John E. Yingling, who ushered the Howard County school system into the suburban era as superintendent for 19 years, died Tuesday of pneumonia in the Anne Arundel Medical Center. The 60-year Ellicott City resident was 93.
Becoming superintendent in 1949 at a time when Howard's handful of schools were rural and segregated, Mr. Yingling created the physical framework for what today is one of the state's top school systems.
"He did the best job possible in terms of the building of schools in Howard County," said Mary Rockwell Hovet, who was the director of instruction while Mr. Yingling was superintendent. "We never went on double sessions, which was really important. We never built palatial buildings, but we always housed the children.
"He gave the county a strong beginning for the growth that has followed," she said.
The school system's enrollment grew from about 4,000 students to more than 14,000 while Mr. Yingling led the school system through a period of significant new construction and building renovation.
During his final years as superintendent, Mr. Yingling negotiated with the Rouse Co. to ensure that Columbia -- in its formative stages at the time -- would have enough land set aside for new schools.
Howard schools began teaching kindergarten and 12th grade during Mr. Yingling's years as superintendent, and the first of the new sixth-through-eighth-grade middle schools was created.
Mr. Yingling also oversaw the desegregation of the Howard school system in the 1960s -- a process that went "more slowly than I would have liked, but rather smoothly," said Morris L. Woodson, whom Mr. Yingling appointed in 1967 as one of three supervisors of elementary schools. Dr. Woodson became the county's first black administrator and supervisor after desegregation.
"He was the kind of person who, if you justified a need for something when you made a request, he would find some type of a way to get it done, even if the budget made it difficult," Dr. Woodson recalled.
In 1966, an outside consultant said Mr. Yingling had "played the role of a surrogate father to the children of the people of the county, many of whom are his friends."
Born and raised in Westminster and a 1920 graduate of Westminster High School, Mr. Yingling received a bachelor of arts degree from Western Maryland College in 1924.
