Article by Silas Bent which appeared in the Louisville Courier-Journal a little over a month after Henry Cherry\u27s death. It gives an overview of his life and career at Western Kentucky University.https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/exhibit_2015/1008/thumbnail.jp

Bent, Silas

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Western Kentucky UniversityTopSCHOLAR®2015: Cherry Statue Time Capsule Online Exhibits ~ Kentucky Museum / LibrarySpecial Collections9-12-1937His Memorial is Western StateSilas BentFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/exhibit_2015Part of the Higher Education Administration Commons, History Commons, and the JournalismStudies CommonsThis Book is brought to you for free and open access by TopSCHOLAR®. It has been accepted for inclusion in 2015: Cherry Statue Time Capsule by anauthorized administrator of TopSCHOLAR®. For more information, please contact connie.foster@wku.edu.Recommended CitationBent, Silas, "His Memorial is Western State" (1937). 2015: Cherry Statue Time Capsule. Book 11.http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/exhibit_2015/11., H. H. C" e rr y (above) . was suc-ceed ed th is month by P all I L. Garrett. - (Drawini By Joseph. By Silas Bent. To sit up with the dying is a mourn-ful fundamental of Kentucky folk-ways. So when the word went thro~gh the Barren River bottoms near Bowlmg Green that George Cherry's boy was on h is deathbed with typhoid and couldn't live through the day. the doctor said so, farmers gathered from the countryside to whittle and chew tobacco and talk about crops, It was a brilliant mid-summer Sabbath. Frequently a delegation of two or three visited the sickroom of the log house, tramping noisily. and retu~·ned to their fe llows with a news bulletm. To the boy. tossin&., w ith fever, this well-meant neighborrmess became unendurable. He lifted h imself with painful effort to one elbow. "Get out of here," he com-manded. "I'm not going to die." That indomitable spirit to be up and dOing persisted ,hrougll the life of Henry Hardin Cherry, who died recently at Bowling Green. It was unbroken h~ .the face of bit ter poverty, of cruel ' denslOJ; of disastrous f ire and o( misguided litiga-t ion. It had brought him to the uresi' dency of Western Kentuck~ State Te~ch­ers College, time and agam the lar gest of its kind in this country. The school has more than 4,000 stUdents, muc~ ~ore t han 100 splend.~ acres, an~, bUIldmgs which ha ve cost some three millIons. Mr. Cherry was a college president for forty -f ive yeari· Peddle(l Behind Oxen The seventh of nine sons, H. H. Chen-y and a brother drove oxen as boys to sell potatoes and ax handles in the town. Once Henry ventured inadvertently into a classroom where a teacher was initiat-ing the girls of a fashionable school into the myster ies of Browning. "Want to buy some taters?" he asked, Laughed out of that room by a group of girls, the farm lad continued un-daunted his search for customers. He was able to attend school in those days an average of but two months annually, but when he had split and sold enough ax handles to amass $72 he went to the Normal School. The weekly tu ition was $1 and the board was $1.50; the school fee was f ixed but the ambitious young man saw no need to squander money on board. He rented a room for 40 cents a week and cooked his own food, mostly rice. Thus his capital saw him through ten months. Students and faculty alike were called "Soups" when I was in my teens in Bowl-ing Green. Most of those struggling for an education in the Cherry Scho'ol were hard put to it for funds, and lived in the cheapest boarding houses, whence the term. If a "Soup" had the effron'tery to make a date w ith a town girl, we way-laid h im as he was going home and "rocked" h im. In the presence of these indignities , some gave up and went home. Now, during the first five months of that school there wcre but twenty-eight students, and for several years growth was not rapid. These defections from the rinks were serious: but even jf that had not been so, the president was not the sort of man to fail his followhs. He hid behind trees to get the names of the rock-throwers, and prosecuted th~m success-fu lly. More, he had Lark Wilkins ar-r aigned before the City Judge on a charge of calling his pupils "Soups," ' Led Teacher Trai"i"g Move All of us watched that case with in-terest, for we had heard that " Toose" Wilkins, Lark's father, actually had en-couraged Mr. Cherry to go ahead. City Judge Hines disappoin ted all of us when he ruled gravely that the epithet was a"n offense aga inst the dignity of the com-munity and a breach of the peace. Lark · w as duly fined, and h is father paid, There-after, although we made fun of the stu-" dent body privately by the old name, we did not affront them publicly. There was still left to us