Maurice H. Cline: the final chapter in his life
Principal Maurice H. Cline and his wife Mary tried to satisfy the hearty appetites of their student boarders, and minimize the cost of each student’s room and board. The Clines made bulk purchases of farm-fresh vegetables, and stored sides of beef and pork in Maurice’s walk-in freezer in the basement. Purchasers of such items as bread or milk placed their receipts on a nail in the kitchen, and students divided these extra monthly costs evenly. Mary served her baked-fruit pies divided into quarters. If a quarter of a pie remained uneaten at the end of a meal, students drew lots for it, but whoever won had to eat the prize immediately.
Although Maurice’s many unorthodox tactics were usually effective and practical, they would be unacceptable by today’s standards. When hiring teachers, the Clines would invite prospective candidates for supper, where Mary assessed the applicant’s suitability.
Today’s unions would frown on this practice, even though the system worked for years. At my job interview in 1965, Maurice asked, “What pay did your board offer? We’ll give you $100 more.” That was the end of our negotiations.
Maurice accumulated cash in a slush fund generated from his photography, printing business and working the cafeteria, where he flipped hamburgers and ran a donut machine. This fund supported school field trips, purchased equipment for the school and saved Orangeville taxpayers a good deal of money. Maurice was accused of sometimes adding oatmeal to extend ground beef supplies to meet unexpected demands for hamburgers.
In spite of Maurice’s unorthodox practices, Orangeville High School enjoyed an excellent academic reputation. Its graduates were highly sought by universities and the school’s greenhouse and its associated courses were one of the first of its kind in the province.
Orangeville High School was ahead of the rest of the province when in 1942 they supplied textbooks free of charge to the students who paid only a caution fee to cover damage and loss of the texts. It was several years later before the Ontario Ministry of Education adopted this policy provincially.
Maurice was an intimidating figure with his stature and stentorian voice, but Elizabeth McPhedran, the diminutive head of the Home Economics Department, was not one easily cowed. Even though “Pheddie” stood not much taller than a fire hydrant, she had no qualms about standing up to Maurice.
He served as Rotary president in 1963-64, First Avenue United Church Sunday school superintendent and Westminister United Sunday school teacher. Maurice established a Student Aid Corporation to provide interest-free loans to needy students and displayed his expertise as a parent by taking in problem students as boarders.
Even though he’d retired from teaching in 1979, Maurice’s compassion affected me personally. When he learned that I might be unable to continue earning a living by teaching as a result of an accident, Maurice offered me the opportunity to learn his printing business. Fortunately I recovered fully, but appreciated his offer.
Maurice had his fingers on the pulse of most school activities. My first non-teaching duty at Orangeville High School was supervising at the yearly school trackmeet, which was held at the Orangeville Raceway. My duty was to determine the order of finish of the finalists in a running event, but due to a thick layer of fog that blanketed the track, I couldn’t see the start of the race. Following the crack of Maurice’s starting pistol in the fog, a group of runners burst from obscurity and raced towards me at the finish line.
A fire that destroyed the original high school in 1948 forced Maurice to organize alternate teaching spaces around town. One unexpected diversion of this fire was the discovery of a box of live rifle ammunition in the school safe. The cartridges were the property of the school’s cadet corps, as Maurice’s school was one of the few in the province with a shooting range in its basement.
Following Maurice’s death in June 1983, the Orangeville Banner devoted a front page story to his career. Ex-student and reader of this column, Ray Bookman, summed up the unique character of Maurice Cline nicely saying, “They don’t make them like they used to…”
This is the final part of a three-part series on the life of Maurice H. Cline.
Clare McCarthy (retired Department Head of Math) in The Orangeville Banner, Friday, Friday, February 27, 2009