Arkansas State College Training School

By James U. "Junior" Craft
Class of 1945
Jonesboro, Arkansas

Expansion and growth, necessitated and born of progress, have swept away all the labors of those of us who worked our way through school on the N.Y.A. (National Youth Administration).

Those of us in the last two years of high school paid $20.00 per semester to attend our junior and senior years. The one-room, one-teacher school of Hope paid the first two years. We were paid 17 ½ cents per hour for a ten-hour day, and allowed to go to school three days per week, provided we maintained good grades.

We, along with the college boys did the labor for the new ground we cleared, over across the St. Francis River. We planted, plowed, then gathered the bountiful corn crop, bringing it then to the lovely cribs in the most beautiful barns I have ever seen, which were barns we had built. We formed and poured our own concrete posts and built the fences. We trucked the logs from the cleared new ground to our mill, which was on Caraway across from the Administration building, and we made our own lumber.

Not infrequently Dr. V.C. Kays, founder and president of the college, could be seen lifting one end of a log, with a couple of high schoolers on the other, either selecting for the mill or the burn pile. He was not one to hang around the office.

The above are some of the progress that was swept away by latter progress. The huge barn complex gave way to the beautiful Convocation structure, and so many other visible evidences of change and growth.

My great-grandpa Thomas A. Craft and Alzeary Slatton, along with his first-born, my grandpa John M. Craft and his wife Nice Ella Gambill, began their lives here at Greensboro before Jonesboro was founded, 150 years and more ago. Between them they raised twenty-five children. One time V.C. Kays told me that, "Your grandpa John and I helped to form the first Grange in Craighead County."

An interesting note, perhaps, for those who remember the C.C.C. on Caraway Road, just south of the tracks: It became a German Prisoner of War facility in the early ‘40's.
I was walking along one morning on my three-mile walk to school, in my pretty R.O.T.C. uniform (we of high school trained with College boys in R.O.T.C. back in those days, as I seem to recall). That uniform was the best clothing I had, and I was proud of it.
Two Germans were standing inside the fence, watching. After I passed, on said to the other - in perfect English - "wonder how he'd look doing the goose step?'" Shortly, end of '43, I went to the Army and served in the C.B. I. (China-Burma-India) Theater.

For many years I felt an attachment of ownership in the growth of the college. I looked with pride on the hard-working force of Vic Lassiter, Ralph Waddell, and Jap Hunter, who soiled their hands daily, along with "V.C.", in the building of a fine college's physical plant to university status.

As someone has said, we of this generation "have out-lived our uselessness," and as such we think in the past and don't so much "do" any more. Nostalgia seems to rule, and melancholy sets in, and we see only what we may have seen in the past.

Yet, we who saw it come alive and grow can only pray and hope for another century so outstanding as this one passing has been.