#40: New teachers (1924)
"Meanwhile, we had been making every effort to secure suitable
teachers. Mr. Getchell came from his office at Rue Franque 5,
at appointed hours to take care of College business again, and
Mr. Brewster also came by appointment to teach certain Bible
lessons. I estimated that I wrote fifty letters before finding
the right man for one Greek position, but he became a reliable
and permanent teacher and has been one of the faculty to this day.
The first new teacher was Mr. Savvas Theodorides, who had been
one of our students as a ruddy-faced Greek lad during the
irregular war years in Turkey. He had learned something of
pharmacy by voluntary work for our doctors, and that probably
kept him alive, for when he was drafted into the Turkish army,
he made himself useful to the army doctors, and they spared
his life. When Kiri Savvas came, I was the President of the
College and he was the rest of the faculty, or staff, as clerk,
translator, secretary, errand-boy, factotum, and then monitor
and teacher.
Our reputation with the officials would depend very much on
competent instruction in Greek. Rev. Aristidi Mihitsopoulos
had been one of our students of Theology in Merzifon. He
was now the capable minister of the Evangelical Church in
Thessaloniki, manager of an entire orphanage amid the
foothills of Mt. Olympus, and a man well-known and much
respected. His counsel and help were of great significance
to us strangers. One day he came to my room in the hotel,
bringing a young man, Prof. Ioannes Papastavrou, whom he
recommended as a teacher of Greek. Prof. Papastavrou was
a real scholar, a graduate of the University of Athens,
a very likeable man, and a respected teacher in the city.
He became the approved head of our Greek Department from
the beginning.
Pupils and their parents were chiefly anxious for the
learning of English, and in this we were fortunate in
finding Mr. H. R. Henwood, an English soldier, who had
recently been discharged in Constantinople and who, having
married a Greek wife, did not care to hurry away. He was
an admirable man for our first classes in English, and
in various ways, and his wife served helpfully as matron.
Mr. Nazaret Mikhlian, a graduate of the American Normal
School in Sivas, was one among the throng of Armenians
who were resettling westward of the Aegean Sea, a teacher
by profession, choice and preparation, and he was engaged
as teacher of the Armenian language.
Mr. John G. Racopoulos, one of our former students, a
graduate of the Trebizond Greek Gymnasium, referred to
by Mrs. Getchell as "her foster son", fortunately was
available as business manager and for some lessons in
Mathematics."
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