Harriett Leigh Grogan had completed the seventh grade at Spencer Penn Elementary School in Henry County, excited and somewhat nervous about the prospect of beginning the eighth grade in the fall of 1971 at Drewry Mason High.
Until the day she received mail from the school system.
“You know how you get that letter that tells you who your homeroom teacher is? I got a letter that said, ‘Starting eighth grade, you will be going to G.W. Carver High School.’
“I had no idea what that was. I knew who George Washington Carver was, the scientist, but ‘What school? Where is this?’ My grandfather was like, ‘Are you sure about that? That’s a Black high school.’ I said, ‘Well, I guess I’ll be the only white girl there.'”
Little did the young girl know she would have plenty of company.
Like many public school systems in Virginia, Henry County was in the process of fully integrating its campuses.
While rising seniors in 1971-72 were allowed to remain at their schools for a final year, leaving Carver with an all-Black senior class, the students who came from the former white schools in the county would comprise the first class of students to complete all five years as part of an integrated student body.
G.W. Carver in Fieldale opened in 1950 as the only school in Henry County for African American students, replacing the old Henry County Training Institute.
Thirteen years after the groundbreaking 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court ruling struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine, Henry County began integrating its faculty in 1967.
In the fall of 1971, eighth-grade students who previously would have attended one of three other county high schools — Drewry Mason, Fieldale-Collinsville or Bassett — arrived at Carver.
Nearly 50 of those eighth-graders, who later comprised Carver’s 1976 senior class of 104, along with several ex-teachers and school administrators, convened for a 50th reunion Oct. 16 at West Piedmont Higher Education Center in Martinsville.
Carver’s 1972 yearbook, “The Trojan,” showed 95 students in the senior class, 108 juniors, 138 sophomores, 158 freshman and 177 eighth-graders.
On its front and back covers, the yearbook also displayed some other numbers — — with the following explanation:
“Four divided by one equals one … is at best poor arithmetic. Yet, in the fall, there it was and it was true. Four high schools fed students into a unique environment — four schools each with its own traditions, its own friendships, its own roots. Now, this changed and for all of us, the process of education would never be quite the same.”
Leigh Grogan
Woman of letters
Leigh Grogan fancied herself a writer, so she had a bright idea one day during her senior English Composition class taught by Mrs. Jean Hairston.
She turned in a paper with a poetic touch.
“I decided that at some point I was going to sign my name in all lower-case letters,” she said. “I wrote a paper, and I thought it was so fabulous. She gave it back to me, and she said, ‘I’ll let you know when you’re E.E. Cummings.'”
Somewhere around that time in the fall of 1975, Grogan had a real capital thought.
She would go to the University of South Carolina to study journalism.
“My senior year I kind of knew right off the bat what I wanted to do. I wanted to work at a newspaper,” Grogan said. “That was kind of a tough assignment. Every [college] had an English Department, but I didn’t want an English degree. I wanted a [journalism] degree.
“I ended up driving from Martinsville to Columbia, South Carolina, and walking into the admissions office. I said, ‘Will you take me in the journalism department?'”
She showed up in South Carolina’s capital city with a high level of motivation but a low SAT score courtesy of the math section.
However, the aspiring newspaper reporter had something else in her pocket … a recommendation to get into college written by Jean Hairston.
*****
It’s a long way from Carver to California, and Grogan wrote her road map in ink.
She retired after a 37-year newspaper career, with the last 30 as a features editor for the Sacramento (California) Bee. Stops along the way included her debut in 1980 as a 22-year-old news copy editor and sports writer at the Raleigh News & Observer and a brief stint at the Dallas Times Herald.
The Dallas paper folded in 1991, and amid tidal waves of cuts in the industry, Grogan got out in 2017 before she was swept out the door.
The Sacramento paper underwent staffing layoffs, headlined by the departure on Oct. 9 of the last member of its sports department, 38-year veteran Joe Davidson. The office where Grogan spent most of her career was torn down. The newspaper moved its print operation to Fresno.
“They pretty much got rid of all the copy editors, and I was a features editor,” she said. I did the production work on all the features sections. They were going to get rid of the sections. They’d already gotten rid of quite a few of the reporters, so the writing was kind of on the wall.”
