MERIDIAN — This year MCC celebrates 75 years of providing community building opportunities beyond high school for our community. For many of us blessed to be part of that journey it's been a fun and rewarding trip.

    And while the sign on the college entrance says "founded 1937" the college story goes back to the early 1900's.  

    In 1905 high school football in Mississippi was in its infancy. In fact, the first game of record was on Dec. 9, 1905. The home team, Yazoo City, defeated their Winona visitors 5-0. The winning coach, Horace Ivy, was not satisfied and in May at the close of the school year he headed to the University of Chicago for six weeks to learn from "the best."

    Thus a small town coach from Mississippi joined 20 other coaches from across the county in Amos Alonzo Stagg's course on football's innovation du jour, the forward pass.

    A few years before Coach Stagg and his colleagues developed the "forward pass" another educational visionary, William Rainey Harper, president of the University of Chicago, began advocating creation of "junior colleges."

    Harper was a wonderful classical scholar. Most of his published works are religious studies which required scholarship drawing on classical languages including Hebrew and Greek.

    President Harper was also committed to excellence and innovation. And in that spirit, he counseled the development of Joliet Junior College via inclusion of "college level" courses in Joliet High School. And in the fall of 1901 Joliet High School began offering "university college level" courses. His reasoning: more high school graduates would be better prepared to succeed at the University of Chicago.

    And in the summer of 1906, Coach Ivy enrolled in a sociology course as well as Coach Stagg's seminar. One of the course activities included a field trip to Joliet, the site of the Illinois State Penitentiary and also the site of Joliet Junior College, then in its fifth year of operation. While Harper died a few months before Coach Ivy's arrival that summer, those attending to his legacy within the university were actively promoting his ideas about lifelong learning, general education and junior colleges.  

    Coach Ivy intercepted each of those passes. They were in his playbook when he returned to Yazoo City in early August. And by 1922 State Superintendent of Education W.F. Bond appointed Horace Ivy as Mississippi's State Supervisor of High Schools. Another Mississippian influenced by William Rainey Harper was State Sen. Julius Zeller from Yazoo City.  

    Bond and Ivy assisted Zeller in drafting Senate Bill 251. Coach Ivy contributed the language, which allowed "separate school districts" in towns of 10,000 or more to create junior colleges.

    Senator Zeller's bill became law. America's first state system of public junior colleges was created. And in 1923 following completion of studies at George Peabody College in Nashville, Coach Ivy became Horace Macaulay Ivy, Ph.D.  

    He also became Superintendent of Schools in Meridian. His terms of employment provided an annual leave of six weeks, which he could use to teach in universities. His three year contract began at $5,500. And in 1953 his salary was $7,200 when he retired at age 69.

    Ivy led the transformation of Meridian's public schools from "good to great."  Of course, the Ivy playbook included developing a "junior college."  And in 1937 the community saw completion of that come to pass.  

    Dr. Ivy lived long and well. He was a model of servant leadership. I was blessed to become his friend and colleague. In 1965, when the H.M. Ivy Building was dedicated he admonished us "to stop calling this a Junior College, it’s a Community College!"  

    It took us 25 years to get that formalized. But then it did take him many years to move the college from concept to formal enrollment. I know he had the heavier lift.



    Dr. Bill Scaggs is President-Emeritus of MCC. The opinions and perspectives contained in this column are his alone. Next: The MCC/Ivy Saga continues.