Henry Hulbert was a probate judge in Wayne County responsible for deciding cases of committal to institutions like the Lapeer State Home. He saw a burgeoning number of troubled, unfortunate children coming through his court who did not really belong locked up in jails or asylums. Based on that, on the plea of Milton Alexander, and on what the Thursday Nooners subsequently found in analyzing Lapeer, Hulbert concurred in the need for a local response to juvenile delinquency. He sent a letter in October 1919 to the Wayne County Board of Supervisors calling for action. The supervisors moved swiftly in calling for state legislation, and soon Public Act 392 of 1921 was passed, providing for Wayne County to establish and maintain its own training school in lieu of state responsibility. ¹⁶

         William H. Maybury, cousin to Detroit Mayor William C. Maybury, held committee memberships at the city, county, and state levels. As president of the Board of Health, and a member of the Board of Supervisors, William was already engaged in a similar pursuit in Northville by the time the WCTS was being conceived, that of establishing a municipal tuberculosis hospital for Detroit: Maybury Sanatorium. ¹⁷   County government subsequently turned to Maybury to supervise the construction of the WCTS as he had for the sanatorium. When asked about the sort of patients the WCTS would accommodate upon its completion, Maybury specified that it would accommodate the feebleminded, and not the insane. “We want children we can help and there are many feebleminded we can help.” This was a reflection of the operational theory practiced at his sanatorium, where hopeless cases were not admitted precisely in order to maintain the atmosphere of hope and optimism so necessary to a children’s center. ¹⁸

                   Frank Cody was the superintendent of Detroit Public Schools, and likely an indispensible advisor in conceptualizing the WCTS’s program. Cody could be credited as the man solely responsible for raising the Detroit Public Schools to its prominence as a national model during the twentieth century, and indeed one of the greatest public education systems in the world at the time. He took the reigns from Superintendent Chadsey who resigned in 1919 in scandal, and held them firmly until 1942. Under Cody’s tenure both the Detroit Public Schools and the city itself experienced their greatest growth and challenges, “developing methods of instruction which won for the city a foremost place in public education in the nation.” ¹⁹

         Admittedly never much of an academic, Cody was however a masterful administrator. As a boy he remembered skipping class occasionally to go fishing, and empathized with pupils who had trouble focusing; he resolved to make his classes so interesting that boys would hate to miss a session. ²⁰