The walls and halls of Carver High were new to Grogan and all of her classmates — Black and white — when they arrived as eighth-graders in the fall of 1971.
“We were all dealing with things we’d never dealt with,” she said. “We had lockers. The locker challenge. Can I get my locker open? You’re standing there, and you’re surrounded by people you don’t know. And they’re trying to do the same thing. That’s what happened with our class. We were all trying to do things we’d never done before. Somehow, in those five years that we were together, we formed a bond.
“There were fights. Don’t get me wrong. There were instances where a Black and a white kid would get into it out back. We just decided that’s not who we’re going to be.”
Grogan, who went by her first name, Harriet, throughout high school, was 10 years old when her mother died. An only child, she dived headlong into extracurricular school activities, proudly earning a varsity letter jacket for her four years as a cheerleader.
“If anything bad happened in my family, I had school,” she said. “I wasn’t the kid that dreaded getting up and going to school. We all started getting cars around junior year. I could have stayed there all day and into the evening. We were always looking for ways to stick around, making posters or auditioning for plays. Anything to stay there.”
However, the job of schoolteachers is to prepare their students for the outside world.
“The thing that motivated us more than anything was the faculty,” Grogan said. “I don’t know where they came from. I don’t know how Carver lucked out the way they did.”
Jean Hairston
‘A lot of English’
Jean Hairston was a young mother home in Martinsville with an 18-month-old child when she received a telephone call from Henry County Schools Superintendent Branch K. Rives in the late summer of 1965.
Rives needed a schoolteacher at Carver High School, and the decorated Army veteran who was once awarded the Croix de Guerre for his military service in France was not going to take ‘No’ for an answer.
“He called and introduced himself, it was a Friday afternoon,” Hairston recalled. “I wasn’t looking for a job. He said, ‘I heard you can teach a little English.’ I said, ‘No sir, I can teach a lot of English.’
“He said, ‘I need you to come to Carver Monday morning and teach this 10th-grade class.’ I said, ‘Well, I have a baby.’ He said, ‘I know that. Your mother-in-law lives around the corner. She can keep it.’
“He hired me over the telephone. It was hilarious.”
That phone call began a 35-year career in public education in Henry County for Hairston, a Chicago native whose first teaching job was in 1962 at Roosevelt High in Gary, Indiana.
She traded steel and big cities for textiles, furniture and small-town life in southern Virginia when she married fellow Morgan State University graduate James “Big E” Hairston, a former football star at Albert Harris High in Martinsville.
“We hadn’t planned to come here. His mama got sick,” she said. “He was an only child, and we decided to come here. I liked it. I had experienced big-city living. This didn’t bother me at all.”
With her husband teaching at Albert Harris, Hairston took the job at Carver so the young couple would not have both of their incomes dependent on one school system.
It was a decision that would have a major impact on the lives of Carver’s graduating class of 1976, the group that entered the school in the fall of 1971 as eighth-graders experiencing Henry County’s first full year of public school integration.
*****
The price of a gallon of gasoline in 1971 averaged around 32 cents, and the students in Mrs. Jean Hairston’s English 12, advanced composition and speech classes got their money’s worth.
“Some of them had me twice in one day,” she said. “Think about that. But I didn’t love on them because they came to me twice.”
Class of ’76 graduate Maynard Smith was a three-sport athlete at Carver and a good student. He was cruising through English class until he got the full Jean Hairston experience.
“She said, ‘In this class you’re going to have to read every day, and you’re going to have to write every day,'” Smith said. “I’m like, ‘What?’ But I learned so much in that class. That’s probably the best class I had in my days at Carver High School.”
Classmate Denise Mitchell earned a law degree from Howard University and has embarked on a long legal career. She has more than just memories of her former teacher.
“I won awards for legal writing when I was in law school, and that foundation came from Jean Hairston,” Mitchell said. “I still have the book that she taught from.”
Hairston remains fond of the particular group of eighth-graders she welcomed through the doors at Carver and helped usher them out into a mid-1970s world.
The feeling is mutual.
