Lakewood Lore

City's fine educators put heart into their jobs

Credit for Lakewood’s longstanding reputation of excellence in education belongs in large part to the city’s fine teachers and administrators past and present.

Among those often recalled in the school days’ memories of Lakewoodites are three standouts from the middle years of this century -- Mahlon A. Povenmire, Robert L. Meeks and Donald A. Lee.

Povenmire was principal of Lakewood High School for 19 years, from 1948 until he retired in 1967. He was hardworking, conscientious and warmhearted, and he loved his job and his school.

“If I had to do it over, I would,” he told his wife Portia to whom he was married for 54 years and who still lives in the family home on Lincoln Avenue.

“Mahlon said he loved his school because he had the world’s best faculty and the best parents who sent him the best kids,” she remembered.

Born in Hocking County, Ohio, and educated at Ohio State University, Povenmire started his teaching career downstate and came to Lakewood in 1948 after serving as school superintendent in Galion.

He was 80 when he died from heart failure on Jan. 5, 1984, six days after the death of Robert Meeks, who was assistant principal of Lakewood High during much of Povenmire’s term as principal.

Meeks, who lived to be 93, was a liberal thinker, ardent civil rights worker and a disciplinarian. At age 73, he was jailed in Jackson, Miss., with nine other northerners for fighting to break racial barriers at four Methodist churches in the southern state capital.

A devout Christian and pacifist who gave more than lip service, Meeks defended Japanese-Americans who were interned in western states during World War II, and got a bullet through his window for his trouble.

He held degrees from Miami and Columbia universities and spent 44 years in the Lakewood school system before retiring in 1960 after 32 years as assistant principal.

Our third subject, Don Lee, who died in 1988 at age 80, is cherished in memory as a fine teacher, coach, recreation supervisor, principal and all-round lovable guy.

Among his friends, he was known as a good-humored prankster and an inveterate saver. He sometimes set off tiny firecrackers at Kiwanis meetings and would go to dances wearing one red sock and one white one.

In his attic he stored stacks of memorabilia, including overruns of expired tickets to Lakewood recreational programs and other doings in which he had a role in the distant past.

On occasion he would slip these tickets under the luncheon plates at Kiwanis meetings. As fellow members sat down, they would radiate appreciation; that is, until upon closer examination, they discovered the decades-old dates printed on the ducats.

Lee was a native of Eldorado, a small Ohio town near the Indiana border. He had degrees in education from Ball State and Ohio State Universities, and started his teaching career at Marion, Ohio, in 1928.

He came to Lakewood in 1937 as teacher and coach at Harrison Elementary School, advancing to principal in two years. Later he earned other principalships -- at Roosevelt, beginning in ‘49, and at Garfield from ‘52 until he retired in ‘67.

This article by Dan Chabek appeared in the Lakewood Sun Post October 19, 1989. Reprinted with permission.

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