CHAPTER 1
Laying the Foundation for Effective Educational Leadership
The Early Years
We were trailblazers for the baby boomer generation. I was born in Salisbury, North Carolina, on September 15, 1946, to Ralph and Esther Sinclair. I was the first of three children, and was fortunate enough to have a father who was a lifetime educator and a mother who was a stay-at-home mom until her three children were grown. My sister, Jean, was born four years later and my brother, Roy, was born in 1952.
I remember very little about my first three years when the family lived in Cooleemee, North Carolina. In 1949, my father took a principalship at Union Grove High School and remained until 1953. When I entered the first grade at the local elementary school, my father began taking me to high school basketball and baseball games, creating fond memories of that time together as family.
After moving to Union Grove, our family lived in a home known as "the principal's house" located beside the baseball field and across from the local flour mill. In this rural setting, our family enjoyed a variety of small pets, and I enjoyed being mostly responsible for their care—and training.
There was a small watering hole behind our home, and I became very frustrated trying to teach the chickens how to swim like the three pet ducks. The family's favorite chicken was named Queenie. She was allowed to roam freely throughout the day, and her nesting box was safely tucked on one side of the porch. Often, when neighbors would drive up the gravel driveway for a visit, Queenie would wait until they entered our house, then proceed to make herself a guest in their car. Sometimes she would jump inside if the windows had been left down. A lady almost suffered a heart attack when she returned to her car, started it, and was greeted with loud clucking and feathers flying all around her, rustling Queenie from her new nesting spot in the backseat. Needless to say, after that incident, Queenie headed to the henhouse to join her other egg-laying friends.
When a pet would pass away, a special spot was selected for the burial in the pet cemetery located behind our house in a small field. Preacher Huss, minister at the Union Grove Methodist Church, would be called upon to conduct the funeral. My cats, chickens, and ducks were well blessed when they departed this world.
My father frequently took me along to investigate incidents of school vandalism, which was an eye-opener for me to the destructive behavior directed toward school property. In 1953, he was named principal of Troutman High School, at that time the largest school in the Iredell County School System. The family then moved to another "principal's house" located across the street from the school property. This location provided easy access for me to become involved in all school events and activities.
During my early elementary years, I joined a Boy Scout Troop in Troutman, North Carolina. As the youngest boy in the group, I had to learn a lot about scouting in a very short period of time. However, by the end of my scouting program, I had achieved the rank of Life. This required earning many merit badges in the process. Those scout experiences and the summer scout camps helped advance my maturity.
At age thirteen, I began working on Saturdays at a local Troutman grocery store, making three dollars a day in exchange for ten hours of work. The long hours of bagging groceries, stocking shelves, and replenishing produce allowed for an opportunity to get to know the store patrons, who were from all levels of society. This made every day an educational learning experience.
Entering the sixth grade, I began developing an interest in music, eventually becoming a member of the Troutman High School marching band, playing the clarinet and participating in the high school band program even before becoming a teenager. Many friends at that time told me that I was too young to participate in a high school band program.
Being from a small school, the marching band was not the best musical ensemble and was often placed behind the larger school bands during parades. We were placed behind the horses in some parades, prompting members to joke that even though the band couldn't play Christmas music, we were the highest-stepping unit in the parades. At that time, band students were required to pay one dollar a week to compensate the band director for his services. The band once had to perform at a Duke University football game as part of a Band Day event. While returning to Troutman from Durham, the big bass drum started rolling across the top of the bus. My bandmates followed the sound toward the back of the bus, where they watched the big drum roll onto Highway 64 and toward automobiles that subsequently began swerving into ditches in their efforts to avoid hitting it. The drum was destroyed, but thankfully, no cars were hit. I had the good fortune to spend several years in the band program before turning my main interest toward athletics.
After reaching the eighth grade, I was well on the way to becoming a future school administrator. Dad had provided firsthand experience about school operations and even began asking me to substitute for teachers who were absent for a portion of their school day. By the time I reached ninth grade, it was not uncommon for me to be called from class and assigned to a substitute teacher's role for that day. Dad also asked for my help with securing and transporting surplus textbooks to the county administrative offices in Statesville, North Carolina. Adding to my list of growing skills, my father taught me to operate a Farmall Cub Tractor used to frequently mow the seventeen-plus acres of grass surrounding the school facilities.
