THE BLUE,
  THE ORANGE,
  WHERE THE CORN
  GROWS GREEN

--by Ronald C. Wimberley,
Class of '63

  My parents brought me to Louisiana College [LC] one Sunday afternoon in June 1960 to begin summer school and my college experience. At the end of orientation week, a classmate said, "So far, this has been like summer camp." After that, it never was. But my mom and dad saw to it that I got here, and with the help of a part-time job in the library, could stay.

  After I graduated, my younger sisters came here as well. Ilene graduated in 1968, and Betty Gaye in 1970. Like me, Ilene majored in sociology. Betty Gaye drifted into a major in history. Our younger brother, Dale, strayed even further. He majored in sociology, but at Louisiana Tech. We have all been fortunate.

  Our parents feel they did well, too. Asked to list his accomplishments at his fiftieth high school reunion, Dad simply said, "Four bachelors' degrees, four masters', and two Ph.Ds." Pretty good for parents who were never able to go to college themselves. But none of us would have received any degrees without their ideals and guidance. We chose the right parents.

  Had I gotten to LC a couple of weeks earlier for the 1960 graduation, I might have met Ken Wilkinson. He also was a sociology major, and he played football on teams that won nearly everything. Ken was robust, intelligent, unassuming, and a deserving winner. We were not to meet until years later at a sociology convention when he was a [rural] sociology professor at Penn State, and I was at North Carolina State.

  At first, we had little to share from our past except our separate experiences at Louisiana College, but that was enough. We became good friends. Being out a few years ahead of me, he also became something of a mentor who, quietly and from a distance, watched out for me and my career. Occasionally, I could return a favor by a letter of support to accompany one of the many honors that he achieved.

  Ken became ill in 1993. Browsing in a card shop near my campus, I spotted the cover of a get-well card that said, "Don't get better, get well." Inside it said, "You're already the best." And he was. I sent him the card about the time they discovered that cancer had spread through his body, and about two weeks before he died. Although never formally named as such, Ken was indeed a distinguished alumnus of Louisiana College.

  But during my first week on the L.C. campus, I met another great friend, one of my best friends. Dick Clayton. We majored and graduated together. I can easily remember the pre-dawn August morning at the log house on Cummins Drive when he, Sandy and I packed all we had into a station wagon and a small trailer and left our undergraduate days for Florida State.

  Sandy was a beautiful, freshman girl who smiled at me one day in chapel. Yes, good things do happen in chapel.

  With Dick and his family, we would later move together to more states, schools and jobs.

  A sociologist, Dick has accomplished many things and, a few years ago, he was recognized as a distinguished LC Alumnus. He is one of only two professors in the history of the University of Kentucky to receive both the outstanding teacher and the outstanding professor awards. He runs a major center for research on drug use. He is the co-developer of what is probably the most successful quit-smoking program anywhere. He has made the world a better place.

  It was not until we went through three degree programs and a couple of jobs together that I finally figured it out. Dick is really bright. He should be, for he had a great teacher here at LC.

  Another classmate of the early '60s was Tom Howell. Tom was the only one of the Louisianians with a perfect GPA or perfect pitch. He was better than the pianos in many of the places we sang. But those familiar with distinguished faculty members at LC know how he turned out.

  Unlike Ken or Tom, I was not an athlete and even less known for campus scholarship, at least, through the summer session of 1962. That's the Summer the PE department thought I was an English major and the English department thought I was a basketball player. I knew this because in a large English class the instructor would always call on two basketball players, me, and a football player in that order.

  I did better that Summer in PE than in English. Perhaps that's because the PE instructor, Billy Allgood, saw me as a special challenge. I'll always remember him announcing to our class, "Wimberley is a great guy, but he can't chew gum and walk." If athletics builds character, I guess he soon figured he had taught me enough about athletics. But I also learned some values from him. I value walking, so I don't chew gum.

  If Billy Allgood took me on as a special challenge, the English department just took me on. In that literature class, we once went for three days trying to crack the symbolism of a scene in Faulkner's "The Bear." In the story, one of the hunters incessantly pounded the breach of his gun against a washtub. Symbolically, as I now recall, this was to represent the intrusion of the railroad into the hunter's woods.

  But day after day, the instructor kept asking, "What is the symbolism of pounding wood against steel?" None of the athletes nor I nor anyone else could get the point. On the third day of our pounding in the classroom, a student from Texas gained my lasting respect and the eternal gratitude of the entire class.

  He meekly asked, "Isn't the breech of a gun made of steel?" I wondered, "Why hadn't I thought of that?" His question changed the symbolism of everything. We all looked at the instructor who was suddenly the one on the spot. Thinking quickly, he said, "Well, steel against steel, that certainly intensifies the matter."

  I've always been glad I didn't sell my literature books after those courses. Reading more from them years later than I did then, I came to realize the value of the arts as well as the sciences and athletics. Actually, I began to learn this before leaving the campus.

  In spring of 1963, my senior year here at Louisiana College, there was a play in the then-new, fine arts building. The play was, "The Corn is Green," by Emlyn Williams. It's the story of a Welsh coal mining community, about a hundred years ago, where each new generation fell into the life and work of the previous generations and was never able to move beyond it.

  The main characters of the story are a teacher and a boy who is her student. The boy showed academic promise for more than the coal mines, and the teacher was determined to see to it that promise was fulfilled. In fact, the teacher insisted that her student not follow the destiny of coal mines, but to rise beyond where the corn grows green.

  As I sat in that theater, I began to realize that perhaps I was that boy. Yes, I had to be that boy. I wanted to live my life where the corn would be green. There was more to do out there than I could see. No doubt, the play had the same effect on other students who watched, listened and began to interpret.

  By the final act, I also began to realize more than symbolism in the fact that the teacher starring in the play was, indeed, my teacher. However, it was by no means the final act. She was a sociology professor--actually, she was the entire sociology faculty--in her first year at Louisiana College. She was a professor who wanted to move me and others like me from the ordinary lives and careers in the coal mines that otherwise awaited us.

  My teacher and the teacher in the play, of course, was Sarah Frances Anders. Not only did she play a leading role on that stage, she was playing a decisive role in my real life, would in my later career, and will in accomplishments hopefully to come.

  Thank you, Sarah Frances Anders, for giving me a start to out-of-the ordinary places and ideas, both real and abstract, above the surface, where the corn is green.

  It is the purpose of education to change lives from the ordinary to the green, to provide a liberating education. For education--as another professor in graduate school told me--is the process of increasing one's alternatives.

  It is the purpose of places like Louisiana College to provide that kind of education.

  To the extent that a college or university produces distinguished alumni, those graduates are a direct product of distinguished professors. A part of our accomplishments always belong to them.

  So thank you, Louisiana College, for hiring distinguished professors like Sarah Frances Anders. And, especially, thanks for her.