Millersburg Military Institute - Sniper Yearbook (Millersburg, KY)

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Sunday Herald-Leader, Lexington, Ky., January 17, 1982 MMI enrollment has done Herald-Leader Frank Anderson Uniformed cadets stand at parade rest while waiting in cafeteria line for breakfast. The junior school, grades one through six, was closed in 1975. Four years ago, the school’s board of trust- ees was forced to raise $40,000 just to keep the school open another year, and no teachers were given raises that year so the doors could remain open, said Dick Letton, a 1967 MMI graduate who now serves as the board’s chairman. Then in late 1979, an anonymous donor pledged $250,000 over a five- year period to establish an endow- ment, provided MMI raised a match- ing $500,000 during the period. The endowment campaign al- ready has raised more than $72,000. For the 1,200 citizens of Millers- burg who have grown used to watch- ing the cadets marching across the campus, that is good news. “The school has been here so long that if they didn’t have it, they would be lost,” said Millersburg Mayor Karl Lusk Sr., whose 36-year-old son, Karl, is among the school’s 2,000 graduates. Dr. Alan Saunders, who became president of MMI last summer, agreed with others associated with the school that “there’s a turnaround coming” for MMI and military schools in general. “Vietnam about killed it,” Saun- ders said last week while sitting in his office in the school’s historic adminis- tration building. “People got anti-military, anti- taking orders. We went through a pe- riod when what we did at military schools wasn’t in vogue.” The tide has been turning for the last several years, said Maj. Gen. W.D. Crittenberger, executive direc- tor of the Association of Military Col- leges and Schools of the United States, based in McLean, Va. Enrollments at the association’s 30 elementary and secondary military' schools that survived the Vietnam pe- riod — and 10 to 20 schools did not — are on the upswing for several rea- sons, Crittenberger said. “Just old-fashioned patriotism” and “President Reagan’s interest in national defense” head Crittenber- ger’s list. Supporters of military schools, such as Lt. Col. Gordon Betts, who spent 42 years at MMI, say they still have a place in society.” “There are small classes and indi- vidual help and a lot of children just need that type of training,” said Betts, 74, a 1928 MMI graduate who then was everything from janitor to president” at the school until retiring to Versailles in 1973. Col. F.H. Hall, who has lived and taught at MMI for the last 25 years, agrees. “The old-fashioned virtues of dis- cipline and toughness of body and mind are just as valid today as they were,” said Hall, 55, who says mili- tary schools were “unjustly” criti- cized during the Vietnam era. Even 17-year-old David Stevens of Illinois, who acknowledges that he does not like the military aspect of the school and found it hard to adjust to being given orders by his peers, said he will probably look back on his year at MMI and not look down on it.” But the MMI of today, like other military schools, has been forced to make some changes. Women cadets now attend. MMI has four women this year who attend as day students. This year, MMI’s students, who come from Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois and Florida, also includes seven Mexi- can-Americans and four blacks. Around 1972, the school stopped teaching battle techniques and staging platoon attacks, said Letton, who ate tended MMI for 12 years and whose wife, Sandi, teaches social studies at the school. The required Junior ROTC program now is “basically a citizen- ship course” — a change that Letton and others say is for the better. MMI board member Bill Stamler, who attended the school for four years in the 1940s, agrees that the “advanced Boy Scouts” approach is an improvement. “I don’t think we have any business teaching war tac- tics.” Stamler’s only daughter, Rose Mary, attends the school and has some interest in attending a service academy. His wife, Ellen, teaches at the school. Saunders, who came to MMI after a year as dean and interim president of a Virginia military school, Ran- dolph-Macon Academy, hopes to re-