“I lit my purest candle close to my
Window, hoping it would catch the eye
Of any vagabond who passed it by,
And I waited in my fleeting house…
“Tell me stories,” I called to the Hobo;
“Stories of cold,” I smiled at the Hobo;
“Stories of old,” I knelt to the Hobo;
And he stood before my fleeting house…
— “Morning Glory,” Tim Buckley
This cautionary tale is entirely true. Anyone who doubts it may contact former Wayland High School coach and teacher Ernie Strong in Hastings.
Once upon a time in the neighboring communities Nashville and Vermontville there was the consolidated school district of Maple Valley, which still exists to this very day. And there came a time in the 1990s that the superintendent of that school district, Carroll Wolff, decided to retire after about 30 years of service as the school chief.
The Board of Education began deliberations and finally hired Dr. Ozzie Parks of Deckerville, a 1954 Wayland High School graduate, to be Wolff’s successor.
Word on the street immediately afterward was that Wolff, president of the Village Council of Nashville, was outraged that Parks was handed a salary of just about the same as he had when he retired.
Interestingly, Wolff then became a candidate for the Maple Valley Board of Education, was elected and then was chosen by colleagues to be board president.
The situation was awkward, to say the least. Maple Valley had a superintendent who was serving at the pleasure of a board that was presided over by his predecessor. And the following two years, board meetings and discussions were dominated by a great deal of strife, wailing and gnashing teeth, rivaling those seen and heard today at Dorr Township.
Wolff had cultivated a longtime reputation as being a bit of a tightwad in spending money on district needs. When he stepped down, the school system had one of the lowest millage rates in the area.
But needs caught up and surpassed frugality, so a massive campaign was launched under Parks’ leadership to increase the meager millage level to handle growing instructional and building needs.
Parks campaigned tirelessly for the millage increase and wrote numerous columns in the Maple Valley News to try to explain why more money was needed.
In one particular incident, he quoted Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” by suggesting it was the best of time and the worst of times.
The millage request went down in flames, largely because Board President Wolff and his staunch ally, Trustee Ron Tobias, another skinflint, vociferously opposed it.
Not long afterward, Tobias and Wolff found two like-minded individuals on the board and the four of them voted against renewing Parks’ contract. He was shown the door on a 4-3 vote.
I was editor of the Maple Valley News at that time, and to this day I am ashamed for having merely stood by and watched these developments unfold. My superiors did not want me to make trouble in the community.
My local reporter, Susan Hinckley, told me many times personally that she had never known Parks to lie to her, and that meant a great deal to her. She was sad to see him go because he was a decent, honorable man and a good role model.
But Parks’ career in education was over and he died at the age of 70 in a farm vehicle accident near Mendon in 2006.
I looked it up and hear tell Wolff died in 2012 at his home in Nashville.
“But nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care.” — The late comedian George Carlin
