Stivers High School - Annual Yearbook (Dayton, OH)

Page 12 text:

Thou Hast Served (To W. C. Reeder) Thou, too, host served by daily duty done, By numerous kindly acts thou scarce couldst know, As much as they who glorious victories won; And thou the seeds of character didst sow; From thee the timid soul the courage caught Which led him to that realm where honors wait— Thy messenger, he is avoiding naught That tries his will; and, taught to conquer Fate, He wins the laurels thou canst not acquire; Ifor thou didst sacrifice much true renown When thou to thy disciples gavest thy power. But, multiplied so many thousand times, Thou seest it in these retrospective years, Through many channels, aid the world each hour. 8

Page 11 text:

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Page 13 text:

William Campbell Reeder HERE were neither vocational guides nor conferences nor even long magazine articles on the subject of choosing one’s life-work, when William C. Reeder was a boy of sixteen. It was not, therefore, as a result of pondering over the demands of the profession and its possibilities that he decided to become a teacher; but his aptitude for study and a desire to be useful started him, almost without his consideration or consent, in the work which he has been doing cheerfully and well for fifty-four years. Perhaps Mr. Reeder inherited some portion of his pedagogical skill, for his greatgrandfather, Andrew Small, a soldier of the Revolutionary War, who had been with Washington at Valley Forge, was one of the first teachers in Montgomery County. He taught in a country school near Miamisburg. A paternal ancestor, Elijah Reeder, kept a tavern in Franklin, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. His descendants, among them Alexander I). Reeder, the father of “our” Mr. Reeder, who had married Margaret Denise, continued to reside there. The family, therefore, had become quite well established when William C. became a member of it, on January 16, 1844. The house in which he was born is still standing. He received most of his education in the Franklin public school. In his fifteenth and sixteenth years, however, he attended a private school, where, because the teacher had too many pupils, he took charge of the classes in Mental, Grammar and Spelling. At the same time he made daily preparation for seven recitations in his own work. So useful an assistant had no need to seek employment. He was offered a position in the Franklin Township School, where he taught, as he expresses it, “everything from A, B, C’s to Second-part Algebra,” twenty-six weeks, for one-hundred-sixty dollars. He continued teaching in various township schools of Warren and Montgomery counties until 1868, when he entered Germantown High School, where he remained three years. Following this he was superintendent of the Miamisburg schools in 1871-72. He taught in the Franklin High School from 187S until 1884, one year after his removal to Dayton. His experience a little later as a teacher at Chambersburg is interesting, for it shows his vitality and energy'. He walked to that town from Dayton, each morning, and walked home in the evening—a distance of fourteen miles in all. After a series of attempts at various other kinds of work, which followed the two years at Chambersburg, Mr. Reeder returned to teaching in 1893, when he was chosen as a member of the Steele High School Faculty. He remained there seventeen years, shortly after which he came to Stivers to teach five weeks. These, he says, have been the longest five weeks of his life. They are only now drawing to a close after eleven years of service in Stivers, where many who have known him either as teacher or as co-worker and those who have known him well in both relations will miss his cordial greeting and his kindly manner. Mr. Reeder is strong, vigorous, even young except in years of service, and were it not for the state pension law he might “carry on” for a long time to come. Perhaps the secret of his “eternal youth” lies in his philosophy of life, or, rather, lack of it, for he declares that he has none, saying, “I just took things as they came.” Perhaps we are most interested in the experiences heretofore mentioned; but these have not been all of life for him. In 1865, when he was twenty-one years old, he married Miss Lovina Brown, who died in 1882. There were seven children, four of 9