When their 85-year-old English teacher entered the West Piedmont Higher Education Center in Martinsville to attend the 1976 Class Reunion on Oct. 16, several of her students were visibly moved to tears.
A lot of English indeed.
“They came with fresh faces and ambition. They were creative,” Hairston said. “I used to tell them, ‘Guys, you are big fish, but you are big fish in a little pond. We’re working so that you will be successful as big fish in bigger ponds. I told them we’re not here to play around.”
Rob Lovell
Student of the game
Long before he was a high school teacher and state championship basketball coach, Rob Lovell was sitting as still as he could in a too-small desk inside a G.W. Carver classroom with one thought that made his pulse quicken and his hands sweat:
Please, teacher, do not call my name.
That was until he encountered English instructor Jean Hairston.
Not the first rodeo for the veteran teacher in the Henry County school system, she pulled the young student out of his reluctance and shyness.
“She offered a new class, speech class. It was like public speaking,” Lovell said. When I was in high school, I was terrified to be called on in class, like to talk in front of everybody. She really got me over that to the point where being in front of people, talking and teaching, that’s what I did for a living.”
Lovell spent 31 years as the girls basketball coach at Turner Ashby High School in Bridgewater, retiring in 2023 after leading the Knights to three VHSL state championships, five regional titles, 10 Valley District crowns and 514 career victories.
Few successful prep basketball coaches never played the sport in high school. Lovell never suited up for the Trojans on the basketball floor before graduating.
“I tried out and wasn’t very good, got cut,” he said. “We always had some good athletes. But I was always kind of a student of the game.”
*****
Upon graduation from Radford University, Lovell entered public education with the goal of becoming a football coach. Early in his career at Bassett Middle School, the boys basketball program needed someone to coach the freshman team.
Lovell bit.
“To be honest, I took the job because I needed the money,” he said.
The job bit back.
“I fell in love with it,” he said.
Lovell’s 39-year career in education included two seasons at a private school in Ohio before he returned to Virginia and landed in the Shenandoah Valley for one season at Page County High.
Lovell had signed a contract to return to Page for a second year until he saw an advertisement for a position as a world geography teacher at Turner Ashby, roughly 30 miles to the southwest.
“The principal called me the day after I interviewed and told me I had the teaching job if I would coach girls basketball,” he said. “They didn’t have any coaches, varsity or JV. After I accepted, he asked me if I would be the head coach. I kind of took that to mean that if I wanted the teaching job I had better say, ‘Yes.’
“I signed my contract at 10 a.m. At 2 p.m., we had our first practice. This was back when the girls played in the fall. When I walked in the gym, it was the first time they had laid eyes on me.”
Lovell had some experience with that feeling.
One of eight children, Lovell was the only one of his siblings who did not attend Bassett High for at least one year.
As part of Carver’s 1976 graduating class, he could count the number of familiar faces on the first day of school in 1971 on one finger.
“The only other person I knew in that school was my older sister,” he said. “I didn’t know anybody else. But you keep your head down, and find new friends and find your tribe, and that’s sort of what I did. All of the friends I made were new friends. I’m still great friends with a number of those people today.”
Lovell ranked No. 11 on the VHSL’s career list for girls basketball coaching victories when he retired. His teams won back-to-back Group AA state championships in 1998 and 1999 in Salem along with a Group 3A title in 2015 in Richmond.
By then, he was more than comfortable speaking in front of television cameras and microphones.
Come to the front of the class, young man.
Speak.
“Our teachers … they were teachers,” Lovell said. “If they hadn’t done the job they did, I never would have gotten into teaching.”
Denise Mitchell
About-face
Denise Mitchell attended Ferrum Junior College and later became an Elementary Education major at the State University of New York–New Paltz.
A funny thing happened on the way to the chalkboard.
“People told me I should go to law school,” she said. “And that’s just because I was always in someone’s face about, ‘This isn’t right. We need to do something about this. We need to change this.’ “
The young college graduate acted on the suggestion, eventually graduating with a law degree from Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she has spent nearly the entirety of her professional life.
Mitchell’s area of expertise is employment and labor law, where the potential for activity in the nation’s capital is growing exponentially.
