to set a trap -- and all the stuff that fathers are supposed to do."

It was because fathers are supnosed to provide financial support for their children that Charles Carey supplemented his slender preacher's salary by making brooms.

Two shades of red

Mr. Carey's first memory of his father's broom making dates to the Urbana of the World War I, where, as a child, he witnessed a display that depicted Kaiser Wilhelm, the German leader, as the devil himself.

The broom shop he recalls on Urbana's north side was painted a more beautiful red than the Kaiser's costume and had a floor Mr. Carey says had a perpetual shine from the oil left on it by fallen kernels and the buffing done by regular sweepings.

Said Mr. Carey, "It was cleaner than clean ought to be."

The owner "was either Fruehof or Freyhof," Mr. Carey said. (The Urbana City Directories of the time lists Freyhofs.) "They did all their work by hand."

And when his father took the family to preaching positions at Bellefontaine and Zanesfield and then eventually in Mount Pleasant, near Steubenville, he did his own work by hand, too.

B.V. (Before Vacuums)

"We moved down to Eastern Ohio in 1924, and, some way or other, he got hold of a piece of bioom corn machinery," Mr. Carey said.

The machine was kept in a garage on the property, the supplies brought in from Urbana.

"I can remember him out there in the winter-time making brooms," he said.

Although he remembers it sketchily, Mr. Carey said the process begsn with a handle being locked in a set of jaws and a fist full of broom corn tassel being tightly wrapped around it.

"He'd cut off here, cut off there, depending on what kind of a broom he was making. I think he could make a broom in about an hour and a half. And then he'd do it again."

Although it probably happened with other brothers as well, Mr. Carey remembers his brother Herbert and a friend "used to load up this Model T with brooms" and go door-to-door selling brooms to farmers, an experience that gave Herbert a lifelong fear of dogs.

Eventually Mr. Carey, as the youngest, took over the sales.

"A lady across the street bought the first one," he said. "You'd just go up and down the street, and you could sell half a dozen of them.

"Everybody needed a broom. I don't think they had vacuum cleaners then," he said.

He estimates the cost in the mid-1920s as having been a quarter and said, "I probably got a nickel" from each sale.

About the Miss Daisy

After he graduated from high school in Mount Pleasant in 1932, Mr. Carey moved with the family to Springfield, where his father started a Society of Friends church on McCreigbt Avenue.

With the help of a paint brush, Wittenberg College's policy of allowing ministers' children to pay $60 a quarter instead of $120, and some donations from Elizabeth Tipton at a downtown bank, Carey earned a two-year teaching degree in 1935 and took his first job teaching 54 students at Springfield's Southern School on the current site of South High School's Tiffany Gym.

After serving in the Navy during World War II, he earned a bachelor'a degree from Wittenberg in 1947,¹ and continued his administrative career, retiring from Simon Kenton School in 1972.

"I can remember one broom," he added toward interview's end, "it was called Little Miss Daisy. That was my mother's name."

Did his father name the broom? Did Mr. Freyhof name it in honor of his friend's late wife? Or was the name merely happenstance?

Mr. Carey can't say. Along with so many things from the days of broom corn, it has been lost in the sweep of history.

The Rev. Charles Carey, center, made brooms to help ends meet and had his boys sell them. From left are sons Herbert, Kenneth, WiIford² and Marvin. Courtesy of Marvin Carey

I called Marvin to thank him for clipping and mailing us this article and could tell he had enjoyed being interviewed for it. He went on to talk about the old days along Bloomfield Avenue in Urbana, of playing in Sam Carey's greenhouse as a boy, and how once his cousins, Sam's boys "Howard and Claudie", had chased him and Milford around inside that all-glas structure, merrily shooting at them with BB guns. We both had a good laugh at the absurdity of that escapade.