ABSTRACT
Stanley Kohn arrived in Gary in 1940 to work in the advertising department at H. Gordon & Sons, one of the city's leading downtown department stores. A graduate of the University of Chicago, Kohn became interested in the public schools in 1945 when his son began attending kindergarten in the old Miller elementary school. "I would visit there and he was in the classroom in the basement of the school right next to the coal burning boiler, and kids, forty of them, were sitting on the floor, concrete floor, which was rather upsetting to me to see the condition of it," he later recalled. Kohn joined the Miller-Wirt PTA and quickly discovered that the school tax levy was frozen and there had been no school construction for some years. In order to put pressure on the school board to raise the levy and begin construction, as well as institute other improvements, the Miller parents combined with other PTAs throughout the city in early 1946 to form the City-wide Parents' Council. Kohn took a leading role in the new organization and became its second president. 1
