Dr. J. O. Van Meter Served 20 Years At Lees College

Jackson Times 1950

Perhaps best known among those who have at one time or another served as chief adminstrative officer at Lees, is the Rev. Dr. Jesse O. Van Meter, who came to Jackson in 1928 and remained until his retirement in January 1949.

Twenty full years of service were these during which he saw the school become firmly established despite the most adverse circumstances; a period in which it overcame financial difficulties, in which it became soundly established as a school of college level.

A tall, stout man and an athlete of renown in his younger days, he brought to the campus a superabundance of vitality which made itself felt within the school and wherever he carried the story of Lees. The 20 years here sapped much of that vitality, but when he voluntarily stepped out of the president's office, he could look about the campus and see evidence of the fruits of his labors.

There are scores, yes, hundreds of men and women who could tell of Dr. Van Meter's years at Lees, each able to give his own personal slant on the school and the personalities of those of the faculty, but, perhaps, the best story of those years has been told by Dr. Van Meter himself. Taken from the files of the college is the following article written by him as the end of his administrative years there approached.

A brief summary of events and conditions at Lees Junior College during the administration of J. O Van Meter:

On August 28, 1928, Prof. J. Morton Davis, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Lees Collegiate Institute, asked me to go to Jackson and take charge of the Institute as acting president and keep it open until February 1, 1929, when he assumed it would be permanently close. There was no faculty, no scientific equipment and no accrediting for either the high school department or the junior college.

The new dormitory, known as Jackson Hall, was nearly finished, but only partially equipped and both buildings were full of dirt and the new dormitory and the school building had large quantities of packing material scattered about it. The school building was built in 1892 and had been allowed to deteriorate until many of the rooms were not usable and the large basement on the south side of the building was filled with rubbish and had several inches of water in it, in which thousands of mosquitos were breeding. The new window wells in front of the dormitory had just enough water in them to furnish ample moisture for breeding mosquitos, and back of the dormitory 100 gallons of cans and quart cans, which had at one time contained food, were pile up. In these additional thousands of mosquitos were to be found. We hauled off some six two-horse wagon loads of these cans and 15 to 20 two-horse wagon loads of debris out of the basement of the school building. I then covered these places with powdered lime, using more than half a dozen sacks, and in that way got rid of the mosquitos and made the place partially habitable for people at night.

I do not remember just how we got a faculty together. Sufficient to say there were five people on the campus with M. A. Degrees before the first of October. At that time this was the requirement for a junior college.

I think the University gave us our rating for that year simply because Professor Davis asked for it. I believe if anybody else had asked for it, it would probably have been turned down. We were supposed to offer the first year physics and first two years of chemistry, but were not prepared to offer either one. I ripped out the wall between the two large classrooms and made what we called a chemistry and physics laboratory. Major Webb from the University told me what equipment to buy. We continued to add to this minimum equipment until we were very well equipped to teach the above subjects.

There was no fence around the campus and you could drive a car onto the campus from practically any direction, and our nights were sometimes made miserable by drunken men racing across the front of the dormitory, blowing their horns and raising sand generally, but we were helpless to stop this with no fence anywhere. There were practically no cement walks on the campus in front of the dormitory, so we laid a few flagstones, and the mud being so bad, being no paved streets and very few pavements in town, that I wore hightop boots from October to May and was thankful that I had them.

I used to wonder why anybody on earth would come to a school equipped like we were and then I realized that all our students came from areas where conditions were as bad or even worse than those in Jackson. The student body of the first semester consisted of 33 students, but the second semester we had more than 100; and in two years we had more than 300. I said we were sent there to keep the school open until February 1929. In some strange way this question of closing school was not brought up again for some ten years, at which time, at a board meeting a member of the board turned to me and said, "Van Meter, didn't we send you up there to close that school?" I stammered, "Yes, sir." "Then," said he, "why didn't you do it?" By that time I had myself in hand, and I replied that I had never closed a school and I didn't know how. After getting our ratings and the faculty and the student body, the next problem we had to face was acquiring equipment. This problem stayed with us for 20 years. We could only buy what we could pay for and most of the time that was painfully little. I do not believe that the Board of Trustees actually knew how much they owed when they sent me to Lees. There had never been an auditor's report that I ever heard of until about 1936 and that was asked for by the Synod of Kentucky at a Shelbyville meeting. I think it was a Mr. Van Winkle of Covington who arose on the floor of Synod and asked me how much Lees College owed. I very frankly said I didn't know; the Board of Trustees had never told me. He then insisted that Synod have an audit made and report to them at the next meeting. This good man died without ever knowing what a friend he was of the college for that audit brought everything out into the open. It showed me exactly what I had to do to keep the school going. There has been an audit every year since then.