“I just formed a new business called Federal Personnel Investigations because of all of what happened in the federal government the last several years, there are going to be a gazillion investigations and lawsuits,” she said. “I literally just formed a new company to take care of those kinds of matters.
“Usually I deal with unions on the management side. People go, ‘You must hate unions.’ Actually, I love them because that’s why I have a job. My grandmother worked in a factory in Martinsville. I used to see some of the abuses that would happen. Even though I was in high school, I was like, ‘Why aren’t y’all in a union?’ My grandmother was like, ‘Don’t say those words in Martinsville.'”
Mitchell’s bio in Carver’s 1976 yearbook, “The Trojan,” lists activities such as varsity cheerleading, newspaper staff, pep club and student government. However, Mitchell said beyond those customary sidelines was a rebellious soul.
“I was a hellion in high school,” she said. “I was the revolutionary in the school. I was different.”
*****
Mitchell attended Mount Vernon High School in Westchester County, New York, in the ninth grade before moving to Carver in Henry County, where her grandfather, Samuel Trott, worked from 1939-87 as a teacher, coach and administrator in the school system.
Trott is estimated to have influenced and assisted more than 2,000 students to attend college, often organizing and paying for bus trips to college campuses out of his pocket.
One of those students was Carl Hairston, who graduated from Martinsville High School in 1970 after attending Albert Harris High in the city. Hairston was working in a factory before Trott convinced him to give football a shot at his alma mater, Maryland-Eastern Shore, now known as Maryland State.
Ten years later, Hairston was a starting defensive end in the Super Bowl for the Philadelphia Eagles, part of a 15-year career.
“My grandfather was the one who took Carl by the hand and put him in the car.”
Mitchell’s grandfather’s former home sits just across the road from the old high school. The name of the road? Trott Circle.
“Even though I was born in Virginia, I was raised in [Mount Vernon] New York,” she said. “I literally came back intentionally to go to high school at Carver. I did not want to go to high school in New York. I begged and pleaded with my mother for years prior until she finally let me go back.”
Now Mitchell is giving back.
The D.C. attorney said she is forming a foundation to help students attend a large Historically Black Colleges and Universities gathering sponsored by Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria.
“It’s important for us to stand on the shoulders of giants,” she said. “I’m forming a foundation in my grandparents’ name, but it will be known as ASPIRE [Association of Students Persevering and Reaching Excellence]. What I want to do initially is start those bus trips from Martinsville to the HBCU college festival.
“You don’t have to be Black to go to HBCUs. It’s all about the opportunity.”
Mitchell attended the 50th reunion. She still bleeds green and gold and is proud of all her classmates.
“The class was pretty much evenly divided between students who were vocational, general or college prep,” she said. “You don’t have to go to college. There’s [an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers] program in Roanoke. They get paid to go to class. They get paid to become an electrician. They get paid good money, and they retire well.
“What makes our class great is not so much about the people who left, but the people who stayed in Martinsville who have invested in the town and had the children who hold onto the values that we have. When given the opportunity, people can do great things.”
Dennis Via
Brick and mortar
Dennis Via hardly had his life mapped out at age 16 when he prepared to enter his junior year at Carver High School in the fall of 1974.
But a teacher named Edward Fontaine gave him a blueprint.
Via’s father was a house painter and a home contractor, and the young Via planned to follow in those footsteps.
At 5-foot-not-much, even with a prodigious Afro, he decided college sports were not his future, so he took some part-time jobs at a grocery store and Tultex Mills while enrolling in a masonry class at the Henry County School.
“I wasn’t destined to go to college. I wasn’t planning to go to college,” Via said. “I was the first generation of my immediate family to attend college. I thought I might go into building homes, so I enrolled in brick masonry.”
However, Mr. Fontaine and a guidance counselor, Mrs. Carol Wills, laid out a plan for Via to attend Virginia State University near Petersburg.
“I was always a very, very good student, but I had never been advised to go to college,” he said. “I wasn’t aware of what was required to prepare to go to college. Back in that time, Martinsville was such an industrial manufacturing town, so there was a lot of employment there. That was a little bit more of my focus.”
