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| 1638 Granville Street, March 2010 |
J.A. Laurence purchased lots 4 and 5 from Samuel Ryland in 1892. The Laurences sold the lots to W.A. Jones in 1894. Jones sold the lots in 1898 to A.R. McNeille.
The McNeilles lived at 1634 Granville Street. McNeille sold the lots to Otho W. Loofbourrow on April 1, 1913. On March 4, 1914, Ross W. Cheek bought the two lots.
Ross was in real estate and was President of the Columbus Real Estate Board (now the Columbus Board of Realtors) in 1913.
This house was probably built in 1914 either by Cheek or for the Dotys. The Dotys bought the property from Cheek on July 14, 1914.
George Henry Doty was born September 15, 1853 in Whitley County, Indiana, son of James and Barbara Shreve Doty. He married Julia Eliza Parfitt on December 20, 1883 at First Presbyterian Church, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Julia was born March 21, 1862 in Pennsylvania, daughter of John and Mary A. Brown Parfitt. They had a son, Earl J. (October 1884).
In 1910, George was a railroad baggage master. The Dotys lived at 329 West Ninth Avenue. In 1920 the Dotys lived at 992 Oak Street.
George died in Columbus on December 17, 1934. He and his parents are buried at Greenlawn Cemetery. Earl had moved to Alameda, California before 1940. Julia died in Alameda on October 7, 1956.
On May 4, 1916, Stanley Sparks bought the house from the Dotys.
Stanley William Sparks was born May 27, 1875 in Ohio, son of Edward S. and Belle Akin Sparks.
He married Viola Belle Knarston on March 10, 1910 in Covington, Kentucky. Viola was born in California in 1885
In 1910 the newly married Sparks lived with Stanley's family at 1040 Fair Avenue. Stanley was a commercial traveler in machinery. The July 27, 1911 issue of The Iron Age reports that effective August 1st, the machinery department of the Lake Erie Nail and Supply Company of Cleveland "will be in charge of S.W. Sparks, who has been connected with the Osborne & Sexton Machinery Company, Columbus, Ohio."
The May 1916 Southern Hardware journal reports, "The Simplex Machine Tool Company, of Cleveland, with $100,000 capital, has been started by S.W. Sparks, C.D. Gibson, W.E. McNaughton, John O' Bren and Frank Ginn." It is reported elsewhere that the Simplex company was a sales arm of Cleveland Machine and Supply Company and that Sparks was President of both firms. In 1917 Stanley was living at the Seneca Hotel in Columbus.
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| Stanley W. Sparks, circa 1919 |
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| Edna Spencer Sparks, circa 1919 |
On December 2, 1920, Stanley and Edna divorced in New York City.
Stanley married Lyndel Clima in Cuyahoga County, Ohio on December 18, 1920. Lyndel was born about 1892 in Naugatuck, Connecticut, daughter of Edmund R. and Inez A. Gibbud Clyma.
In 1925, Sparks was living in Summit, New Jersey and filed a patent for an improved gate valve design. He assigned the patent to the Columbus Machine Company.
In 1930, Sparks was living in Norwalk, Connecticut with his fourth wife, Eunice M., who he married in 1929. Eunice was born about 1899.
In the 1939 Norwalk City Directory, Stanley is listed with what seems to be his fifth wife, Rosella. In 1941, Sparks filed a patent for the Sparks Lathe which he assigned to the Sparks Machine Tool Corporation of Norwalk.
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| Herbert H. Goddard, circa 1938 |
The Indiana University website states, "It is no exaggeration to characterize Henry Goddard as the father of intelligence testing in the United States. His biographer points out that he was either a leader or a participant in every significant event occurring during the genesis of American psychometrics. In the years between 1908 and 1918 he translated the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale into English, distributed 22,000 copies of the test throughout the United States, advocated for its use in the public schools, established an intelligence testing program on Ellis Island, and served as a member of Robert Yerkes' Army Alpha and Beta testing team during World War One (Zenderland, 1998, p.2). Goddard's contributions to public education were considerable as well: He helped draft the first state law mandating that schools provide special education, and stressed the need for public school reform by suggesting that normal children could benefit from the instructional techniques originally developed for use with retarded students (Zenderland, p. 124, 63).
When Goddard began working in education he was an unlikely candidate for such a distinguished career. He spent his 20s working as a Quaker schoolteacher and principal, and he didn't begin his Ph.D. work until he was 30 years old. He graduated in 1899 and took a job teaching psychology and pedagogy at a state normal school in Pennsylvania. In 1906 he was offered a position in a small New Jersey institution called the Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys. He enjoyed his work with the students there, and became very interested in the both the causes of mental deficiency and the teaching methods employed by the instructors. His research facility at the school was perhaps the first laboratory for the scientific study of mentally retarded persons."
