Preview
Creation Date
9-1-1937
Description
Paul Garrett was born in Waddy, Kentucky, in 1893. He earned a bachelor’s degree (1914) and a master’s degree (1915) from Georgetown College and also did graduate work at the University of Chicago and the University of Kentucky. Georgetown awarded him an honorary LL. D. in 1938, shortly after he became President of Western Kentucky State Teachers College. Garrett served in an artillery unit during World War I and then began a career in public education, becoming Superintendent of the Versailles city schools in 1924. A close friend of Governor Happy Chandler, he was serving in the Chandler administration as Director of the Division of Personnel Efficiency in the Department of Finance when Western’s President, Henry Hardin Cherry, died unexpectedly in August, 1937. Garrett accompanied Chandler to Cherry’s funeral, and Chandler pressured Western’s Board of Regents to hire Garrett as Western’s next President even though Garrett had no higher education experience and no real connections with Western. The board named Garrett as President on September 1, 1937.
Garrett’s tenure covered a particularly challenging time for Western, stretching from the Great Depression through World War II and into the post-war period. The school’s financial situation was precarious through much of this period, but Garrett was successful in securing federal support for some important campus needs. He secured funding from the Public Works Administration to complete the long-delayed Kentucky Building in 1939, and he secured Works Progress Administration funding to assist in the construction of a building for the Music Department. When World War II military service precipitated a dramatic enrollment decline, Garrett went to Washington and secured a contract with the Army Air Corps for Western to provide coursework for aviation cadets who were enrolled in pre-flight training. The contract provided badly needed income for and kept at least two-dozen faculty members employed because they now had students to teach as part of the cadet program.
Garrett was a voracious reader who took full advantage of Western’s library, and students occasionally found that he had checked out books they needed for their coursework. He was a strong champion of Western sports, particularly Ed Diddle’s highly successful basketball teams, often greeting teams at the railroad station as they returned from away games. Garrett enjoyed a well-earned reputation as a student-oriented President, and an example of his commitment came soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor drew the United States into World War II. Western had one student of Japanese descent—James Oshiro. Concerned about the young man’s safety and his lack of financial support, Garrett gave him a job and moved him in to the President’s Home where he stayed until he graduated in December, 1943.
Garrett also addressed the challenges brought on by the enrollment surge brought on by the end of the war. Student housing was a particularly pressing problem. To accommodate the numbers of veterans arriving on campus after the war, he arranged for temporary campus housing—a conglomeration of small houses and trailers--that came to be known as Vet Village, and he began construction of the first new residence halls to be built since the 1920s—McLean (1947), East (1955), and North (1955). In addition to addressing housing issues, Garrett also saw the need for a student center that would provide recreation and programming opportunities for students, and his efforts led to the construction of Western’s first student center which opened in the center of the hilltop campus in 1953.
Virginia Garrett had her own significant impact on Western’s campus. An avid gardener and a student of horticulture, she was active in campus beautification projects, a service she continued even after her husband’s death when incoming president Kelly Thompson quickly hired her to oversee an extensive landscaping project for the school. The campus had lost more than 150 trees over a three-year period due to drought, and a tree development program was part of the project. With her supervision, the campus planted more than a thousand shrubs in the spring of 1955 and more than 100 trees over the next few years. She particularly enjoyed daffodils and imported some of her bulbs from Ireland. Mrs. Garrett continued in this role for Western until her death in 1961. The school named a campus street in her honor, now Virginia Garrett Loop.
The Garrett family was also touched by tragedy. The Garretts had 3 sons, one of whom died in an accident in 1946, a devastating experience for both parents. Another son, an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, died in an airplane crash in 1969 while serving in Vietnam. As a consequence of a stroke, Garrett himself spent his last years in very poor health and died on February 28, 1955, not long after suffering a fall at the President’s Home. Eight students served as pallbearers at his funeral. A few months later, the Board of Regents voted to name the recently completed student center the Paul Garrett Student Center.
David Lee
University Historian
