FRAZES
Ian Frazier—The New Yorker writer and winner of the Thurber Prize for Humor—visited campus last November. He spoke with students and faculty, enjoyed the Monon Bell Game, and was interviewed by Richard Paige for the Wabash On My Mind podcast.
Some moments from that interview:
What I liked about growing up in Ohio was that it was just boring enough. You sit there and really feel the weight of being alive. And that’s when invention comes in.
Maybe it’s a problem that people aren’t bored enough.
You know how sometimes in baseball you’ll see someone get the exact base hit he’s trying to get? It’s not like he’s done an amazing thing, but it’s really satisfying.
To write something funny is really satisfying.
Listen to the complete interview at Wabash On My Mind: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/wabash-on-my-mind
“THE GOOD SHE WAS DOING”
Faculty, staff, students, and alumni gathered in Lilly Library last fall to celebrate the Wabash Writing Center’s 35th anniversary and to honor its founder, Julia Rosenberg.
“I knew the good she was doing all along, all those years, and I could see it happening every day, over dinner talking about students,” said Rosenberg’s husband, Professor Emeritus Warren Rosenberg H’98. “But for her to be honored by this wonderful ceremony was fantastic.”
“SOMETHING SPECIAL WE SHARE”
Orthopedic surgeon and Shelbourne Knee Center founder Dr. Don Shelbourne steps to the podium to receive the Indianapolis Association of Wabash Men’s Man-of-the-Year Award on March 21 from his son, Brian Shelbourne ’12.
“The Wabash experience is something special we share,” Brian said in a tribute to his dad that was at times hilarious, at times serious. Don was clearly moved.
“Unbelievable,” was how he described it. “I’m going to get emotional again, if I keep thinking about it.”
“A GOOD GUY”
The father who got up at 5 a.m. to cook his son a hot breakfast before swim practice.
The grandfather who taught his grandson how to drive a pickup truck.
The gardener patiently cutting asparagus in the family garden.
On campus, David Wilson was the quintessential math professor—soft-spoken, deliberate, thoughtful, and a man who made a big difference at the College.
But when Aleeta Wilson and her family returned to campus to honor her husband by establishing the David E. Wilson Scholarship, we got the bigger picture.
“Wabash was kind of a playground for us when we were kids,” said Steve Wilson, one of David’s sons. “It was a safe spot for us to play."
David’s son Paul Wilson remembered studying in Lilly Library when he was in high school.
Gray Wilson, David’s grandson, said the professor was “constantly trying to teach me how to multiply with my fingers whenever I’d come over to cut the grass. I ended up telling this story on my college application.”
His granddaughter, Ellie, laughed: “He would take me into the other room of the house so my grandma wouldn’t see him trying to teach me math.”
“We had to know not just the answers, but the fundamentals, all the way back to Ancient Greece,” said Paul, smiling.
“I wanted to honor him with something ongoing, something tangible, for a student who is serious about mathematics,” said Aleeta Wilson of the scholarship.
Its first recipient, Kevin Sheridan ’20, is exactly that, as well as a swimmer for the Little Giants. That would no doubt please Professor Wilson, who not only supported his son Steve’s swimming but was head timer for the Sugar Creek Swim Club for 18 years.
“He welcomed me into the family,” David’s daughter-in-law, Stephanie, remembered through tears. “It was hard for me to call him David, because I had such respect for him that I always wanted to call him Dr. Wilson. But I always felt cared for, always felt welcomed. He was a good guy.”
The David E. Wilson Scholarship in Mathematics will be awarded annually to a student or students in their junior and senior years who have declared their interest in completing their Wabash degree as a mathematics major.
THE WORLD
“I’m genuinely overwhelmed by what you’ve done here,” Wabash Trustee Emeritus DAVID ORR ’57 told ZACH MCKINNEY ’22 and MILES BARILLA ’20 after seeing their work curating “Louis Orr’s Journey in France: Capturing Mankind’s Magnificent Creations.”
“Thanks to your hard work, we can share this with the world.”
Barilla and McKinney, along with DAVID DUENAS ’21 and NICHOLAS LAWSON ’19, had researched and framed each piece by Orr, the first American to have his work hung in the Louvre. He received honors from the French government for his heroic actions during World War I. He sketched the 700-year-old Our Lady of Reims Cathedral while being shelled by the German Imperial Army in World War I, risking his life to record the moment and preserve in art what remained of the cathedral.
“Students had to dig deep,” said Professor of Art Elizabeth Morton, who supervised the project. “Some of the research they did was professional level. They had to grab the project and run with it.”
THE POWER OF WABASH
We are too often driven by emotion. Emotional, reactionary responses have led to the divisiveness. But this is the power of the Wabash experience—it gives you an opportunity to think through issues, to weigh both sides, and not feel compelled to lash out in reactive or reflexive ways. As long as you can control that within you, and try to share it with others, that puts the building blocks in place.
KEVIN CHAVOUS ’78, attorney and educational reformer, speaking on
A COMMUNITY EFFORT
Wabash College Trustee Jennifer Evans loves to tell the story of how immediately the College made an impact on her son, Jack.
“When we came back for Jack’s first football game, we pulled up in the car with a few goodies and maybe a sweater of his, and Jack did something I’ll never forget: He offered to unload the car for me,” Evans says. “I looked at him like he was someone else’s kid. He’d always been polite, but this was something more. It was courtesy, looking to take care of other people.”
As the College’s first female member of the Board of Trustees who recently established the Mothers’ Fund, Jennifer Evans is making history at Wabash. When fully funded, this endowed fund will be allocated at the discretion of the Dean of Students in ways he or she deems worthy for improving the student experience.
Evans sums up the goals of the fund succinctly: “It’s for when life gets in the way—it’s a resource to help assist our students in less-traditional ways. The Dean of Students can say, ‘The Mothers’ Fund is looking out for you.’
“We want it to be a community effort. Every Wabash man has a woman in his life. We think that this is a place for men to honor those women, and a place for women to honor the men in their lives too.”
—RYAN HORNER ’15
DUCT TAPE
The symbol of the law has always been Lady Justice, blindfolded, holding the scales of justice.
I think that the symbol of lawyers should be duct tape. We are called upon to deal with things that are broken and need mending—broken contracts, broken laws, broken hearts.
Thad Seymour H’78 was president at Wabash when I was a student. He used to say our school motto—Scientiae et virtuti—should be translated as “knowledge and guts.”
To mend the broken things in our society effectively requires knowledge and guts, scientae et virtuti. Knowing what to do and doing the right thing.
—JOHN RYDER ’71, keynote speaker and recipient of this year’s David W. Peck Medal.