A Model Learner

And while creating a place to treat the uninsured has been the work of many, those same folks will tell you that without Doemel’s dogged efforts, this clinic might never have become a reality. 

 

And without Brock, Cook, and C&T, Doemel might not have been involved.

 

Tom Brock, Doemel’s graduate school mentor, shattered the science world’s limited notions of the conditions under which life was possible. “There I learned that everything changes,” Doemel says. “Assuming anything else puts blinders on people.”

 

Jim Cook was one of Doemel’s first students at Wabash and changed a young biology professor’s interactions with his fellow learners.

 

And teaching C&T “was one of the most exciting expe-riences of my career,” Doemel says. “It transformed the way I taught biology. It transformed everything I did.” Including his volunteer work in the Crawfordsville community, his seven years of service on the Christian Nursing Service board, and his current role as president of the board of Montgomery County Free Clinic, Inc. (MCFC).

 

In October that board received a $900,000 matching grant from North Central Health Services to purchase and renovate an existing building in Crawfordsville to operate a free clinic in Montgomery County.

 

But that’s getting way ahead of the story.

 

As a boy growing up in Tiffin, OH, Doemel considered becoming a doctor.

 

“My mother was divorced about two years after I was born, so I never saw my father,” he recalls. His next-door neighbor was an only child his age. Her father, a physician, became “a sort of surrogate dad.”

 

“I was thinking of medicine as a career; through books that Dr. Petersen let me read, I found it an exciting field. But then I got to high school.”

 

Doemel’s classmates included numerous National Merit Scholars, and courses were designed to be challenging. 

 

“Our algebra class was amazing; the people around me were talking about things that I didn’t understand,” Doemel recalls. “I didn’t work very hard, and I got a D.” His guidance counselor told him college wasn’t really an option, so Doemel made plans to work at a local department store the next year. 

 

Working at a camp that summer, he encountered the father of one of his fellow counselors. Archie Thomas believed Doemel was college material.

 

“He knew that, as a senior, I had won first prize in the National Machinery Citizenship Award competition,” Doemel says. “$1,000 was a big award in 1962. My mother was shocked when I won. I was shocked. My classmates were shocked. It was sort of like this clown was coming forward and getting the prize.”

 

But it was enough to convince Thomas to intervene.

 

“He came out to the camp and said, ‘Doemel, you are going to college.’ Then he took me to Heidelberg College and got me registered.”

 

To make ends meet, Doemel worked for the biology department, taking samples of septic systems and testing water in the Sandusky River.

 

“Two professors drove the car, and I took the samples and sat in the backseat, doing all the chemistry. Once I got some sulfuric acid in my mouth and took the enamel off my teeth. It wasn’t a good experience.”

 

But Doemel was intrigued by microbiology. So much so that, after the big dance on campus that year, he escorted his date to the microbiology lab.

 

“That was the last time she dated me.” Doemel laughs. “Anyhow, I was sort of a geek.”

 

It was in graduate school at Indiana University that he first met Professor Tom Brock, a microbiologist now best known for his discovery of hyperthermophiles—bacteria that live at temperatures higher than scientists had previously thought possible. When Doemel chose his mentor in the late 1960s, many scientists were skeptical of Brock’s work.

 

“Nobody realized that there was life that could exist above the boiling point of water, because DNA melted —all the studies that had been done in the test tubes proved that. It was in all the textbooks.

 

“This Nobel Prize-winning physicist took me and a post-doc out to lunch and told us that we were crazy to work with Tom Brock, because the guy was out of his mind. Life couldn’t exist at this temperature.”

 

But Doemel found the work exciting and stuck with Brock, whose research eventually contributed to new developments in medicine and agriculture and helped to create the field of biotechnology.

 

Doemel’s research with Brock in Yellowstone—and the early days of married life with his wife, Nancy—is a story in itself. The newlyweds lived in a two-room cabin with another post-doc and his wife.

 

“Our room was the library and main workroom, and we did our experiments with phosphorus 32—a radio-active isotope you really shouldn’t have contact with—in the bathtub. We had our lab in the kitchen.

 

“I slept on the side of the bed where I was growing all of our cultures—I couldn’t stand those lights!”

 

Brock and his wife slept in a trailer next door.

 

“You’d hear his door open and, 30 seconds later, no knocking or anything, he was in your living room. For a young married couple, it made for an interesting experience. But we were on the leading edge of a new era of scientific research. I was really fortunate; it was luck, being in the right place at the right time, and not being afraid of tedious work.”

 

Since Brock first found hyperthermophiles in 1969, more than 70 species have been discovered, including one that thrives at 250 degrees Fahrenheit.

 

“I learned then the most important thing I know about science: Everything changes. And today, almost 90 percent of what was so-called scientific fact when I was a grad student is not there anymore. That textbook said the upper limit of life was 85 degrees; that put blinders on people.”

 

His post-doctoral work on this groundbreaking research at IU completed, Doemel sent out 250 letters to small colleges. Only Wabash responded.

