By Brian Weber
Denver Rocky Mountain News Education Writer

Emily Griffith grew up on the grimy banks of the Ohio River, then moved on to the desolate prairies of Nebraska, only to end up in the slums of turn-of-the century Denver.

That hard life might have produced a hard woman. But instead, Griffith grew more compassionate with each depressing stop.

The result was a school for people like herself: those of little means, reasons for less hope, yet a hunger for a better life.

That's why she called it the Opportunity School when it opened in 1916. And it still lives up to its name. Nearly 1.5 million people, mostly adults, have benefited from the school that made Griffith Denver's most beloved and famed educator.

"She just had this inborn quality of compassion for people who did not have much," said Marla Marcott, who worked for 30 years as a teacher and principal at the school, renamed for Griffith in 1934. "She always seemed to care so much for where people found themselves and for people who wanted to do better."

According to accounts from newspapers, historians and people who worked at her school, the tale of Emily Griffith is a paradox, one loaded with elements and outcomes that seem inconsistent.

It explains how, in a time when women held little power, a determined woman could accomplish progressive things.

"It was the pluck she learned on the prairie," said Yale Huffman, a retired attorney and author of a history on Griffith.

She was born in Cincinnati in 1868, the oldest of four children. Her birth year reveals one of Griffith's few faults.

When she arrived in Denver in 1895 she was 27, unmarried and burdened with a dependent mother, father and sister. She chopped 12 years off her age to avoid a spinster label.

"She was a vain woman and didn't want to be an old maid," said Huffman, who discovered the ruse in 1989. "Vanity was perhaps her only character defect.

"In some ways it served her well and helped her build her image as a classy dame."

In Ohio her father, Andrew, tried to practice law and preach, as well as other things, with little success. Early on Griffith discovered her destiny with her Uncle Charles, who captained a boat on the Erie Canal in northeastern Ohio.

The self-taught man and avid reader ran a floating night school. "For all who wish to learn," a sign on his cabin read. Forty years later, that greeting would hang over the door of Griffith's Denver school. It still does.

In 1884 the family rode a wagon to western Nebraska to try farming. But drought-prone Custer County demanded heartier souls than Andrew Griffith.

"Settlers had to be as ingenious as shipwrecked sailors," Willa Cather wrote of the times in The Nation magazine.

Griffith's father became a justice of the peace and a traveling Bible salesman. Griffith took up teaching to help the family. Even though she had only an eighth-grade education, the school superintendent welcomed her; most female teachers quickly retired to marriage in the male-dominated prairie.

Griffith, a petite teen-ager with auburn hair, clinched a job by writing S's as a board member preferred and correctly spelling vicissitudes. The word, which means "unpredictable changes, ups and downs," was prophetic.

Unmarried teachers like Griffith lived with homesteaders, paying half her $50 monthly wages in rent. Most parents were immigrants and uneducated. In the close quarters, she saw that, without education, children would become their parents. She also realized parents needed education to help their children.

The conditions were miserable. Stoves heated little because wood was scarce. Floors were dirt and frosted feet. Straw warmed floors, but it bred fleas. Wind shook schoolhouses made of sod. Blizzards blew snow through the walls.

By the 1890s, nature brutalized western Nebraska. The Griffiths headed in a one-horse cart to Denver, a city of progress and progressive -- for some.

The rich were getting richer as Denver rebounded from the depression of 1893. But the poor got poorer, with children who could hope for little more.

Griffith taught in their neighborhoods, quickly seeing the needs of adults as she had in Nebraska. She spent nights teaching families in their homes, where she witnessed brutality, drunkenness and deprivation.

She gained a reputation as a selfless and innovative teacher. In 1904 she began a four-year stint as deputy state superintendent of schools. The job boosted her prestige and knowledge of education needs.

All the while she supported her family, caring especially for her younger sister, Florence, who was mentally handicapped. She rejected two marriage proposals to keep up family obligations. She never married.

She returned to teaching in impoverished areas in 1908. Close again to needy people, Griffith began years of lobbying for a school for adults.

"I want the age limit for admission lifted," she said, "and the classes so organized that a boy or girl working in a bakery, store, laundry... may come to school and study what he or she wants to learn to make life more useful. I already have a name for the school. It's 'Opportunity."'

The school board finally agreed to help -- sort of -- in 1916.

"They gave her a condemned school, figuring she'd fail," said Abie Ratzlaff, a former teacher and assistant principal at her school.

It was to run 13 hours a day. Students could come as often, or not, as they pleased. There would be no attendance, no grades, no tests and no tuition.

But she worried that no one would come. By the end of the first week, 1,400 students registered. They could learn to read, write, add and subtract, and just about anything else they wanted: carpentry, waitressing, auto mechanics, cooking, sign painting, gold mining, beauty courses. And hat-making. Emily Griffith wore a different hat every week to advertise student work.

The school, which spreads across an entire downtown block adjacent to the Colorado Convention Center, has 13,000 students and offers classes in 350 subjects. Emily Griffith is one of only two women celebrated in stained-glass windows at the state Capitol.

In 1934, Griffith retired after helping more than 100,000 students. She returned to the austere life of her youth. She and Florence moved to a small cabin in Pinecliffe, near Boulder. It had no electricity or plumbing until former students modernized it. She lived, by all accounts, happily on a $50-a-month pension.

On June 19, 1947, she met a most unpredictable end: an intruder fatally shot her and Florence in the backs of their heads. Police suspected Fred Lundy, a former teacher of Emily's who reportedly loved her from afar. Lundy, 61, committed suicide shortly after the murders. A suicide note suggested he did it to spare her the burden of caring for Florence. The case was never officially solved.

Colorado Milestones, which appears Tuesdays, is part of a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society. Digital and print copies of historical images are available at the Colorado Historical Society, (303) 866-2305.

On TV: At 10 p.m. Sunday -- Colorado History: one of Colorado's most famous native sons -- heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey, the Manassa Mauler.

September 7, 1999

Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society
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