By Diane Smith
Record-Courier staff writer
The Great Depression was at its height when Doris Wise graduated as the valedictorian of Ravenna Township High School in 1934.
But still, her mother managed to find $300 to send her daughter to study at Kent Normal College — a sum Miss Wise was proud to pay back when she started her teaching career.
As today’s graduates walk across the stage while the nation goes through another economic downturn, the 94-year-old Ravenna Township resident finds herself worrying about their prospects for a job.
“I just wonder how many will find a job because of it,” she said. “There’s so many of them.”
But she hopes the economy will improve during their college years, as it did for her.
Miss Wise was born in 1915, the same year plans were being drawn up for the school building located on West Main Street where she would spend so many years. The building is now known as Rausch Intermediate School.
When she was a year old, her parents relocated to a farm on Infirmary Road, the same year students entered the Ravenna Township school for the first time, taken there by horse-drawn carriages. The buses were motorized by the time Miss Wise started attending the school as a first grader. At that time, the school housed students from first grade to graduation.
She led a class of 33 graduates from the school in 1934 — although the Speedometer, the Portage County Schools’ yearbook, pictures 34 students,she recalls that one student pictured did not graduate.
Most of them went on to take careers as teachers, farmers and accountants. “So many of them are gone now,” she said as she looked at photos of her former classmates.
In that era, Portage County schools were dismissed before Memorial Day to allow students to work on the farms during summer break. But in Akron, the school year was a little longer, which allowed her to serve as an assistant to her aunt, Nettie Wise, a teacher in that district.
It was there that a young Doris Wise developed her love of teaching, which would stay with her throughout her 46-year career.
As a student at the Kent State Normal College, as Kent State University was known then, Wise studied to become an elementary teacher. She worked her way through college at a dime store in Ravenna, earning $1 for 10 hours of labor.
In 1937, Wise landed a teaching job at her growing alma mater. In her first year, she spent an hour with each of the elementary grades at Ravenna Township School, teaching whatever she was asked.
She was paid $600 for that first year of teaching — about $8,500 in today’s dollars — and the sum was divided over the nine-month school year.
The job called for other personal sacrifices, she recalled.
“If you got married, you were out of a job,” she said. While some tied the knot and managed to fly under the radar, she ended up staying single.
A year later, she got her own classroom, and found her niche teaching second graders. Many of her former students recognize her when she goes out, she noted proudly.
As enrollment grew and the schools were consolidated, she found herself teaching very large classes. At the height of the work at the Ravenna Arsenal, she had a class with 100 students.
One of her former students, Clarence Keller, later married her niece, Delores, with whom Wise now lives. Wise didn’t make the connection until she spotted his name in one of her scrapbooks.
“He was a cute little fella,” she recalled.
During her career, she said, she especially enjoyed the years she taught “slow” students.
“The other teachers didn’t like to bother with them,” she said. “But I liked them. They were good kids.”
Mindful that she was teaching students who would one day go out into a world where they might be taken advantage of, she was especially determined to teach her young charges to read so they would understand the world around them and agreements that would be set in front of them. One student checked out a book from the library and proudly pointed out that he had read “the whole book,” which consisted of one line at the bottom of a few pages.
“I had a lot of kids who were beautiful writers,” she said.
Four years before she retired, her dedication to her students sent her to jail.
In 1980, a teacher’s strike had bitterly divided teachers in the Ravenna City Schools from administration. Wise was planning to say home until a friend encouraged her to go to the school.
She said she was staying where she was supposed to — until she realized that children going to school would know nobody inside the building except the superintendent. So for the sake of her students, she crossed the picket line, and got arrested.
The arrest angered many area residents, and was considered by some observers to be a turning point in the tense negotiations.
After her retirement in 1984, Wise concentrated on caring for her mother, Julia, a Hungarian immigrant, on the family farm. She continued to live on the Infirmary Road farm until December, when she was injured in a fall and decided it was best not to live alone. One of her nephews will be moving into the homestead.
She also volunteered with the Ravenna Balloon A-Fair, and was honored as its grand marshal one year.
Although she struggles with some health problems, Miss Wise remains well aware of today’s students and what they face. She’s particularly surprised when she sees group photos of valedictorians in the newspaper.
“It surprises me how many of them have more than one valedictorian,” she said. “We had one valedictorian. We never had a salutatorian. These kids know a lot of things now.”