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W. Boyce Ricketts
W. Boyce Ricketts devoted his life to Cranbrook for more than 40 years, as a history teacher, headmaster, coach and husband -- marrying his wife, Jane, at the school chapel.
Ricketts arrived at Cranbrook in 1929, just two years after the school had opened. In the 1930s, he traveled abroad to Europe, exploring the history behind Cranbrook School and gaining firsthand experience of Nazi Germany. Ricketts shared his ventures with his students, turning textbook readings into colorful, engaging presentations of facts and personal accounts. Students developed tremendous respect for Ricketts and his strict but fair manner, and good-natured teasing. He was honored with the school's Independence Fellowship in 1968, and retired in 1970. Following Ricketts' death in 1976, a bookshelf in the Cranbrook library was dedicated in his name. |
 12/9/2006 - Charles Chase
Boyce Ricketts was a superb teacher and a wonderful human being. While being a disciplinarian he did so with considerable humor. Who remembers the eraser being bounced off his head while looking out the window in Boyce's class? I remember when being asked a question and after some delay, the comment "don't scratch your head Mr. Chase, you might get splinters in your fingers"!
I arrived at Cranbrook as a scholarship student in the fifth form, and Boyce, "little" Ed Snyder and "Womby" sort of gently led me the way to learn how to achieve in scholarship.
Now being retired after 38 years of the practice of law, I look back with much gratitude to the lifetime skills which I received from Boyce Ricketts.
3/10/2006 - R. Stephen Molina
Everyone has a favorite teacher that inspired them, made the subject exciting and left an everlasting impression. For me, it was "Boycer" Ricketts. I made a hobby of studying American presidents using Mr. Ricketts' approach and often think that after retiring from the law that I'd like to teach American history in a public high school.
3/9/2006 - Douglas Lieberman
Mr. Ricketts taught us to understand history as narrative. It's an approach that had gone out of style by the mid 20th Century (it's coming back now), but it was a great way to engage our minds and hearts in the story of civilization.
3/9/2006 - John Good
Many years after I had taken the International Relations course from "Mr. Ricketts" in my senior year I came back to Cranbrook with another mentor of mine to present a workshop on the new ways of teaching history and social sciences in the schools that we were developing at Carnegie-Mellon University (then it was still Carnegie Tech). Boyce was pleased that I ended up in the same profession he was (and for which he has to take a lot of the blame)and that I was one of the many pioneers then being funded by the Federal Government trying to find new reasons for and new ways of teaching these disciplines. He confessed, however, that he was too far along in years to try our new fangled ways (this was 1967). I understood, but more than that, I had to say that if he did change, there might not be another person like myself entering the profession because of him. As it turns out, Boyce and his ways lasted a lot longer than our new fangled ways, which did not have much of a following only five or ten years later.
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