You Can Do It

In a crude, pine-slab cabin without bath or toilet, a little old lady sat silently peeling grapefruit one day last week. Presently a car pulled up the mountain road and honked. The old lady put down the paring knife, daintily touched a smidgen of rouge to her cheeks, clutched a wide-brimmed red straw sailor and climbed in.

It was Emily Griffith Day at the Denver Kiwanis Club, 30 miles away. (Emily is the only woman member--honorary-- of Denver Kiwanis.) At the luncheon, Kiwanian after Kiwanian gave Emily a rose and made a little speech; soon she had a big bouquet and eyes full of tears. Sighed 5 ft. 4 in. Emily: "I feel two inches taller."

Back in 1916, tiny, tidy Emily Griffith was a red-haired eighth-grade schoolteacher in a poor district of Denver. Distressed because so many boys & girls were dropping out of school, she went to their homes to learn why. They were needed as breadwinners. Too often, their parents had lost jobs because they were illiterate or unskilled. The children could get work while they were young, but one day they would be in the same fix. Emily decided to start a "second chance" school for adults --to prove that opportunity always knocks twice.

Knock, Knock. First Emily cajoled the Board of Education into giving her a shabby old brick school building in downtown Denver--and appropriating some money.* Then she persuaded the Denver Post and the Denver trolley cars to plug the idea in stories and signs. Within a month after Emily Griffith's new Opportunity School had opened its doors, it had 600 students. Opportunity taught anybody (one, a retired barber, was 82). Over the school door was lettered the simple motto: "For all who wish to learn."

There was no tuition, no terms, no marks, no attendance records, no required courses, no graduations or diplomas (except in the special high-school academic courses). You came when you could and took what you wanted: welding or writing, cooking or cartooning, mineralogy or millinery or motherhood. Said Emily: "Let people do what they can and the best they can. Don't force them."

The teachers, like the pupils, were of all kinds. The Russian instructor, a tile-maker by trade, had graduated from a university in Leningrad. Telegraphy was taught by retired Union Pacific operators. Emily herself had not had much formal education and played schoolmistress by ear. She thought it worked: "It's what a person can do and not the letters after a name that ought to count. I would take a teacher with a high-school certificate rather than a master's degree, if she had understanding."

Once Emily fired a teacher two hours after hiring her, because the woman told a pupil: "I just don't understand how you can have reached your age without learning this." At Opportunity, ignorance was always an excuse--if the student tried to get over it. In every room, Emily posted a slogan: "You can do it."

Sympathy & Soup-Mix. She had no office, but put her desk by the main door --to keep a friendly eye on everybody who came & went. An evangelist for education, Emily would find a dejected-looking man on the street and talk him into following her back to school. For hungry students there were huge pots of soup-mix, cooked up by Emily at home, at her own expense, and brought down to school.

Emily retired in 1933 to her mountain cabin, on a $50 monthly pension (she was offered twice as much, but didn't think it fair to take more than other retired schoolmarms). Opportunity is still going strong, under a male principal. Some 21,230--about 7% of Denver's population--took courses this past year; 5,000 attended every day. There were 285 teachers, and 187 subjects. The average student age had dropped from 35 to 28, thanks to 1,966 veterans--who signed up mostly for such courses as auto mechanics, refrigeration and airconditioning.

Of all the students, Emily Griffith would perhaps have been proudest of a 26-year-old veteran, racing against approaching blindness. Opportunity had set up special training apparatus for him to study electricity, using bells instead of lights as signals. He planned to open his own electrical repair shop in Pueblo, when the night closed in.

*Her first budget was $51,560; this year's School Board appropriation for Opportunity School: $264,460.57.

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