So Via enrolled at VSU and joined the campus Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, a program that prepares students to become commissioned officers in the U.S. Armed Forces.
Generally speaking, it worked out well.
Via retired in 2016 after a 36-year military career that saw him rise to the rank of U.S. Army four-star general.
“You don’t start getting into the Army until the Army gets into you,” he said. “So the Army got into me. I thought, ‘This might be something you want to try.’ Ended up going on active duty for three years, and that turned into 36.”
*****
Before Via became all he could be, he hit an immediate snag during his first year away from home. His father died.
“That changed life in a huge way for me when that type of adversity showed up when I was 19 years old,” he said.
Via graduated from VSU with a degree in Industrial Arts and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Signal Corps. He became the first Signal Corps officer to become a four-star general in the U.S. Army and the first to head the Army’s Materiel Command, a global operation.
The Signal Corps installs, operates and maintains the Army’s communication systems. Established in 1860, the Corps ran the first military telegraph during the Civil War and operated U.S. Army aviation until 1918.
Via’s deployment included a stint in Kuwait during the last six months of combat operations in Iraq, overseeing the drawdown of equipment from the war zone.
“That was a massive undertaking, the amount of equipment and materiel we had to get back to the U.S. or to other parts of the world,” he said. “Then of course we destroyed a lot of it because we didn’t want to leave that equipment in place where insurgents and others could use later on against our forces.”
General Dennis Via’s 2013 appearance on Jay Leno’s Garage.
Via’s real 15 minutes of fame might have come in 2013 when he appeared on the reality TV program “Jay Leno’s Garage” with a prototype of the Army’s FED Alpha, a fuel-efficient all-terrain tactical vehicle.
“I was told he would come out for 20 minutes and ask a few questions and then tape the show,” Via said. “I was prepared for that 20 minutes, and he said, ‘This is a pretty neat vehicle. Can I drive it?’ We got in the vehicle, and he was cracking jokes all the way.”
Via, who has retired to McLean in Fairfax County, came a long way from the Preston community in Henry County.
Like the classmates who joined him at their 50th reunion, he walked into the halls of Carver with a big world waiting.
“We sort of were all at the same starting line. Our class was the first class integrated, but I wasn’t much aware of that at the time,” he said. “Of course, as we look at the divisiveness in the country today, we didn’t experience any of that in the eighth through the 12th grade.
“I’ve always been an approachable person. I enjoyed meeting people. Maybe that’s why I decided to pursue the career I did.”
David Wigginton
Changing course
David Wigginton spent several years as a course superintendent at Heritage Oaks Golf Club in Harrisonburg.
However, his path from tee to green was not a straight line. It was more like a dogleg.
Wigginton graduated from Radford University with a degree in Recreation Administration, but the job market in that field was not burgeoning in the early 1980s.
So he chose the known over the unknown.
Wigginton’s father spent 41 years in the furniture working for American of Martinsville mainly buying lumber for storage and curing at the company’s old Red Level Plant on Rives Road. It was a job that paid well enough to achieve the American Dream of raising a family and owning a home.
The young Wigginton took notice.
“I said, ‘Dad’s made a good living at it, maybe I should try it,’ ” he said.
So Wigginton put his Radford diploma in a drawer and headed to Tennessee to work for J. Walter Wright Lumber Company in Bristol. He spent five years in Bristol before heading north to the Shenandoah Valley for a job at a Merillat Industries cabinet-making plant in Mount Jackson.
Two years in Shenandoah County were enough for the young 20-something, so when job opening with the city Harrisonburg’s parks and recreation department came open in 1987, Wigginton jumped. He eventually became the city’s assistant parks and rec director and never left Harrisonburg.
“I started out at the bottom of the totem pole and worked my way up,” he said “Harrisonburg is a good place to live. It’s far enough from Northern Virginia that I don’t want to go any farther north to live.”
*****
Wigginton grew up in Fieldale with an eye on following his brother to Fieldale-Collinsville High School.
Henry County had other plans. Upon school desegregation in the county, Wigginton began high school as an eighth-grader at Carver. His older brother, a junior, finished his last two years at Carver while the students one year ahead of him at F-C were allowed to graduate from their original high school.
