When Joe P. Moore announced that he was retiring as superintendent of Fort Worth schools, he said, “My entire life . . . has been spent in answer to the call of school bells in one capacity or another.”
Moore heard his first school bells ring in the Marine community of today’s North Side, where he was born in 1895. His father, M. H. Moore (see Part 1) was a teacher there.
(At the bottom of that list of names is another half of a father-son educator team: W. M. Trimble was the father of Green Berry Trimble.)
Joe attended North Fort Worth schools while his father was first a teacher and then principal and superintendent there. Joe graduated from North Side High School after Fort Worth annexed the city of North Fort Worth in 1909.
Moore began teaching manual training at Diamond Hill School in 1917 at age twenty-two.
In December 1917 he enlisted in the Army and was trained at Camp Taliaferro.
Early in 1918 he was sent to France, where he was the only American in a contingent of French and English soldiers attached to a British squadron.
After the war he resumed his teaching career in Dallas.
In 1922 he returned to Fort Worth and joined the faculty of Polytechnic High School just as the school moved into its new building on Nashville Avenue. He taught industrial arts and began the first organized counseling program in the Fort Worth school system.
In 1924 he became vice principal of Riverside Elementary and Junior High School and taught science and industrial arts there.
In 1925 Moore and his wife Ruby moved into a house at 3329 Avenue E in Poly just east of what was then Texas Woman’s College. They would live there thirty years.
In 1927 he returned to Polytechnic as vice principal.
At Poly Vice Principal Moore was faculty advisor for the new student newspaper, the Parakeet. (Athletics co-editor Raymond Meissner would later operate a funeral home down the street.)
Photo of Vice Principal Moore is from the 1930 Poly High School yearbook.
In 1931 Poly Principal W. A. Meacham was promoted to assistant superintendent, and Moore was promoted to principal at Poly High.
Seven years later, in 1938, Moore and his faculty and student body moved three blocks west to a new building on Connor Street.
In 1943 Principal Moore was promoted to the position of assistant superintendent in charge of special services. One of his wartime duties was issuance of new ration books.
With the promotion of Moore, C. A. (“Mr. T”) Thompson, principal of J. P. Elder Junior High, became principal of Poly High.
Moore was promoted to superintendent in 1946 upon the death of Superintendent W. M. Green, who had been given the job in 1931 when Moore’s father had resigned.
Joe P. Moore was superintendent during the 1950s and early 1960s as the civil rights movement grew. In 1959 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, representing two local African-American families, sued the Fort Worth school district to force integration. Moore was among the school officials named in the suit.
The school district fought the suit.
In 1961 U.S. District Judge Leo Brewster ordered Fort Worth schools to integrate. The school district appealed that order. In February 1963 the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans upheld Brewster’s order.
School board president Atwood McDonald said the district would not appeal the latest ruling.
Integration of Fort Worth schools began on September 4, 1963.
But Joe P. Moore was not in office to witness that milestone.
He had retired five days earlier after seventeen years as superintendent.
In December 1962, after sixty-seven years of school bells, Moore had announced his retirement, effective August 31, 1963. He said: “Our school program, which must make rapid and far-reaching changes to meet the demands of fast-moving advances in many fields, should be led by a man who has a much longer period of service ahead of him than have I.”
The Star-Telegram in an editorial thanked Moore for his “long and fruitful devotion to education.”
During Moore’s tenure, the number of school buildings increased from 71 to 113, enrollment increased from 32,000 to 74,000, and the annual budget from $4.6 million ($44 million today) to $24.4 million ($231 million today). More than $44 million ($424 million today) in school construction took place during his tenure.
He was credited with organizing special education classes for handicapped children and with updating the school system’s science and mathematics programs.
In 1963 a new school in south Fort Worth was named for Moore. Note that the school was the system’s first to be built with air conditioning! (And remember when Loop 820 was “Loop 217”? Neither do I. But that was the highway’s original designation in the 1950s.)
(J. P. Moore Elementary School is now Wedgwood Sixth Grade Center.)
Joe P. Moore died at age seventy-five in 1971.
Joseph Preston Moore is buried in Greenwood Cemetery.
I do recall “Loop 217” but ironically, it was not a complete loop at the time….IIRC, it connected to US 81 (later I-35 W) on the east and at the Weatherford Traffic Circle (Hwy. 337) on the east….Today that leg is known as Southwest Blvd….
Thanks, Dan. This was all news to me.