A land of opportunities— that’s what Lakeland was for him, says Mark Schowalter.
Before he graduated in 1979, Mark was in the band, choir, and theater programs at Lakeland. He even carried Lakeland’s mail into Sheboygan—before diabetes took his sight in his senior year.
Oct. 15, Homecoming Saturday, 20 mph winds whip through campus. Mark stands in front of Old Main, next to his mother, Joyce, who went to Lakeland for a year but left in 1957 to work when she and Mark’s father, George, got married. He wears a black jacket and his hair is gray. Unless you’re standing close, you can’t tell he’s blind. He is just one of the many in a crowd of alumni and friends of the college at this dedication ceremony for the newly opened Sesquicentennial Plaza and front entrance.
He’s just one of many who listens as the Lakeland Singers belt “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” the hymn of the college, past the wind. Who listens to Chaplain Kelly Stone preside over a Lakeland ceremony for one of the last times before she goes to work at Wellesley. Who listens to three speeches made in honor of the occasion: one by married alumni Ralph and Dianne Mueller, class of ‘58 and ’57, respectively, one by senior Margarita Barraza Diaz, and one by President Stephen Gould.
They all describe their unique stories with the college.
Mark doesn’t take the podium – but not for a lack of feeling about Lakeland. He cares plenty about the college. He’s on the Lakeland Alumni Association Board. When he mentions he’s a part-time minister at a United Church of Christ congregation in Iowa, he feels it’s necessary to mention UCC churches are “connected to the college.” He calls the plaza he can’t see “beautiful.”
He’s just one of the many here, in this crowd. Is it possible they all have stories like Mark’s? That every person here feels he or she has a story set at Lakeland or because of Lakeland?
Look at them. Why would an attorney from Sheboygan, Bob Melzer, who didn’t go to the Lakeland but to Northwestern, not only volunteer to be on the college’s Board of Trustees, but still be volunteering 40 years later? Why would Paula Gaumer, coordinator of a program at Lakeland that offers high school students course credits, transfer from the University of Illinois to Lakeland in the early 70s and be standing here today? Why else would Linda Schlaak – a Menasha resident who never graduated from Lakeland, lived three years in Krueger Hall in the early 80s before leaving for Fox Valley Tech, but never graduated – be here this morning and be on her last payment for one of the $150 bricks that is helping fund this Sesquicentennial construction project, and say that, after all these years, she’d “love to come back and finish.”
But look: the ceremony has ended. Now, the stories are mingling. Dianne Mueller talks about one of her college memories with Judy Taylor, who graduated a year after she did and who today wears her jacket hood tightly over her head because even now that she doesn’t have to stand still as others talk the wind is cold.
“There used to be a barn where you could keep your horses. It was by where the science center is now,” Mueller says. “Paul Krueger, the president’s son, kept his horses there and several other students kept their horses there. And then the barn burned, but they got the horses out.”
They talk near pavestones with their names on them. Taylor points to her paver: “Judy Taylor 1958 / In Memory Of All / Lakelanders Not With Us / To Leave Their Mark.”
Mueller and her husband Ralph, class of ’58, bought three pavers, one in memory of their parents, one in memory of their brothers, and one thanking former college Presidents Krueger, Morland, and the current president, Gould, the man who moments ago in his speech said, “Every brick, every building, every space on this beautiful campus is there because someone else, a friend of the college, a member of the alumni, cared.”
Someone else stands near the fountain in the middle of the plaza. It’s Dorothy Mohr, another donor. She talks of attending Lakeland from 1938-40, transferring to Milwaukee State Teacher’s College because she couldn’t become a kindergarten teacher with a degree from Lakeland, her husband George who attended the academy, college, and seminary at Lakeland and passed away 27 years ago, her three sons who went to Lakeland, and holding every office in the Lakeland women’s auxiliary.
When she’s just gotten to the part about how, until it disbanded, the auxiliary always used to serve tea and food at Lakeland graduations, a man named Bill appears with a woman in a puffy green jacket and glasses. This is one of President Morland’s daughters, Letitia, he tells her. Whatever came next is forgotten.
“Oh for heaven’s sake—Letitia!”
That’s what Dorothy says. For her, today, that’s part of what Lakeland is. A land in which Letitia, an old character from a story she remembers, has returned.
Editor’s note: As of Nov. 1, 543 people have sponsored bricks or pavestones that are funding the donation campaign the front entrance project is part of. On the Lakeland website there’s a running list of their names. It takes eleven minutes to get from A to Z, from Kyung-Jun Ahn to Leeann Zoeller.