the recourse of ostracizing them socially, which we did with the I thoughtless enjoyment of a snobbish small town; and we may have pummeled some of them, when we caught them swimming · at Beech Bend or cross ing the covered bridge at the foot of College St. But we Cl;>uld not keep the school from grow-ing, and we . bu t deepened the en thusiasm and loyalty of its personnel. It was in 1892 that H. H. and T. C. Che:t,ry, the brothers who had sold taters and ax handles, organized the Bowling Green Business College and Literary Insti-, tute. By its very pretentiousness that n ame bespoke their h igh hopes; but it was changed three years later to the Southern Normal School and Bowling Green Business College. A little later · H . H. Cherry took entire control of it. Fire in 1899 completely destroyed the modest bui ld ings and nIl equipment, but n ot one day of instruction was lost, The second and third floors of business build -ings on "The Square" and nearby were leased, the work went ahead, and a tuiJd-ing company was incorporated to provide a new home. This W<lS still a private insti tution. W hC'n it was oa -; going basis, Mr. C;herry became a leader vf the movement to have the State take charge of \he training at teachers fOl' its common scnOOIS, AL hl~ instigation the students and many alumm sent a petition for this step to the Gen-eral Assembly. "We most earnestly pl~dge to do everything we can," they, pr~nu~ed, "to make it one of the great lllstitutlOns of this country." Ojjere(l School to State Lobbying at Frank£o:ct for the bilI, Mr, Cherry volunteered to give to Kentucky property representing years of labor ~nd a triumph over adversity, the school bUlld-ings and equipment and a student enro~l­ment gathered from eight States. The bill passed, but an action wa~ brought to test its constitutionality. ThiS was defe~ted, but later when the Assembly appropnatp.l" further f~nds to acquire additiona l g;'our-is and buildings, another similar SUIt was entel-ed, with the same result Not until five years after the Stale to,?k charge was the school moved from ~ts quarters on College St.\ to its present slle on Teachers College Heights. Bowling Green is surrounded by handsome hills, of which this is the handsomest. During the War Between the States, when the town was a point of considerable strategic I importance, it was crowned by Fort Alb,ert Sidney Johnson, from which the Ullion forces drove the Confederates on February 15, 1862. Remnants of the fort are pre-served, and reveal that even then there was trench warfare. Earlier still, what is now College Heights had been called Vinegar Hill. A crone who lived in a thicket there had brewed an illicit corn liquor which she dubbed vinegar and sold to the young blades of the village. After the war the trees were cleared to make way for a dignified brick building which housed Potter College, in the early Nineties of the last century one 01 the leading institutions of its kind for young women of the South. After it had flourished for more than two decades , the property was acquired for Western; and whcn the new students marched up the hill they carried with them their books, maps, globes and other equipment, plus all the furnitw-e of the old school. Moreover, they set about vigorously with picks, hoes, shovels and wheelbarrows to clean up the campus and make themselves at home. Forty High Schools Then A few years earlier the town had fa iled in an effort to persuade the State to locate there a penitentiary for which $250,000 had been appropriated. A delegation of citizens was sent to lobby for it and was outraged that their own State Senator, Dr. Robert Parker of nearby Scottsville, would not support them. "Bowling Green will never be a prison town," the physician maintained stoutly; "it was meant to be a city of scbools ,an.d colleges." The Cherrys were making that' prophesy; come true. Eddyville got the penitentiary, and Bowling Green did not begrudge it. After absorbing Potter College, Western reached out for 50-year-old Ogden College, on the eastern slope of its hi ll. Some thought this was sheer voracity; but John B. Rodes, a graduate of Ogden, address ing an alumni banquet, said that he was "overjoyed" at the merger, and declared U1at at last the hill typified "the spirit of a wide tolerant outlook on humanity; a spirit that will impel us to fo llow knowledge 'like a sinking star beyond the utmost bounds of h uman thought.''' The more supercilious part of the population dwindled rapidly thereafter, and no longer Jifted its eyebrows so persisten tly. The supercilious were those who had the better advantages !n getting an edu-cation. Many of them could attend priva te school$. Kentucky was a bit backward in the scholastic f ield. Thi r ty years ago, when Western became a State insti tu tion, there were fewer than for ty public h igh