In the spring of 1903, the Hamilton Board of Education hired a 29-year-old recent graduate of Miami University as the principal for the Columbia School on Park Avenue.
It did not take long for Professor Darrell Joyce to earn the respect of the board, and when Superintendent S. Lee Rose died that same year after a long illness, they tapped Joyce in August to replace him.
He immediately made his mark on the district, persuading the board to adopt some kind of a “merit system” for hiring teachers and other innovations.
“He is a young man of energy and progressive ideas and the schools have steadily improved under his supervision,” the Evening Journal crowed when Joyce’s contract was approved two years later at a salary of $2,500 annually, allowing that he wasn’t too progressive as he eschewed the “fads” of modern education, “adopting only the best of new ideas.”
They also touted his strict but fair ideas on discipline, “especially in the high school where the conduct of the boys has been much better. Supt. Joyce is a man who means what he says and if he tells a boy that the next time he repeats a certain caper he will be expelled he means it and if the misconduct is repeated out he will go.”
Joyce was born in Venice (Ross) March 12, 1874, the son of Major Robert Joyce, a veteran of the Union Army who fought in the Civil War, and Isabella Townsend Joyce. His father was for many years a leading member of the Republican party in Butler County, though his son would cast his lot with the Democrats.
In 1898, he married Henrietta Bedinger of Venice.
Joyce entered Miami University in 1900, already with several years of teaching experience in the county schools to his credit. During his student days at the university he was one of the most popular young men on campus and an active member of the Sigma Chi fraternity. He was also quite athletic and powerful, for three years the star first baseman of the Miami baseball team.
During practically all of his residence in Hamilton, Joyce was active in many civic affairs. He was one of the organizers of the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce in 1910 and the Hamilton Community Chest in 1920. He was first vice president of the Chamber of Commerce in 1917 and its president in 1918. He also served as a member of the board of directors of the Chamber of Commerce from 1920 until 1929. For several years he was a trustee of Miami University and president of the Boy Scouts of Butler County.
The success of several of the campaigns of the Community Chest were attributed to his untiring efforts, when he served as chairman of the business men’s group and also as chairman of the initial gifts committee.
During the first World War, Joyce served as food administrator for Butler County and following the war remained active with the local chapter of the Red Cross and served for a time as its president. He was active in state educational activities, but always declined to take any offices or hold positions of power outside of Hamilton, although he did serve a term as president of the Southwest Ohio Teachers Association.
Joyce was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the charter movement in Hamilton in the 1920s that created Hamilton’s first city manager form of government as a way to circumvent the politically charged crony system that had prevailed over the previous decades.
Although he was by all accounts an upstanding and outstanding citizen–and a teetotaller–Darrell Joyce did fall into a bit of controversy during Prohibition.
He had moved to Hamilton when he became superintendent, but he and his wife still held property in Venice, including a 212-acre farm that they rented to a fellow named Lacy.
On the evening of May 9, 1925, he would later explain in an affidavit, Joyce had gone to the farm on business when two other men, Shirley Cates and Harvey Dietz, mutual friends of Joyce and his tenant, stopped in for a social call. They all played cards for a bit, and around 9:30 Cates and Lacey left the house, Lacey leaving a half-filled half-pint bottle of whiskey on the kitchen floor. Around 10 o’clock, Dietz and Joyce heard a noise outside and Joyce picked up the bottle of whiskey and stuck it in his pocket.
Seconds later, four prohibition officers walked into the kitchen unannounced. They had apparently come on reports of a still on the farm, but found none. Instead, they found the half-pint bottle of liquor in Joyce’s coat pocket and arrested him, even though Cates, who had returned to the house shortly after the officers’ arrival, claimed the bottle as his.
When he went to court, Joyce explained that he was not guilty, “but recognizing the fact that while I was not morally guilty I might be considered technically guilty, I consented to pay what I thought to be an unjust fine in a case which I felt I could win in any impartial court.”
His reputation was well-established by that time, and the whole thing might have blown over had not the Rev. William McBirnie of the First Congregational Church, Hamilton’s Prohibition crusader, called him out from the pulpit, demanding that he resign or be fired.
Joyce declined to resign and declared that he would not unless the school board requested it of him.
“I shall pay little attention to the rantings of any publicity seeking egotist posing as a leader in a religion whose tenets he evidently does not grasp and who is a disgrace to the cloth he wears,” Joyce wrote in an affidavit.
At the next meeting, the board did take up the matter. In doing so, they received a letter in Joyce’s defense signed by every teacher in the district and from the board of directors of the Hamilton Rotary Club, calling him “the most highly regarded and best beloved member of our club since its formation in 1919.”
School board member Rosa Haines submitted a resolution that Joyce be asked to resign. She was supported by board member Martha Stewart. But the three men on the board voted to support Joyce and table the motion, and he remained in his job until poor health forced his retirement in 1929 after almost exactly 26 years.
(McBirnie, by the way, ruffled the wrong feathers and after a mysterious explosion at his house, he left town–“has gone where the woodbine twineth,” according to the Evening News.)
His death was not unexpected, according to the newspapers. Following his passing, March 26, 1936, at age 62 from “cirrhosis of the liver, dropsy and complications,” the popular Journal-News writer Stella Weiler Taylor, in her column “Rosemary, That’s for Remembrance,” wrote, “Just roused from my dream… by the arrival of the Journal-News with the handsome picture of Darrell Joyce and the sad news of his passing. It was in the Straub House days that I first saw the dark-eyed little boy who later became a civic leader and superintendent of the schools of Hamilton. His father, Major Robert Joyce, gallant Civil War veteran… had a residence at Venice but spent most of each week, because of his official duties, in Hamilton. A tiny hall bedroom, marked No. 3, just over the Main Street entrance to the hotel was the major’s room. Major Joyce was quite of the type of Gen. Grant, bearded, soldierly, erect and very kindly.”
Professor Joyce had three brothers survive him, but he and his wife had no children. In 1955 Henrietta Joyce made a gift to the city of Hamilton 227 acres of land that would become Darrell Joyce Park. Additional gifts from the family brought the acreage up to the current 313.