Laying the Foundation for Effective Educational Leadership

The Early Years

We were trailblazers for the baby boomer generation. I was born in Salisbury, North Carolina, on September 15, 1946, to Ralph and Esther Sinclair. I was the first of three children, and was fortunate enough to have a father who was a lifetime educator and a mother who was a stay-at-home mom until her three children were grown. My sister, Jean, was born four years later and my brother, Roy, was born in 1952.

I remember very little about my first three years when the family lived in Cooleemee, North Carolina. In 1949, my father took a principalship at Union Grove High School and remained until 1953. When I entered the first grade at the local elementary school, my father began taking me to high school basketball and baseball games, creating fond memories of that time together as family.

After moving to Union Grove, our family lived in a home known as "the principal's house" located beside the baseball field and across from the local flour mill. In this rural setting, our family enjoyed a variety of small pets, and I enjoyed being mostly responsible for their care—and training.

There was a small watering hole behind our home, and I became very frustrated trying to teach the chickens how to swim like the three pet ducks. The family's favorite chicken was named Queenie. She was allowed to roam freely throughout the day, and her nesting box was safely tucked on one side of the porch. Often, when neighbors would drive up the gravel driveway for a visit, Queenie would wait until they entered our house, then proceed to make herself a guest in their car. Sometimes she would jump inside if the windows had been left down. A lady almost suffered a heart attack when she returned to her car, started it, and was greeted with loud clucking and feathers flying all around her, rustling Queenie from her new nesting spot in the backseat. Needless to say, after that incident, Queenie headed to the henhouse to join her other egg-laying friends.

When a pet would pass away, a special spot was selected for the burial in the pet cemetery located behind our house in a small field. Preacher Huss, minister at the Union Grove Methodist Church, would be called upon to conduct the funeral. My cats, chickens, and ducks were well blessed when they departed this world.

My father frequently took me along to investigate incidents of school vandalism, which was an eye-opener for me to the destructive behavior directed toward school property. In 1953, he was named principal of Troutman High School, at that time the largest school in the Iredell County School System. The family then moved to another "principal's house" located across the street from the school property. This location provided easy access for me to become involved in all school events and activities.

During my early elementary years, I joined a Boy Scout Troop in Troutman, North Carolina. As the youngest boy in the group, I had to learn a lot about scouting in a very short period of time. However, by the end of my scouting program, I had achieved the rank of Life. This required earning many merit badges in the process. Those scout experiences and the summer scout camps helped advance my maturity.

At age thirteen, I began working on Saturdays at a local Troutman grocery store, making three dollars a day in exchange for ten hours of work. The long hours of bagging groceries, stocking shelves, and replenishing produce allowed for an opportunity to get to know the store patrons, who were from all levels of society. This made every day an educational learning experience.

Entering the sixth grade, I began developing an interest in music, eventually becoming a member of the Troutman High School marching band, playing the clarinet and participating in the high school band program even before becoming a teenager. Many friends at that time told me that I was too young to participate in a high school band program.

Being from a small school, the marching band was not the best musical ensemble and was often placed behind the larger school bands during parades. We were placed behind the horses in some parades, prompting members to joke that even though the band couldn't play Christmas music, we were the highest-stepping unit in the parades. At that time, band students were required to pay one dollar a week to compensate the band director for his services. The band once had to perform at a Duke University football game as part of a Band Day event. While returning to Troutman from Durham, the big bass drum started rolling across the top of the bus. My bandmates followed the sound toward the back of the bus, where they watched the big drum roll onto Highway 64 and toward automobiles that subsequently began swerving into ditches in their efforts to avoid hitting it. The drum was destroyed, but thankfully, no cars were hit. I had the good fortune to spend several years in the band program before turning my main interest toward athletics.

After reaching the eighth grade, I was well on the way to becoming a future school administrator. Dad had provided firsthand experience about school operations and even began asking me to substitute for teachers who were absent for a portion of their school day. By the time I reached ninth grade, it was not uncommon for me to be called from class and assigned to a substitute teacher's role for that day. Dad also asked for my help with securing and transporting surplus textbooks to the county administrative offices in Statesville, North Carolina. Adding to my list of growing skills, my father taught me to operate a Farmall Cub Tractor used to frequently mow the seventeen-plus acres of grass surrounding the school facilities.

My high school years were filled with some unusual, but very educational experiences. At the national level, two historic events occurred, affecting virtually everyone during those years. In 1962, the Cuban missile crisis brought the nation to the brink of war with the Soviet Union, and as high school students, we had to learn and perform practice drills to reach the school bomb shelter should it be needed. This led my good friend Jack Brown and I to attempt to build a bomb shelter in the woods behind Jack's house. Fortunately, after the Soviet Union withdrew their missiles from Cuba, the bomb shelter project was abandoned.

The second and most memorable national event during my high school years occurred on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. I was in sixth-period typing class under the direction of Mrs. Lee Brown. The classroom was located in a building beside the administrative offices. Looking out the windows toward my father's office just after two o'clock...