Earl Wooster, born in Oregon in 1893, spent his early years in California. He attended the University of Nevada and prepared himself to become a teacher. Wooster's educational career, which began in Fallon, Nevada, spanned more than forty years.

Wooster, from his high school days to the end of his career, was never one to follow the beaten path. He was much more interested in making his own path or changing the old one. As a high school student at Fresno, California, he attacked the local school trustees for inadequate fire escapes on a building used for school assemblies. Because of his extreme language, the trustees asked Wooster to retract his statement, but since he considered the statement true, he refused to change his position. The controversy wound up in the courts of California. Wooster was refused a diploma. Later, the school board rescinded its action, granting him his diploma, upon which he entered the University of Nevada.

Earl Wooster began his public school career under principal George McCracken in Churchill County High School at Fallon, Nevada, in January of 1922. From 1922 to 1959 his interest in public education continued, and from 1959 to 1965 he served as executive secretary of the Nevada State Educational Association.

Mr. Wooster was not an armchair administrator, nor was he concerned with following the rules as set down in a book. Always more interested in the individual child and in the individual teacher than in the educational machine of school administration and organization, Wooster made his machine adjust to provide the most adequate preparation for life's work for each child in his system.

His rise in educational administration from the principalship of the Dayton High School in 1924 to that of school superintendent in 1955 is in some respects a history of public school administration in Nevada. At Dayton there were three teachers and fifteen students; in Washoe County there were about one thousand teachers and twenty thousand pupils when he retired.

From Dayton, Wooster went to more responsible positions—first to Wells, Nevada, as principal of its high school, then to Humboldt County High School at Winnemucca, and next to Reno High School as its principal. When the superintendency of the Reno School District Number Ten was vacated in 1944, Wooster was selected to fill the spot. With the reorganization of the school system in 1955, he became Washoe County's first school superintendent, a position he held until he retired in 1959. His account deals with many of the leading educators of Nevada since 1920.