“I lived in Fieldale so I knew where [Carver] was,” he said. “I had gone to elementary school with Black students. I had a lot of good friends already. We handled it really well. The parents were the ones that had a problem with it, but the kids made the best of it.”
Wigginton said his concerns had more to do with the transition from seventh grade to high school.
“You have a little anxiety about a new school anyway,” he said. “Coming up from seventh grade to eighth grade, we didn’t know what high school was about, just what we’d heard. We had to grow up kind of quick. We had one thing in common and that was getting our education.”
Wigginton immersed himself in sports playing varsity baseball and junior varsity basketball.
“We started socializing and playing sports together,” he said. “We just came together as a school. I didn’t have any problems with it at all. Just enjoyed making friendships that have lasted this long.”
Wigginton’s three-plus decades in Harrisonburg have led to an epiphany of sorts.
Like all high schools, Carver has produced successful alumni who left the area for careers beyond geographical horizons. But there are many more graduates who stuck to their roots and planted seeds in their home community.
“I was kind of a transplant into Harrisonburg, but I’ve been here so long I felt like I grew up here,” he said. “There’s something special about somebody that stays in their hometown, gets educated, comes back, works in their hometown. There’s something special about those people.”
Susan (Koger) Blankenship
Back to school
Susan Blankenship knows all about the downsizing of the furniture industry in Martinsville and Henry County.
The Patrick County resident had the legs kicked out from underneath two jobs, prompting Blankenship to resume her education as a married adult with two children 33 years after she graduated from Carver in 1976 when she was known as Susan Koger.
“I did it out of necessity because I lost my position out of the trade act,” she said. “I started out at Bassett Furniture in their main office. Worked there for 23 years. I got promoted to a position of [human resources] manager at their facility in the Patriot Centre. They were downsizing the human resource function, so technically I got laid off from Bassett.”
“I started looking into the job market again. Went to American of Martinsville. I worked in the first-aid station and also as an administrative assistant. Everybody called me the plant ‘nurse’ but I was not the plant nurse. I was first-aid trained so I was responsible for the first-aid department and was part of the HR department.
“Then, of course, American downsized. They did away with their production side, but they kept their upholstery. When they shut down the wood side, the furniture side of the production, that’s when I got laid off.”
So Blankenship did what many of her classmates did when they were 18 years old straight out of Carver.
She went to college.
At age 52, she obtained an associate’s degree in applied science with a major in administrative business technology and a specialization in medical office from Patrick & Henry Community College, graduating summa cum laude.
Getting the degree was a family effort.
“I had a lot of help,” she said. “I had a lot of help from my husband. I had a lot of help from my daughters, with the papers that I had to write.”
Virginia’s community college system is attractive to students of varied ages, so Blankenship was hardly alone as an older adult in the classroom.
“There were other adults, but a lot of were younger than me. I had to take the advanced English classes. Those were little bit difficult because I do not like writing papers.
“Overall it wasn’t that hard. It was kind of fun in a way to be able to take the classes that said I could officially do the job that I had been doing for 20 years. I don’t work in a medical office but I’d been doing administrative business technology for 20, 30 years before I got my degree that says I’m official.”
Blankenship has been employed for Martinsville-based YoungWilliams, a third-party contractor for the Virginia Department of Social Services. She works assisting families who are seeking help with programs such as SNAP benefits and energy assistance.
*****
Blankenship, who grew up in the Rangeley section of Henry County, helped organize Carver’s 50th reunion as the wait for a gathering of alumni was made longer when the planned 45th class reunion was canceled by COVID-19.
She had planned to go to Fieldale-Collinsville High School where her brother, Barry, had just finished his eighth-grade year. Suddenly, she and her brother were transferred to Carver.
Her brother dropped out of school for a year but returned to also join the 1976 Carver graduating class. Barry Koger died in 2021, one of 27 students who were honored with a memorial table at the reunion.
“I basically cried when I found out I had to go,” she said. “It wasn’t that hard. I just wanted to go to Fieldale-Collinsville. Really we were all little sub-freshmen, all scared together.”
