I entered the teaching profession because, in the second semester of my junior year, the dean said I had to declare a major. I really didn’t know what I wanted to study. Some of the friends were studying to be teachers, so I decided that would be my major. I’ve never regretted that decision.
My 63 years in education created many opportunities; I served on numerous community boards, and was active at the state and national levels, all because of the field of education.
When I talk about this love/hate relationship I’ve had with education, it’s important to understand this field has impacted much of my life. Let me start off with the hate part—and hate is maybe a little strong; maybe dislike is better. When I started in the first grade, I was, at best, indifferent to school. The rumor was that they had to send somebody with me to make sure that I got to school, because I would end up goofing off and not getting there. But my indifference at the elementary and secondary level and my disinterest in learning was not a family trait. My brother and two sisters were top-notch students in high school, graduated with honors, and served in leadership positions. I did not. In fact, as a senior, I decided that I was not going to take a book home. The Franciscan nuns who taught us were very strict. Too many afternoons when school was over, I had detention, which meant that I would stay after school. The penalty was to kneel on the wooden classroom floors and recite the Rosary. My brother often complained about how he had to stay after school because I was his way home. One assignment that I had my senior year almost caused me to break my promise not to take home a book. The assignment was to memorize a list of items. Determined to keep my vow, I tore the pages that contained the list out of the book and took the pages home.
Going to college was a disaster. I got admitted to Notre Dame. How? That is still a mystery. I didn’t graduate with honors or as a top athlete, but somehow I was admitted. (Was it praying the Rosary?)
I started at Notre Dame in 1951 when I was 16 years old. I turned 17 about a week later, but I was much too young to be a freshman in college. My first several years of college, first at Notre Dame and then at Wooster, I literally hated. It was not their fault. I didn’t go to classes. I didn’t have any friends. I was a rebel. I broke the rules. You weren’t supposed to smoke on campus; I smoked on campus. You weren’t supposed to do certain things, and I would do them and get into trouble.
At Notre Dame I was totally lost, and I did nothing. I didn’t attend classes except occasionally for the midterm or final exam. I did pass a couple of courses, but I have no idea how. I was terribly homesick, and because of my youth I really don’t think I fit in with the 18 and 19 year olds. I was very shy and did not make friends easily. I never should have gone there. I never should have gone to college at that age.
At Wooster, I lived off campus, met nobody, and hated it. The college had what they called eight “Sections,” similar to and took the place of fraternities. They went through the pledging process like a fraternity. I got invited to join three of them. One was Section Three, considered the best section because it included the top students and the top athletes. Nobody turned down Section Three. Another Section that invited me to join was Section Eight, made up of mostly screwballs, guys not able to get into the other Sections. I picked and joined Section Eight—but I never went. I never set foot inside the facility. The formal stuff of going to class I didn’t do, except again for attending tests, and I managed to pass several classes.
My college record was zero for two. Growing up, my siblings and I didn’t realize that you could go to school for only 12 years. We always thought you had to go to college, because that’s what my dad said. In an Italian family, when your dad said something, that was it. I remember when I was in my mid-forties talking to my brother, who is three years younger than I am. I said, “Jerry, you remember when we used to be scared to death of Dad?” And he answered, “What do you mean ‘used to be?’” Dad came over to this country when he was about 16 or 17. He had a fourth-grade education. My mom, I believe, finished, the ninth grade, So there was no, “I went to Harvard so you have to go.” They just said we had to go to college. Both my sisters went to college and got degrees, and one became a nun. Jerry became a lawyer. I didn’t want to be a doctor or priest so I was in the field of education. I did eventually get my PhD, so I did become a Doctor, but not the paying kind. I went home to visit my parents one day when my mom was entertaining a group of Italian women that I have known since I was a little kid. When I walked in she said to these women, “You remember, my son, Dr. Mollica?” There was a pause and then she said, “But he’s not a real doctor. He’s a PhD.”
I talked with my dad about not going back to college. He asked what I would do instead. “I’ll run The Ritz,” I said. The Ritz was anything but a ritz, but his businesses put his four kids through college. He said, “I’ll burn it down with you in it first.” So I went back to college. The light came on at the Defiance. I made many friends. I became senior class president; a fraternity accepted me—under my condition that I would not go through any hazing. I became captain of the tennis team and won the conference championship. I was voted “most likely to succeed,” and to cap it all off, I met my wife, your Mom. I really began to enjoy the courses that I was taking. Of course, up to this point, I hadn’t taken any courses in college, because I never went to them!
While I was teaching at Lexington Local in Richland County, I started graduate school at Bowling Green State University in 1959. I hated it. Summer school was two years of six-week classes. I had to leave Jan and kids on Sunday evening and wouldn’t get back until Friday night. I lived in an upstairs one-room apartment with no air conditioning. It was next to a Heinz tomato factory and I can still smell the aroma of tomatoes. I didn’t have a car so I had to bum a ride to and from. We had no money. My classes were in the morning; I would go to the union then and have lunch. The lunch was $1.49 or something like that, if you didn’t get a drink. I had only enough money with me to buy five lunches for the week. I really missed my family. I hated being away from my kids; I hated the fact that I didn’t have any money and couldn’t do anything. I didn’t take the course work to learn. I knew the courses I had to pass to get my master’s degree and that’s what I did. I got A’s, but I wasn’t taking those courses because I was interested in learning anything. It just was something else I checked off to meet the requirements for a master’s degree.
