Life becomes an open book
By JoANNE VIVIANO
VINDICATOR EDUCATION WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- Returning to Youngstown in the 1970s after living in Boston and many international travels, Richard Scarsella was shocked.
Local history had been lost.
"Downtown was disappearing, mansions on the North Side were being leveled," he said. "... Most people didn't know the Warner Brothers were from Youngstown, or that the Butler Museum was the first museum dedicated to American art in the country.
"And they didn't know who William Holmes McGuffey was."
William Holmes McGuffey, 1800-1873, was a boy who trotted to school in Youngstown from a Coitsville Township farm along a path (now McGuffey Road) made by his father.
He was a scholar who, in exchange for chores, received board and an education at the side of the Rev. William Wick at a parson's school on Wick Avenue.
And he was a stern school master who began in 1836 to publish a unique set of seven "Eclectic Readers" that educated generations of students and became more widely read than any book except the Bible and Webster's dictionaries.
Since his return, Scarsella has become an expert on the reader and its author. And he now heads up the 50-member William Holmes McGuffey Historical Society, based in Youngstown, the only remaining chapter of a national society that once had 100,000 members.
Now, pieces of the McGuffey archives are being displayed for the first time at the Davis Visitor and Education Center, 123 McKinley Ave., at Fellows Riverside Gardens in Mill Creek Park. The society purchased the archives from Helen Bair Owen of New Wilmington, Pa., one of McGuffey's descendants, and has loaned them to the park.
What's included
On display are copies of the first reader and others, a copper plate engraved to print "Lesson XXV" of the first reader -- teaching words like "James," "Mary," "doll" and "spade" -- as well as stern-faced photographs of McGuffey and other family members. Visitors to the display, in the center's lower-level Melnick Museum, will also see other items, including a 1966 certificate designating McGuffey's boyhood home in Coitsville Township a national historic landmark -- the 78-acre parcel was purchased with donations by the historical society and is now a wildlife preserve.
Visitors will learn that McGuffey's family came to the Youngstown area from Washington County in western Pennsylvania when he was 2 and that the home in which he was born is at the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Mich.
"Well through the 1940s, the name McGuffey was synonymous with higher education," said Scarsella, adding that Henry Ford referred to the man as his "alma mater," after having used the readers to educate himself. " .. If you got through all seven McGuffey readers, you were considered an educated man."
What visitors won't see are what Scarsella called "the most important part of the archives" -- original family letters, that remain in a safe deposit box and have yet to be studied by historians.
They include details of the Civil War era and are "wonderful examples of the social and cultural history of the period from 1820 to his death," Scarsella said. They tell what people were eating, wearing and thinking politically.
"They are kind of like photographs into the past," Scarsella said, "like reading an old diary."
The man and his work
McGuffey taught at "subscription schools" in the local area to teach farmers and other locals that they could better themselves if they worked hard enough.
"He wrote the books as a labor of love, because his mother really wanted him to be a preacher," said Scarsella, adding that McGuffey also preached as an ordained Presbyterian minister. "... But he was called to be a teacher."
In his readers, he espoused citizenship, patriotism and conservation. He also advocated equal education for girls, believing that the road to salvation required reading skills so that one might read the Bible.
Tales in the readers teach phonics, vocabulary and tell of children. McGuffey regularly promoted a religious agenda, using examples from the Bible, but also used samples from Shakespeare and Whitman. Some tales, Scarsella said, are morality tales, in which bad boys and girls come to bad experiences.
A harsh lesson
On a wall, a display featuring early readers tells the story of a girl with a bad habit of tasting every food and drink she came across, but learned her manners after sipping what she thought was wine.
"As soon as she had drank it she cried out in great pain, for the liquid in the glass was not fit to drink and it took all the skin off her lips, and her mouth, and her throat," the reader says.
Scarsella, himself a teacher at Youngstown's East Middle School, said the readers were used in schools into the 1950s and began fading in the Sputnik-era as educators turned to focus on science and math. They also faded due to separation of church and state issues, but are still used in some private rural Christian schools and may be used in public school to teach cultural history.
McGuffey never saw the riches that one might expect his readers would have brought. In his later years, Scarsella said, the teacher's royalties were a couple of hams at Christmas.
"He didn't care," Scarsella said. "He did it because he thought it was the right thing to do."