From a webpage by a researcher who identifies herself only as Lorainne, "As for Henry Herbert Goddard, I may be going out on a limb here, but I believe the reason the tone of "The Kallikaks" study was so harsh (aside from selective editing) was because of his genuine outrage over the conditions Elizabeth Kite reported to him. He had been raised in Maine, in an almost Puritanically-strict Quaker environment, and so, it's understandable that his confoundment must have grown with every story of perfidy provided by Miss Kite. Yet, there was much in Emma's family history that uncomfortably parallelled his own!
"HHG had been born (1866), like Emma, into the less-favored branches of TWO illustrious family trees, the Goodards and the Winslows. His cousins included rocket scientist Robert Goddard, and father & son naturalists Pliny and David Goddard (the latter, a prize-winning botanist and drug-policy advisor under several Adminstrations, referred to his notorious cousin as "Feebleminded Goddard".) Henry's father was a once-prosperous farmer who had sunk, by the time of his son's birth, from landowner to day laborer, partly due to permanent disability from being gored by a bull. His mother, Sarah, became a fanatical Quaker missionary, leaving her crippled husband and son to the care of Henry's much older, married sisters while she preached all over North America.
"Even so, Henry had positive memories of his parents. "They loved me uncommonly", he wrote, "I was the child of their [old] age." There was, apparently, little physical punishment (the father, who died when Henry was nine, was "very gentle") though both parents were quite firm in imposing their beliefs, especially about tee-totalling; their son avoided any drink stronger than cider. Henry grew up in intense poverty (but "genteel"--- no infamous behavior like the rudderless Kallikaks he later wrote about) , only partly relieved by handouts from the local Quaker congregation and earnings from his mother's missions. How he felt about his sisters and their husbands, who raised him after the father's death, may have been something else--- it's interesting to note that, when Henry's wife died, and he grew old, he went to live in California with her relatives, rather than anyone in his sisters' families, or back to Maine, period.
"In any case, the Quakers DID provide Henry with an education--- in a local boarding school, and later, via a scholarship, Haverford College, both of which he later described in almost Dickensian terms. The boarding school was surrounded by a high fence, and in both institutions, the students' routine was monastic. The general intent was to protect the fledgling Quakers from corruption and evil, preparing them for modest careers in teaching and preaching. Henry's instructors discouraged him from reading for enjoyment, and insisted that he bury himself in Greek--- which had its effect, years later, when he was inventing creative terminology such as the word "moron" and, of course, "Kallikak" ("kallos" meaning good; "kakos" meaning bad.)
"Like Emma at Vineland, Henry was not exactly mistreated in HIS schools, either. He won prizes for his speeches, was involved with the school newspaper and the brand-new YMCA (much more religiously-oriented than it is now.) And, in spite of his deceptively compact form and smallish hands, he played on the football team, back when the game, more like rugby then, lacked all modern pretenses at safety. Later, he was even, briefly, a football coach while also teaching in a college in California. Eventually, fulfilling a boyhood dream, the surprisingly sturdy Henry found time to go mountain-climbing in Europe while there for psychological conferences !
"He made a fair number of life-long friends, but in boyhood, he was quiet and shy ---unless overwhelmed with a new enthusiasm (not always a good thing, like when he later became enamored and then obsessed with intelligence studies.) He developed another trait that reflected his fatherless state: When seized by his enthusiasms, he eagerly, perhaps TOO eagerly, sought approval and acquaintance with prominent men in whatever field his interests currently lay. (Also, sometimes not a good thing.) It was, indeed, this life-long tendency toward almost boyish eagerness, even ingenuousness, which endeared him to his friends, to such an extent that, in his old age, he himself derided his "childishness."
"Henry was not very attractive as a youth, with an oblong head, topped by a receding hairline by his teens, and a long nose, all of which he later brought into balance with a substantial mustache. He was already repressing whatever resentments he had against his absent mother, dead father, busy sisters and brothers-in-law, and, of course, his teachers. In old age, Henry would write of the occasions he had been made to feel lonely and incompetent, and that he HAD initially felt empathy with his Vineland pupils. "I was one of them!"
