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Philip Spiess
Mr. Lounds, I have not been able to locate a list of Walnut Hills High School principals, as I am here in Washington and not in Cincinnati, but if one does not exist somewhere (say, at the school itself -- and I'll ask), surely someone with the time and access could construct the list by going year by year through old school yearbooks (I would like to think that a complete run of those exists somewhere!).
However, I can reconstruct a few principals for you. As I mentioned in Post #6060 ["Some Prominent Cincinnati Poets," 9-5-2022], William Henry Venable, prominent Cincinnati and Ohio poet and historian, transferred in 1896 from being chairman of the English department at Hughes High School to Walnut Hills High School to become chairman of the English department there. This was within a year of Walnut Hills first being established as a high school (1895). I have a vague memory (I could be wrong) that at some point he served as principal, or perhaps it was as an interim principal. His son, Emerson Venable, later became chairman of WHHS's English department; William Henry's daughter, Una Venable, was head of the high school division of Pleasant Ridge Public School when it had its deadly disaster [see Post #6666, "The Pleasant Ridge Privy Disaster," 4-17-2024]; and Emerson's daughter was the Hollywood starlet, later classics teacher in Los Angeles, Evelyn Venable. William Henry Venable, at some time prior to his teaching at either Hughes or Walnut Hills, founded and conducted the African School of Popular Science and History in Cincinnati. [As I noted in Post #6060, I have been unable to track down any other information on this school; I assume it was shortlived.]
George Davis, as I mentioned in Post #6671 [5-8-2024], was WHHS principal in 1918. My mother, who entered Walnut Hills as a 7th grader in 1933, told me that the principal was a Mr. Davis [is it possible that he was there from 1918-1933?]. However, my mother also told me that he died that year [?] of a heart attack, shortly after some male students ran a flag with the Nazi swastika up the flagpole in the center of the circle (1933 was the year that Hitler came to power). Davis was succeeded by Leonard Stewart [I'm writing all this from very old memories], who was still principal when my mother graduated in 1939.
And so, skipping over a decade and a half, we come to our own days at Walnut Hills. Prior to the Class of 1964 arriving as 7th graders in the fall of 1958, say, in the early or mid-1950s, Harold "Doc" Howe II became principal of WHHS. His grandfather, Gen. Samuel Chapman Armstrong, had been the founder (1868) and first president of the Hampton Nornmal and Agricultural School ["normal schools" were teacher training schools], which later became the famed Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) near Hampton Roads, Virginia. The Institute was funded by the American Missionary Association for the express purpose of providing former Southern slaves with moral training and practical industrial education; the school was coeducational (and for some years also had Native American students). It was also the only school in the United States that had a separate training program for black librarians. Harold's father, the Rev. Arthur Howe (the quarterback for Yale University's 1909 national championship team), was a later president of Hampton Institute, so Harold grew up in an educational and campus environment. After serving at Walnut Hills, Harold Howe continued in academia, and in 1965 he was appointed U. S. Commissioner of Education by President Lyndon Johnson. (This was still in the days when the Commissioner of Education was under the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare [HEW], before the U. S. Department of Education became its own department [1979-1980] and the Commissioner became Secretary of Education.) Harold Howe served as Commissioner from 1965 to 1968; his chief task, the one for which he is remembered, was heading up the federal abolishment of school segregation in the United States as required under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (part of President Johnson's "Great Society" program).
I believe Harold Howe's immediate successor as principal of Walnut Hills was Mr. Meacham [first name, anybody?], who was principal when the Class of 1964 arrived. He was succeeded, as we all know, by Philip McDevitt, famed in song if not in story. At some point after him (and after we had graduated), our former assistant principal, Raymond Brokamp became principal, and I believe that somewhere down the line after him his son, another Mr. Brokamp, became principal -- but this is all too recent for one of my venerable [no, not Venable, nor (please!) venereal] years to know about. Some youngster will have to come along to fill us in.
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