Adminstration Building 1926

         The Wayne County Training School was given original impetus in 1919, and was the product of a collaboration of many great Detroit civic leaders, but six men stand out as its key framers: Milton Alexander, Henry Hulbert, Tracy McGregor, William H. Maybury, Frank Cody, and Eber Yost. Due to their modesty, these historical figures are virtually unknown today; they consistently put their work ahead of their own recognition for it. Each man already had an established reputation in advancing either social or educational reforms, and subsequently sat on WCTS’s administrative board proudly overseeing operation of their project for decades afterward.

         Milton Alexander was an extremely popular and outspoken member of Detroit’s Jewish community. The owner of a prominent advertising agency, Alexander did campaign work for several local politicians; he also devoted himself to a wide variety of social causes. Alexander was a Wayne County Supervisor, a trustee of Temple Beth El, the first president of the Jewish Community Center, and a board member of the Belle-Faire Orphanage in Cleveland. He conducted a campaign for the sectarian and parochial schools when an attempt was made to abolish them, and during the Great Depression it was Alexander who led the momentous drive in the city to collect back taxes. His campaign for this was so successful in Detroit that he was invited to do the same for Chicago and other cities, winning acclaim in the Wall Street Journal and many similar publications. ⁹   During WWI he was appointed head of the patriotic advertising board of Michigan by Governor Sleeper. ¹⁰   As a member of the Relief Committee of the United Jewish Charities, Alexander learned of a family of eight feebleminded children born to feebleminded parents. Because the Lapeer State Home & Training School—the only place they could receive care at the time—was full, Alexander decided to crusade for the founding of the WCTS. ¹¹   He introduced a resolution to the Board of Supervisors asking them to consider such an institution for Wayne County, and it was he who guided the progress of that movement to the ultimate enactment of the legislation that created the WCTS. ¹²

         Tracy McGregor and his father founded a well-known mission for homeless men in Detroit, the McGregor Institute. Later he formed a league with Henry Hulbert and other Detroit humanitarians known as the Thursday Noon Group, a collection of affluent civic leaders concerned with issues such as “justice in police courts, inhumane prisons, and care for people with epilepsy.” ¹³   In spring of 1913 Hulbert and McGregor, along with fellow Thursday founder Fred Butzel, began to focus on juvenile delinquents, the mentally ill, and especially epileptics—a group they discovered to be rapidly growing, but who were currently being housed in asylums and prisons, not receiving proper care. They came to realize the shameful living conditions at the Lapeer State Home, and fought for the creation of the Wahjamega Farm Colony for Epileptics, which opened by transferring epileptics out of the overcrowded Lapeer, thus allowing that institution to function more effectively ¹⁴   Other significant accomplishments of the Thursday Nooners was the erection of the Ypsilanti State Hospital and a new, more modern Detroit House of Correction, which like Lapeer had become overcrowded and inhumane. McGregor’s affiliations with benevolent organizations were almost too numerous to track. His wife Katherine, the daughter of lumber baron David Whitney Jr., shared Tracy’s passion for philanthropy, and in 1925 they established the McGregor Fund for the sick, the indigent, and for higher education. It supported WCTS research liberally, and still operates today as arguably their greatest legacy. ¹⁵