Michael Scales
Giving back
Michael Scales became Carver High School’s freshman class president in 1972.
His classmates elected him sophomore class president in 1973.
They returned him to office again as junior class president in 1974.
As they became seniors in the fall of 1975, Carver’s students made a weighty choice:
Scales.
And what was next? Four more years? Try another 46.
As Carver’s Class of ’76 gathered for its 50th reunion in Martinsville, Scales appeared in his familiar role, not as former class president but as active leader.
And why not?
Since he graduated from the University of Virginia’s Commerce School in 1980 and returned to the area to run his family’s construction business, Scales has remained in his hometown investing in the community.
Scales works in what he calls his “day job” as an analyst for the Longwood Small Business Development Center housed in Patrick & Henry Community College Dalton IDEA Center, focusing on growing small businesses in Martinsville, Henry County and Patrick County.
He teaches a mathematics class for aspiring engineers and electricians four days a week on campus at P&H.
Oh, at night he teaches heavy equipment operations at the college, helping skilled workers land high-paying jobs.
“Patrick & Henry got ahead of the curve on this,” Scales said. “I had one lady graduate in my heavy equipment class,” Scales said. “She’s making 35 dollars an hour. She’s driving a truck. She’s 5-foot tall and the truck tires are 6-foot tall.”
Josh Blancas moved to Martinsville from Houston in 2021 to start a coffee shop called “The Ground Floor” in Martinsville. His business recently expanded to include an off-site roasting operation.
“Michael walked me through exactly what I needed to know, from the business plan to the financials, and he never made me feel like any of my questions were too silly,” Blancas said.
“His guidance gave me the confidence to take the leap and build something sustainable. Five years later, The Ground Floor is a thriving coffee shop with a team of 20, and a lot of that traces back to the foundation he helped me lay.”
It is no coincidence that at the Carver class reunion at the West Piedmont Higher Education Center, almost all the vendors on hand were local business people.
“The one thing I’m most proud of … this reunion [was] not just about us,” Scales said. “It’s about economic activity. All the vendors, everything is spent locally. We’ve got nine vendors and eight are my clients and I’m working on the other one. We’re putting that money back, from the caterers, the music, the flowers, the decorations, everything’s local and a small business.”
*****
Susan Culbertson presents a check establishing the Michael C. Scales Scholarship Fund for the Martinsville-Henry County Chamber of Commerce.
Carver class reunion organizing committee member Susan Culbertson noted Scales’ selfless history of giving back to others.
“In the years after graduation … he paid for funeral flowers for our classmates and for other expenses out of his own pocket,” Culbertson said during the Oct. 16 reunion banquet. “No reimbursement was ever accepted.”
That was until Scales’ classmates presented him with something too big to ignore.
The Class of ’76 has established the Michael C. Scales Scholarship Fund within Martinsville-Henry County Chamber of Commerce’s Partnership for Economic Growth. Within one week the total has grown close to $10,000.
Scales said his freshman dormitory at UVa had more people in it than Carver had in its entire student body. Coming from a class that was the first in Henry County to spend every year as an integrated high school, he was accustomed to change.
He returned to his hometown with the same charisma that he displayed in high school.
“He came [to Carver] with his own level of pizzazz in convincing you that this is what you needed to do,” retired English teacher Jean Hairston said. “We are blessed in this community that he came back home.”
Classmate Maynard Smith put it succinctly:
“Mike Scales was a superstar.”
Signing off
Black high schools in the state were under the umbrella of the Virginia Interscholastic Association, which maintains its own hall of fame based in Charlottesville.
The VIA website listed more than 100 member schools between 1954-70 with five other G.W. Carver Highs in the state including one in Salem.
When school integration took place, it was a rare event when a former Black high school remained open, as was the case with Carver in Henry County and Lucy Addison in Roanoke.
G.W. Carver remained a high school until 1988 when it merged with Laurel Park to former Magna Vista High School.
The school became a middle school and now operates as an elementary school.
A curious visitor dropped by the Home of the Trojans recently and was greeted by two messages on the sign in front of the school:
“Great things happen when you are here.”
“Rich in history. Shaping the future.”