My high school years were filled with some unusual, but very educational experiences. At the national level, two historic events occurred, affecting virtually everyone during those years. In 1962, the Cuban missile crisis brought the nation to the brink of war with the Soviet Union, and as high school students, we had to learn and perform practice drills to reach the school bomb shelter should it be needed. This led my good friend Jack Brown and I to attempt to build a bomb shelter in the woods behind Jack's house. Fortunately, after the Soviet Union withdrew their missiles from Cuba, the bomb shelter project was abandoned.
The second and most memorable national event during my high school years occurred on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. I was in sixth-period typing class under the direction of Mrs. Lee Brown. The classroom was located in a building beside the administrative offices. Looking out the windows toward my father's office just after two o'clock that afternoon, I observed a number of my classmates leaving the building in tears. Concerned about the commotion, I asked Mrs. Brown for permission to go and investigate. Upon entering the administrative building, it was difficult to make my way through the crowds of students and staff who were fixated on the lone television set in the administrative office, where reporter Walter Cronkite had just announced that President Kennedy had been killed. Dad approached me and delivered the tragic news. For the rest of the class period, students and teachers alike sat in stunned silence, followed by many somber days thereafter as the shock and sadness remained.
Just after my sixteenth birthday, my father determined that it would be good for his oldest son to have a valid school bus driver's license for emergency purposes. Fortunately, I passed the test and was able to add driving services to my growing list of school activities.
During this time, my voice was changing to a deeper tone, and at home, I became increasingly involved with answering the telephone for Dad. Having a father as principal of a school with more than 1,400 students provided many occasions for irate parents to call our house and voice their agitation over the phone. Sometimes when I would answer, they mistook me for my father and proceeded to give me a piece of their minds! However, when Dad would finally take over the call, the premature outburst usually gave the irate caller time to calm down, actually feeling remorse for having verbally blasted the wrong person.
During my senior year at Troutman High School, I continued in the role as substitute teacher in the elementary classrooms, and at the same time, I kept up with the textbook deliveries and schoolyard maintenance work. I added to the list by accepting a role on the school's office staff, serving as sports editor for the local school newspaper, and becoming involved in many clubs and organizations.
Studying was not my favorite pastime, and my grades reflected it, but this aspiring administrator was really getting into the management side of operating a school. On many occasions, Dad would call upon me to help with counting athletic-event gate receipt monies and school-supply monies. At other times, I was required to accompany him on after-school security checks and to various community meetings.
By the time I had finished Troutman High School and was preparing to enter Appalachian State Teachers College, the true contrarian was emerging. I had developed a skill set and desire for school leadership and management, more than I had for the regular school classroom experience—and I was only seventeen years old.
In most instances, classroom experience comes long before school leadership and management, but I had succeeded in reversing the order. Even so, it was well known to me that it was a requirement to go through the proper collegiate channels to reach my leadership goal.
Experience in my early years helped to lay the foundation for major educational decisions and experiences that would occur later in my career.
The College Years
Leaving the small town of Troutman and entering the larger collegiate atmosphere proved very challenging for me. During 1964, Appalachian State Teachers College was transforming into a much larger institution known as Appalachian State University.
After I arrived on campus for my freshman year, the school enrollment was approximately three thousand students. By the time of graduation four years later, it had become a university and the enrollment had more than doubled.
As a typical college freshman, I encountered the usual challenges of academic and social adjustments. The fall quarter was mostly play and little study. However, I made many new friends and attempted to do just enough studying in order to pass the courses. The main areas of my activities were at the girls' dorm and the student center. I also enjoyed sitting on outside benches watching the females on campus, which, at that time, outnumbered males by a ratio of four to one.
In December, I met my future wife, Claryce, who was living in Lovill Hall near the center of campus. After Christmas, our relationship quickly grew, and we were constantly together. I did spend some limited time at my residential quarters, Justice Hall, located just across campus from Claryce's dorm. My roommate throughout my college years was Rick Brown, a native of the Scotts community near Troutman. We were athletic rivals in high school, but we became good friends in college and were in many of the same classes together, which helped us in successfully passing some tough courses. We spent much time at the girls' dorm and also became very good card players.
