MORGANTOWN — Clarence Harvey Jr., the longtime Monongalia County educator and school board member who died last week at the age of 95, was fluent in the language of his profession.
Even the more jargon-y aspects of it.
That is to say, he could make monuments out of manipulatives – while giving rousing rundowns of rubrics.
He could also deliver discourses on data all day long, if the whitepaper or presentation called for it.
He would also do something else in the middle of it all. He would waggle his eyebrows to offer a twinkling caveat.
All that stuff is fine, he’d say – unless it overrides and overwhelms the one job of the day for any classroom teacher.
Which is, to teach.
Counting his time as an elected member to the school board, Harvey, all told, spent 70 years in his profession.
Nope, that’s not a typo – 70 years.
Harvey was a school principal and an elected member to the school board. He was an administrator and college professor.
Ask him what he did for a living, and he’d answer in one sentence.
The arrangements for his service are incomplete at Hastings Funeral Home, but the heart of his professional calling sang in the brevity of one particular sentence in the brief obituary: “He was a teacher.”
Standard issue?
“Well, that was definitely Dr. Harvey,” Mike Kelly said of his friend who had earned a doctorate in education from Penn State, on top of his degrees from WVU.
“He had this thing he’d always say about teachers and teaching,” Kelly remembered.
“He’d say: ‘Standardized testing would be great – if all students were standard.’”
In a profession that celebrates and venerates the light of learning, that was Kelly’s illumination of why he was paying attention, too.
“I said, ‘I’m stealing that.’ He laughed and said, ‘It’s yours.’ Now I say it all the time, but I always attribute it to him.”
Harvey always attributed his vocation from his first days as a student at the former Cassville School in western Monongalia County.
His family had moved to Mon from Webster County so his father could dig coal in Osage Mine No. 3. The kid who answered to “Junior,” was shy and undersized, but his classmates and teachers drew him out, he remembered.
It was even more so at University High.
He recounted those days in a 1998 profile in The Dominion Post.
“They were doing things,” he said, of those long-ago educators. “They gave us more than words. Today, they call it, ‘manipulatives,’ or ‘hands-on’ learning. Back then, it was just good teaching.”
Institutional knowledge
Harvey was more than ready to enroll among the ranks. There were degrees from WVU and a doctorate in education from Penn State.
His first teaching job was in 1948 at the former Daybrook Junior High.
Osage Junior High and University High came next, where he taught English and history.
He directed the teacher education program at the former Fairmont State College before he trekked back to Mon’s district, where he finished his career.
Harvey retired from the district office in 1982 and ran for BOE two years later, sitting in at his last board meeting in 2018, as he was just entering his ninth decade.
State delegate Joe Statler, who represents Mon and served several years with Harvey on the school board marvels at the longevity.
A-plus, the lawmaker said.
“Dr. Harvey had all this institutional knowledge. He was an encyclopedia. He knew what worked and what didn’t.”
Ain’t that the truth, Kelly said.
“We’d be talking about a proposal and Dr. Harvey would be listening. I’d ask him, ‘Has the county ever tried this before?’ He’d say, like, ‘Well we tried something similar in 1969.’ Sometimes, whatever that was had worked. Sometimes it didn’t. But he always knew.”
Blessings – and one regret
Harvey cherished his family and friendships just like a teacher calling roll.
“I’ve been really blessed,” said Harvey, who had 66 years with Wilma, who died in 2014.
Together, they had three children, with grandchildren and great-grandchildren filling seats at their table right on schedule.
Did the old educator have any regrets?
Well, maybe, he confessed in that newspaper profile.
“I never would have left the classroom. The opportunity to help children learn: What a challenge … how exciting.”
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