schools, where now there al'e 668 ; many chi ldren could not buy the te x tbooks they needed and so could not go to school, but last year the State spent half a million dollars for books to give to the underprivileged; county superin tendents could qualify by taking an examination which any good eighth-grade pupil could pass, but now they must have at least a bachelor's degree and three-fourths of them are M. A.'s. The State per capita tax for schools has almost quadrupled in that period. It c'annot be sa id that H. H. Cherry and Western's faculty have been solely responsible for these advances, but the fac t is that they have been in the vanguard all along, and that Mr. Cher ry's unflagging en thusiasm, especiaUy in the matter of putting aU children on an equal footing and in improving scholastic itand .. ards, have been dominant factors. 30,000 Have Enrolled In those earlier days the man who taught art at Western taught penmanship also; MI', Cherry himself had been master of the Spencerian flourish in his young manhood, and regarded it doubtless as a form of art; now penmanship is taught separately in the business college, there are three art teachers in Western, which is a separate organization, and in the library there are more than 300 books on The Cour!~~.Joumal ilIaga:;,ne, Sunday, Septembe~ 12, 1!l.3Z-Page ~ I Dis ltlemorial Is The college at Bowling Green has 4,000 studen"ts and $3,000,000 buildings in large part because H. H. Cherry insisted on giving it his property and his life art, instead of but three. A part-time instructor offered two courses in geogra-phy and geology, where fow- instructors now give sixteen courses. There were but three courses in history and none in govemment; now there are ten courses, all of college rank. As late as 1909 the Hbrary of less than 4,000 books was housed in a single room; now there are nearly 50,000 books and 3,000 documents with an annual circulation of some 300,000. Nine are on the staff and the school has a separate departm!nt of library science, The growth in other departments, of which there are twenty now, has been no less notable. More than 30,000 have en-rolled, from twoscore states, Canada and Alaska, since Western became a State school; last year three-fifths of them were women. In the Kentucky Building and the grounds around it are the products -(Photo By Eugene Franklin Studio, B{Wling Green, Ky. The building at Ihe exlrem,e top of the air view, to the left of t11 e water lau k. is the K entuck y Building, which houses a m useum of Kcnfuchiana, among oth er thi"gs. Of the buildings shown se parately, the one at the left is H. H. Cherry lIall, occltpied this fall for the first time. 1'he other is the library. of the State and its flora, with invaluable heirlooms such as the cradle in which the first white child born there was rocked to sleep, and a bird sanctuary where the gay call oC the cardinal mingles with the cries of other birds of the region. There is even a bed of wild flora, including bulrushes, which some of us may have supposed went out with Moses. Mr. Cherry would have been thc last to claim credit fOl" the accomplishments of Western. He thought t.hat his fine faculty, numbering more than one hundred, had turned the trick. Always he consulted the faculty, even about minor moves and policies; he never ciismissed a teacher summarily, for although an excellent ex-ecutive he was not a believer in rigorous discipline, Once when a student was found to have defaced property on the campus, he stopped proceedings against the young man; the next year this pupil guided thirty-five children sl)me 140 miles to the Hill, to make their tiny contributions in person to the Kentucky Building. Having prosecuted !Joys of the "best" families for throwing rocks at students and calling them "Soups," MI', Cherry con-tinued his loyalty by organizing a fund to lend those in need. When prices and / rents skyrocketed during an oil boom In 1919, he built a village of cottages for them to occupy at nominal rentals, Not until ' two years ago, because of the at-titude of Fundamentalist Baptists and Methodists, could he permit dancing on the !lill; then it became a fortnightly di-verSlOn. Despite high academic standards, Mr. Cherry's predominant thought was for · the welfare of the student body. He had given thought to the State also, and to its farml'l-s in particular , He was credited, for example, with having introduced al-falfa, a money-getting crop. When he was past the Biblical thrce score and ten, his main purpose was to create a machinery or organization which would carryon smoothly when he was gone. Even then he did not rest upon his oars, although his vision was realized. 

His Memorial is Western State

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His Memorial is Western State

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