“In 1933 when I graduated from high school we were in the midst of the Depression and college seemed out of the question. Galloway women’s college in Searcy had consolidated with Hendrix and there was no college near until some people from Little Rock started a school on the Galloway campus. My father bought an old second-hand Dodge and said my brother C.E. and I could commute from Pangburn to school, me to college and brother to high school. This college really struggled to last a year. Teachers were constantly leaving as better jobs became available. I had three different French teachers and two Chemistry teachers. When the founders of the school quit, Virgil Hunt, the last Chemistry teacher, took over and held things together.”
--Christina Doyle Spear
White County Historical Society
“I had no idea he
got so little money for his hard work.”
By VIRGIL HUNT
| T |
he Galloway Academy and Junior College was formed by a man in Little Rock who ran an orphanage. I don’t think he and his wife invested any money in the school and had free use of the property. I arrived on the scene the first week of November – notified by a Teachers Agency in Memphis. I was the sixth person to fill the job in the nine weeks the school was open. All had learned there would be no pay unless the school made money.
The owner (president) called a faculty meeting the next day and announced that I would be vice president. He left town and never returned. His wife stayed behind and collected money from students and townspeople living in the dormitory. That may have been the first coed dormitories in any U.S. college.
The second semester, faculty and some boarding students moved into two cottages and the wife of the president continued to rent out dorm space to townspeople.
About March I escorted a group from Harding College, Morrilton, Arkansas, through the property and hoped to get a teaching job with them the next year. They took only their own brand of Christian and I, a Methodist, didn’t measure up.
From student tuition we paid our gas and water bill and had enough at year’s end for my part to be $65. I stopped in Memphis and paid my Teachers Agency fee, and had enough to fill my gas tank and made it back to Indiana.
I taught in Kentucky Junior College, dean and president of Central Normal College in Indiana, was a research physicist at Johns Hopkins University during WWII, and worked 30 years in administration at Indiana University until retirement. Christina Doyle Spear is the only person I remain acquainted with from my Arkansas days.
A unique experience in a school that never should have been. I’m sure Harding and Hendrix are thriving colleges.