 

“The University of Michigan called and wanted me to come up to Kellogg Research Station, but I wanted to work at a small college. I wanted to do research, I wanted to teach, and I wanted to work in the community. A small community like the one I had grown up in and gone to college in.”

 

But Wabash was “nothing like Heidelberg.”

 

“I came up for my interview on the day of the College Christmas party.” Doemel smiles as he recalls the scene. “I gave my talk, and then we went to dinner in the Sparks Center. I walked in, and here’s this amazing ice sculpture of a swan with what seemed to me like millions of shrimp just falling off, and clams in the half shell, and oysters. Prime rib being carved, and ham. It just blew me away. I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

 

“I sat down at the table with [biology professors] Tom Cole, Elliot Williams, Willis Johnson, and my friend, Aus Brooks. And at a table nearby were [professors] Bert Stern and Peter Frederick and a couple of other rogues, all singing Christmas songs that were a little spicy.

 

“Afterward, we walked over to what is now Detchon Hall, and in the open area they had a dance band, a full open bar, and everyone was dancing. I thought, Whoa! This sure never happened at Heidelberg.

 

“I called Nancy and said, ‘This place is really something!’ But I don’t think they’ve had another ice sculpture since then.”

 

Doemel’s early teaching was shaped by two men, the first from his days at Heidelberg.

 

“I had a professor there who stopped talking to me,” Doemel recalls. “He basically said, ‘I’m not going to waste my time with you if you don’t do the work.’ That shook me up. He cared enough to say that to me, to pay attention, to find a way to motivate me. And I made it my mission that such a thing would never again be said to me.”

 

Then there was Jim Cook.

 

“Jim came to Wabash to learn; he was older, because he’d been in the armed services. In one class in particular, Jim would sit up front and never take a note. He’d just focus on the professor and listen to him. The professor would get furious. Then he’d ask him a question, and Jim would answer, because he was listening. 

 

“In that day and age, the faculty stood in front of the class and lectured; there wasn’t much interaction. Jim recognized that if he was going to learn, he had to engage the faculty member, engage the work, and listen to it. He didn’t take notes until after class, and then he sat down and summarized what he had learned. He was a superb listener.

 

“That was a real lesson for a young faculty member. It changed the way I approached the classroom, the way I think about learning. When I taught, I did a lot more interacting with the students.” 

 

If Cook changed Doemel’s teaching methods, C&T transformed his understanding of the role of a teacher. The faculty was creating the course, and Doemel was the only science professor involved in the discussions.

 

“My peers at other institutions told me I was absolutely crazy to be involved. They said, ‘This is for people knowledgeable in the books you’re reading, and you don’t know squat about that. You’re taking time away from your research and from your intellectual pursuits.’

 

“But [Professor of Religion] Eric Dean captured my imagination. One time the faculty was gathered in Bax-ter Hall, all talking about Plato’s Symposium, and arguing among themselves—what it meant, line by line. It was a very intense argument, and I was looking around and thinking, You know, what they want me to do is to learn this along with the students.

 

“Then Dean Norman Moore said, ‘Bill, what you’re doing in this course is, in essence, learn along with Bill. You have to be a model learner. What you’re trying to do is to engage the students in learning about material that they’re not familiar with, and you do that by your own excitement and interest in it.’

 

“That transformed my whole life at Wabash. That simple statement—that what you are doing is modeling the learned man, and how he explores and learns about new things, whether they’re in the classroom, on the campus, or in the community. C&T was one of the most exciting experiences of my career.”

 

Doemel has been that model learner in the classroom and on campus, as he built the College’s first computer services department, and even as the first administrator of Trippet Hall. 

 

But his approach may have its greatest impact in his efforts to provide medical care and health education for the county’s under- and uninsured. In 2007, Doemel was the first to realize that the renovations needed at the Christian Nursing Services Well-Baby Clinic in a local church weren’t feasible and were limiting the reach of what could be done to address the community’s medical needs. He began exploring other options, working alongside County Health Nurse Rebecca Lang and Wabash community health advocates like school nurse Chris Amidon, Dr. John Roberts ’83, and Chris White. He brings no medical expertise to the table, but not unlike his C&T classes, a good part of this journey has been “learn along with Bill.”

 

And with $300,000 left to raise for the Dr. Mary Ludwig Free Clinic to become a reality, that class is still in session. 

 

At Doemel’s retirement reception, Dean of the College Gary Phillips said, “For 40 years we have been the beneficiaries of Bill Doemel’s imagination, his dogged commitment to excellence and fairness, and his readiness to pitch in to do the hard work of realizing the promise of this College.”

 

He told of an early encounter: “Bill and I had been doing some work together on a grant, and as I was walking home he came up to me and said, ‘You have to understand that this is about students!’ He did this with his index finger in my chest! 

 

“I remember not only the truth and power of that, but also the fact that Bill helps hold us all accountable for the things that matter the most.”

 

For Doemel, such conviction comes with the territory. He sees it in Dean Norman Moore’s terms: “You have to be a model learner.” 

 

And this is what a learned man does.