"Henry's destiny seemed to be as an undistinguished teacher in a series of small Quaker schools. It was during one sojourn that he met his wife, Emma Florence Robbins, a fellow teacher. She was over a year older, but petite and pretty; however, she was noted for being "strong-willed." (This may have been the result of being raised, along with many siblings, by a very determined widowed mother who ran the family farm on her own after her husband's early death.) Even so, Emma seemed to be just what the young, lonely Henry needed--- he married her just before his 23rd birthday. He let her set the rules of their home, and, perhaps because they remained childless, the couple was more devoted than most. When apart, they wrote each other several times a day. Observers would comment 25 years later that the Goddards still behaved like love-struck teenagers. Henry would even write to a male colleague that he couldn't come to a meeting he'd been looking forward to, because Emma was sick, and he acted as "nurse and cook." When she died in 1936 (by which time the couple was living in Illinois) Henry's grief and depression was so intense, that his friends all the way back in Vineland worried about him."
The Goddards employed a live-in maid, Helen T. Duncan in 1926.
Emma died of cancer on October 23, 1936 at University Hospital in Columbus. She is buried at Siloam Cemetery in Vineland, New Jersey.
Goddard moved to Santa Barbara, California in 1947. He died at his home there on June 18, 1957. Wikipedia states that his cremated remains were interred with those of his wife at the Vineland Training School (Cemetery), though evidence suggests the Goddards are both buried at Siloam Cemetery in Vineland.
Goddard sold the house on February 18, 1948 to Robert C. and Dorothy H. Duckworth, though Robert and his parents are already listed as living at the house (as is Henry Goddard) in the 1946 City Directory.
Robert C. Duckworth was born June 11, 1920 in Ohio, son of Van James and Suzanne Duckworth. He married Dorothy Helen Nicklaus on November 2, 1946. Dorothy was born December 17, 1922, daughter of Louis Charles and Arkie Belle Thompson Nicklaus. They had three children.
In 1940, Robert lived with his parents at 1637 Oak Street.
Robert followed in the footsteps of his father, a radio repairman with his own shop. In the early 1950s, Robert had the shop and his father worked as a television tech at Riebel's Appliance Center. The present God's House of Glory at 2189 East Fifth Avenue near Sunbury Road was the home of Duckworth Television and Radio Service. The Duckworths later lived at 178 North Ardmore Road in Bexley.
Robert died June 30, 1990 and Dorothy on January 9, 2004. They are buried at Greenlawn Cemetery.
On November 17, 1949, the Duckworths sold the house to James W. and Elmine H. Rickman.
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| James W. Rickman, circa 1943 |
In 1940, James lived with his parents in Middleport, Meigs County and Elminie lived with her family in Londsdale Mill, South Carolina.
James was a Staff Sergeant in the Army in WWII. He was awarded four battle stars and a good conduct medal. He attended Wilberforce State College. He was an attorney.
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| The Rickmans breaking ground for a new school building, circa 1962 |
Elminie was one of nine children. She graduated from the Oconnee County School System and continued her education at Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts Degree and teaching certification for Elementary Education. Mrs. Rickman taught school in Seneca and then joined her husband, Attorney James W. Rickman, in Columbus, Ohio in 1947.
In 1947 and 1948 she was a teacher at the Religious Training Institute (RTI) which was located at 20th and Long Street. In 1952 Mrs. Rickman began a kindergarten in her home at 1638 Granville Street with eight children. In approximately 1955 she purchased property at 297 Woodland Avenue and relocated her school, which had an enrollment of nearly 100 students and a staff of five trained teachers. She envisioned, founded, built and served as director of Rick's Child Guidance Center (Kindergarten-Nursery), which accommodated two hundred children and is said to be the first all fireproof building for a kindergarten in the state of Ohio. Apparently fireproof was a hard lesson learned as the front page of the Columbus Dispatch of January 4, 1962 reported, "Three teachers act quickly to save seventy-five children from a two-alarm fire at Rick's Child Guidance Center Kindergarten, 297 Woodland Avenue." This was followed a month later by another Dispatch story on February 6, 1962 that reported that charges of operation without a license were dismissed against Mrs. Elminie Rickman, 1638 Granville St., Operator of Rick's Child Guidance Center Kindergarten.
From 1953 to 1992, Mrs. Rickman had continuously conducted her kindergarten with a staff of eight teachers, six substitutes, a cook, a custodian and two bus drivers. She held annual graduation exercises for her kindergarten students. Graduates from her school number into the thousands. In addition, she presented several theatrical productions, programs and recitals over the years. She received numerous honors throughout her life for her contributions to various civic and community affairs.
James and Elminie both died in Columbus, he on November 2, 1992 and she on April 16, 2000.
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| Rick's Child Guidance Center, 289 Woodland Avenue |
