Wabash Professor J. Harry Cotton introduced me to philosophy. An austere older man with a sharp intellect, he was an ordained Presbyterian minister and had been president of a theological seminary.
On the first day of classes with him, I sat in my wheelchair at the bottom of the stairs waiting for help. The first person to come by was the professor himself, who recruited another person and manfully began the process of pulling me in my wheelchair up the flight of stairs to the assigned classroom. The next time the class met, it had been rescheduled for a ground floor room.
Dr. Cotton opened a whole new world of thought to me. He quickly shook my neo-fundamentalist understanding of God, Christ, the Bible, and theology, but he was never too busy to review these things with me and assure me that what mattered in the end was what I concluded to be true. My admiration for him increased steadily.
In 1949, in the middle of the first semester of my junior year, I went to New York for the convention of the National Society for Crippled Children. While there, I was in a taxi accident which resulted in two fractures of my left leg and hospitalization for the next four months.
I was beside myself. Not only was I hundreds of miles from home in a city where I knew no one, in pain and facing a lot of therapy, but I was also in danger of losing an entire year of college. Dr. Cotton wrote me a gentle letter, expressing his sorrow and his concern and assuring me that he would do everything he could to help me move ahead. He arranged for professors to determine what work I could continue in my hospital bed, to prepare examinations for me to take, to send me books and assignments as appropriate.
When I returned to campus in the middle of spring semester, 1950, Dr. Cotton went with me to the dean to see what could be retrieved from my junior year. It was determined that in order to graduate on schedule, I would have to take more than 40 credit hours in my senior year.
"Impossible!!" said the dean.
"Will you let me try?" I asked.
The dean looked skeptical, but then Professor Cotton said, "I am willing to tutor Mel to help make up some of the deficiencies so that he might not have to re-take all the courses; and I know there are other professors who would gladly do the same."
"On that understanding," the dean said, "I will let you try."
I did, and with the help of Dr. Cotton and others, I graduated on schedule. In fact, the first semester of my senior year was the only one I made the Dean’s List!
Edited and excerpted from I Am Not Afraid: Memories of a Life at Risk by Mel Schoonover. Available at www.Xlibris.com.