The debt at one time was more than $50,000.00, and the only way this was paid during the "terrible 30s" was an answer to prayer. I recalled that in October 1929, the First National Bank notified me there was a note there that would be due early in December for over $900.00. I had never heard of this note. I don't think most of the Board of Trustees had ever heard of it; but that didn't make any difference. The note at the First National Bank of Jackson, where we were doing all of our business, was not to be treated lightly. I called in Miss Jean Forsythe, and we made this note a subject of much prayer. I haven't the slightest recollection of where the money came from, but that $900.00 soon came in, and we paid the note after renewing it just once; and the money came from people most of whom I have never even heard of.

We have had students of Lees from some 90 high schools in the mountains, but in those first years we had students from only six or eight high schools; and while later on we were able to travel to all those mountains high schools over fairly good roads, between 1928 and 1935, there were practically no roads in the mountain that permitted travel for any distance by auto. I bought a new Ford, if not every year, certainly every two years, for the roads were terrible until 1938 and 1939.

When I first went to Lees the Board was very urgent in its request that I go to central and western Kentucky and raise money for the college. We needed the money all right, but this was in 1931, 1932, and 1933 and raising money was something else. After much prayer I felt I should go after students, which I did, giving practically all of my time to introducing the college and its opportunities to the senior classes of the high schools of that area. In most cases I was the only college president the senior class had ever heard speak, and they gave me unquestioned attention until I would tell them that room, board, and tuition for a year at Lees was only $250.00. Then everybody would settle back and begin to do other things. I finally asked one of the high school principals what was the matter, and he said, "Nothing except there wasn't a child in the room whose family had an annual income of $250.00." I then realized that in the senior classes of Eastern Kentucky there were to be found the answers to a college president's prayers, with the exception that there was no money.

These young people had good minds; fine, rugged characters; good health; and were ambitious and wanted an education, but they simply had no money. I then begun to pray for a factory and to hunt for one. About a year and a half later, the first of February, a boy came into my office and said, "If you will take my note for my tuition and fees I will pay it in July and live with my sister here in Jackson." It never really occurred to me that he would pay the note. I was so anxious to help the boy I paid little or no attention to that phase of the question; but I took his note. He evidently went out and told a half-dozen others what he had done, and they came in and made the same arrangement. All of those notes were promptly paid in July. The next September we had a score or more to ask for the same privilege. One day I said to our business manager, Mr. Bernard, "How many notes have I accepted?" He said, "I thought I ought to tell you, you have accepted more than $5,000.000 worth of notes." I was astounded and embarrassed, but kept on praying for a factory. One day I was in prayer in the basement of the Presbyterian Church and the Lord explained to me that the notes were the answer to my prayer for a factory. In the ensuing 15 or 16 years the auditors say that I have accepted over $400,000.00 worth of notes and less than $9,000.00 of them were still unpaid in 1945, and we had collected over $12,000.00 in interest, and for more than 18 years we have never turned a student away from Lees College for lack of money. We did turn one or two away who didn't have the money, but that was because we didn't believe they could do college work and not because of lack of money.

During the last of Mr. Hoover's administration I received an inquiry from the local foreman of the federal work crew asking if I had any work on the campus I would like to have done. I immediately sent work to him to bring his men and wheelbarrows and picks and shovels up to the campus, and I would put them to work. This was the beginning of nearly $100,000.00 worth of work and material government did on Lees College campus. It's a fantastic story for I was told that it was the only private school or church-owned school in America on which this kind of work was done. I have my doubts about this, but I do think it is probably true for Kentucky. The total results of this work was a vast improvement of the physical appearance of the campus, a cement stadium that would seat some 6,000 people, hard surface streets on three sides of the campus, and a recreation field that the college, the town, and the city high school have enjoyed and used for the last 10 to 15 years. The total cost to the college of this $100,000.00 worth of work was less than $1,000.00. The repairing and equipment of the school building went on steadily during the 20 years of my administration. It was a splendidly built building in the first place, but had been sadly neglected and in some instances deterioration had gone far. For instance, there was no drainage for waste water in the building at all, and there was no public sewers in town. This was an expensive undertaking, but absolutely necessary and what we did has been satisfactory for more than 18 years.