Several memorable events occurred during my freshman year, and while it was very difficult for me to find a favorite academic subject, geography became one of the more desirable courses outside of my health and physical education major. I decided to enroll in one of the first undergraduate snow-skiing courses and learned just enough to become dangerous. My skiing career came to a sudden end when I went crashing through a retainer fence while showing off on the slopes with several skiing buddies in front of a group of coeds from Lenoir-Rhyne College. Trying to walk on crutches during a snowy Boone winter was very difficult. My injured foot eventually healed, but skiing was certainly not going to be my sport of choice!
Another interesting and unusual class experience came when I was taking notes in one of my classes and switched hands in the middle of the lecture because my right hand had become tired. Unaware that the notes were to be turned in after class, I wasn't worried. The next day, I was questioned by the suspicious professor, who discovered that the handwriting on my pages didn't match. When I responded that I could write with either hand due to an old injury, the wary professor didn't believe the story and made me successfully demonstrate the technique in front of the class. I proceeded to write flawlessly, to the professor's amazement, and he then apologized for questioning my ambidexterity.
At the end of my freshman year, I believed that I possessed very good social skills, but my poor academic grades spoke for themselves.
During college breaks, I returned to the Troutman Shirt Company to work at their warehouse, racking and packing thousands of pairs of pants. Working with many friends made the workday go by faster, but I also realized I did not want to spend my entire adult life making $1.25 an hour in a hot, sweaty workplace. The positive and negative experiences at this warehouse helped persuade me to eventually get serious and study harder.
During my sophomore year of college, I moved off campus and into an apartment in Boone. Although the independence was a great improvement over the structured dorm life, it made it even more difficult for me to maintain good study habits. My apartment college buddies included Rick Brown, Mike Phipps, Andy Whisenhunt, Don Blake, and Jay Coe. We had some great times together, but few of us were academic standouts. The winter in the cold North Carolina mountains provided a lot of snow-sledding and card-playing opportunities, but there were no improvements in grades. Each weekend, I would travel to see Claryce, who had transferred to the University of North Carolina at Asheville to be near her home.
My junior year continued at the apartment, and I actually began to develop some decent study habits. My grades were improving, and I had begun thinking about education as a career choice. Rick Brown, my roommate, had developed good study habits as well, and he was a big encouragement as we continued to register for the same courses and study together. We set academic goals and focused on future teaching and coaching opportunities. I conducted some teaching observations at Watauga High School, and on holiday breaks from college, I took every opportunity to return home and substitute teach at Troutman Elementary School and South Iredell High School.
In December 1966, Claryce and I became engaged, which motivated me further toward an educational career. The 1967–68 school year was my senior year at Appalachian, and I realistically had a chance to graduate and obtain a job in teaching. My grades continued to improve, and during the winter, I volunteered to become the first white student teacher in an all-black, inner-city high school—a very controversial decision met with fear and safety concerns from friends and family. However, I looked at the opportunity as being a very positive and challenging one.
South French Broad High School was located in Asheville. I had previously broken segregationist color barriers in sports and other areas, and knew I could make a difference during a very volatile period of social unrest in America.
In the early spring of 1968, my first experience into the African American student and educational culture went well. I believed that my low-key approach to fit in among the students was accepted by the vast majority. Shortly thereafter, my supervising teacher turned over all teaching duties to me, including preparations for courses in social studies, health, and physical education for grades eight to eleven. By the end of the first week, I felt like a veteran and was very comfortable in my new environment. I was also involved with helping to coach the varsity baseball team. What followed were life-changing events that I will forever remember.
On the night of April 4, 1968, Reverend Martin Luther King, an American clergyman, activist, and leader in the African American Civil Rights Movement, was shot and killed by a white man while standing on a hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. When I heard the news, I, along with the majority of most Americans, was shocked and speechless. My thoughts soon drifted toward the danger and anger that might await me when reporting to my school assignment the next day. After a sleepless night, I turned on the television set to discover increased outrage and violence in city streets across America, demonstrations everywhere, and a nation on the brink of civil war caused by racial violence. Racial distrust and hatred appeared to be everywhere. I reflected on the earlier days of playing with my African American teammates, breaking the color barrier in baseball, even standing up to the Ku Klux Klan after one of my Morganton semipro games. I was concerned that there could be some kind of retaliation for this unjust murder.