Our family of four moved from Mansfield to Athens, Ohio, where I was a local high school principal. Back then, working on your PhD required you to establish residency, take full-time coursework, and quit your job. They made an exception for me—and I was the last one allowed to do that—so I could maintain my job while I took the coursework. It was grinding working full time and getting the credits as well as all those other things that you had to do to get a PhD was almost overwhelming. However, I could not afford to quit work. That’s why I refer to formal education as a love/hate relationship. This was the “hate” aspect of education. I did not enjoy what I had to do to gain my degrees.
But the “love” part was stronger than the hate. My first year, I taught sixth grade. I had received several job offers in my field of high school social studies, not because I was that good, but because there was a shortage of teachers. The superintendent offered me a hundred dollars more if I would teach at the elementary school, because the students there had never had a male presence in the classroom. When I began my teaching career, the starting yearly salary was $3,200, so this made it $3,300. So I said I’d do it, which was the best decision I ever made for the wrong reason. Teaching that sixth grade was probably the most enjoyable year I ever had teaching. They were glad to have a male teacher and pushed me to keep ahead of them. For their 20th class reunion, they invited one teacher back to celebrate with them, and that one teacher was me. I stayed in that district six years; when a middle school position opened up, I applied for it. In the process, there were two of us still in the running for the position, and I didn’t get it. I went to the superintendent to ask why, not to complain but to understand for the future. He told me the community wasn’t ready for a Catholic administrator. I accepted it then, but by the end of the school year my anger had built up and I quit. Then it dawned on me that I had a wife and two children and no way to support them.
Getting a job as a high school principal at age 26 was not an easy thing to do. I sent out letters and got four or five interviews based upon my credentials, but I didn’t get any offers because I was too young and inexperienced. I was frustrated because I couldn’t get any experience if no one would give me a job, but I decided I could do something about my age. I lied about my age, adding several years, when I applied for a job in Athens County. For the interview, I powdered my sideburns to make myself look older. The small, hot room caused me to perspire and, without thinking, I wiped off the sweat—and the powder. The interviewers must not have noticed because they offered me the job. I later asked the county superintendent if he knew why I had been chosen and he replied that both he and his brother, the district superintendent, were Catholic and had seen that I went to Notre Dame. The irony was that in the span of several months, I lost out on a job because I was Catholic, and landed a job because I was Catholic.
I’ve enjoyed numerous positions in education, including high school principal, and guidance counselor in a school that had never before had one. I ran several federal programs advancing creativity in education; I was a placement director at an Ohio university. I was a county superintendent; I was a local superintendent, while at the same time teaching ten years as an adjunct professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, which I really enjoyed. Another federal program I ran coordinated the curricula of Ohio colleges and universities which trained school administrators to make sure they were all teaching what was deemed important. As a result of that job, Ashland University hired me as an associate professor to teach educational administration. I discovered that teaching at the university level, and in a graduate program in particular, is very different from K-12 education. In fact—though I hate to say it—it was almost like being on vacation. I had only three classes a week, each one a three-hour period on a different evening of the week. The accreditation officers who came around to ascertain faculty teaching loads were also professors who taught educational administration. They knew that there needed to be some reciprocity among us since we might be chosen to check out their programs. The irony was that the accreditation team observed that our teaching load was “too heavy” and recommended that I have only two courses rather than three. Many of the other professors didn’t get paid very much, sometimes even less than public school teachers, although I was paid more because of my previous experience. I got into trouble at a faculty meeting for pointing out that they didn’t get paid as much but they didn’t work as hard as a public school teacher did. That didn’t go over very well.
I taught teachers who wanted to be principals, principals who wanted to be superintendents, and those who wanted specific training in school law and school finance, among other areas. My students had worked a full day before they came to my class at 6 p.m. Teaching in the evenings, though, interfered with our social activities to the extent that I decided to quit. I wrote a letter of resignation, and walked up our driveway to put it in the mailbox. As I returned to the house, my phone rang. It was the Ohio Department of Education offering me a job dealing with teacher training and certification, and representing the state with the colleges and universities that offered that course of study. Although it was right in my field of expertise, the one drawback was that it was located in downtown Columbus, a 35- to 45-minute drive, depending on traffic and weather conditions, from our home in Granville. That really bothered me and I couldn’t figure out the best time to come to work to avoid the traffic. Once my boss asked how I liked my job; I replied, “I like it, but I quit.” When I explained that the commute was the problem, he suggested that the department would pay for me to have an office in Granville or in Newark, which was right next door to us. So I did that for four or five years. That job then led to a federal project.
Many of the superintendents and administrators I’ve worked with would feel swamped and couldn’t keep up. But I learned early on that I didn’t have expertise in every field of education. I didn’t know how to teach reading. I didn’t know how to teach kindergarten. I certainly didn’t know how to teach physics. I understood that my job as an administrator or superintendent was to be an enabler who would hire people with expertise and give them what they needed to do the job. I didn’t feel overwhelmed because I delegated; I often joked that I delegated so well that all I really had to do was come in every two weeks and pick up my check. Duties like suspension and expulsion of students really bothered me. I enjoyed working with the Board of Education.
Throughout my career, I have been lucky, going from one job to another, and always upward movement. In some cases, I followed people who weren’t very good, such as the county superintendent before me who had been all “spit and polish,” being more interested in staff keeping hours than in getting things accomplished. In a meeting my third week as county superintendent, one staff member stood up and said, “Dr. Mollica, we just want you to know that we all feel like we’ve died and gone to heaven.”
