"What's Up, Doc Wilson?"

WHAT'S UP, DOC WILSON?

August 2012

In a narrow hallway of the McLane Building on the Kenai River Campus of Kenai Peninsula College hangs a large framed photograph of a 60-something gentleman posing for a formal portrait. He has thinning grey hair, a generous nose, big laid-back ears, and large glasses, and he is smiling somewhat uncomfortably, as if he dislikes being in front of a camera.

Dr. William S. Wilson, 1977.

This gentleman is Dr. William S. Wilson, and the chemistry lab at the end of the hallway, built in the mid-1970s to enhance the school’s Water/Waste Water Certificate program, was named for him, even though he was never a KPC instructor, staff member or administrator. In fact, by the time the lab was dedicated to him at the May 1974 commencement exercises, Wilson had been retired for two years from the University of Alaska campus in Fairbanks.

At the university, Wilson was a Professor Emeritus in chemistry and general sciences, and he was a popular instructor, brilliant enough to master abstract concepts concerning auroras and electrical storms, but partial to teaching lower-level courses because he enjoyed generating excitement about science in younger students.

“Doc,” as he was almost universally known, began a 25-year teaching career in Fairbanks in 1947, and during his tenure he also served briefly as the acting director of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute. The 1961 edition of the Denali, UAF’s yearbook, was dedicated to Wilson and included a two-page spread that featured a photograph of the professor on the left and a caricature of him and a formal dedication on the right.

Caricature of Doc Wilson
from 1961 UAF yearbook.

The dedication stated that Wilson had “never been too busy to stop and talk, to tell a good story, to offer a kindly word.” It also lauded his understanding of student needs, his respect from students and staff, and his ability to increase the “intellectual content” of the university.

After his retirement, Wilson moved to Kenai, where he was given an opportunity to set up a new science lab from scratch. He was told that he could design the layout of the lab and array it with the latest and best equipment. He accepted this task enthusiastically. As former KPC instructor, Lance Petersen, wrote in his 1992 history of the college, Wilson “came out of retirement and attacked the job with zest.”

The result was “one of the best-equipped labs in the state,” according to Dr. Charles Behlke, Dean of the College of Mathematics, Physical Science and Engineering at Fairbanks, who at the 1974 commencement presented a plaque naming the lab after Wilson.

Doc Wilson (L) in the KPC lab named in his honor.

 Other than the lab, “Doc” Wilson’s main connection to Kenai concerns a long-term relationship with another teacher of chemistry and general science, Shirley Henley (then Denison), whom he had met when she was his student in 1960 in Fairbanks. Henley, who had worked as an adjunct at KPC starting in college’s inaugural year of 1964, was a long-time faculty fixture at Kenai Central High School, where she retired after 20 years.

In 1960, Henley, seeking to improve her education and to have some time away from an unhappy marriage, sent her two daughters to spend the summer with her parents in Birmingham, Alabama, and traveled to Fairbanks to study. Her schedule included one of Wilson’s chemistry courses.

One day, Wilson failed to show up for class, and Henley, who had come to Alaska in 1949 as a registered nurse, decided to go to Wilson’s cabin on the Chena River and check on him. She knocked on his door, noting that the windows were boarded over, and she waited for an answer. When Doc came to the door, she said, “he looked like death warmed over.” She offered to examine him or to get him some medication, but he declined both offers, promising he would be back at work the next day. And he was.

Two days later, Wilson tracked down Henley in the cafeteria, where she was dining with a couple of friends. After standing behind her briefly, he asked her to go to dinner with him at Chena Hot Springs, and thus began an intimate friendship that lasted for nearly 20 years, when in the spring of 1979 she finally divorced her husband and married Doc one month later.

Shirley (Denison) Henley, about the time
she first met Doc Wilson.

Although Henley said their long relationship was enriching to them both, their marriage turned out to be star-crossed.

On Nov. 30, 1979, Doc was driving Henley to her job at the Health Department in Kenai, and was planning afterward to drive on to the college to read in the library. But by Candlelight Road, near KCHS, an oncoming car slid on the icy roads into the front of their two-door Datsun hatchback and was subsequently slammed into by another car, and Wilson was killed instantly. Henley was critically injured and hospitalized for weeks. Doc had been 71.



Henley, now in her late 80s, still mourns the loss of Wilson, but she looks back on her time with him with admiration and sometimes considerable laughter. She called him “quite the character,” and said, “I don’t think there were two people on earth anywhere near like Doc.” She said that although she loved his mind—“he was a wonderful one-on-one teacher; he was patience itself”—he was fraught with eccentricities.

For instance, he wore pants with overly wide legs because he liked to put on his shoes before he put on his pants; since he was “chubby” around the middle, he found bending over to tie his shoes difficult if his pants were on first. And his shoes were “funny-looking,” she said, because they had “great big toes” to fit over his “funny-looking feet.”

A much younger Doc Wilson.

Although he enjoyed talking with almost anyone, he rarely looked at other people when he spoke to them. Instead, he squinted his eyes nearly closed as he talked, opening them only after he’d finished speaking. And although he wore thick lenses to correct astigmatisms, his glasses were usually so dirty that they were difficult to see through.

Sometimes in retirement when he would drive up to KPC to read in library, he would lie down on the floor between the rows of books and fall asleep. One of the first times he did so, then-librarian Ethel Clausen found him and was “about scared to death” because she feared that he might have passed away.

The boarded-up windows on his Chena River cabin were the result of Doc’s irritation from all the daylight during summers in Fairbanks, plus his desire to keep out the cold during the long winters there.

He had two big mixed-breed dogs, one of which he named “Puppy,” and the other “Chandrasekhar,” after a renowned Indian-American astrophysics professor.

He was “quite the gardener,” having worked with produce since about the age of eight, and having used his gardening prowess as a source of income during his days spent earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Brown University. And he was also a “great cook,” Henley said, “but there wouldn’t be a clean dish or utensil in the house after he was finished.” In the chemistry lab, however, she said, he was “clean and organized and meticulous.”

Born at home in 1908 in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in southeastern Ohio, Doc went through life with only a baptismal record and no birth certificate. His father, who had taught in public school, had married Doc’s mother, who had been a student there. She was only 15 when Doc was born.

From these humble beginnings, Doc Wilson went on to earn a doctorate at Yale University and completed a distinguished career as a university professor.

In memorializing Wilson, former colleague Neil Davis, who was a professor with the Geophysical Institute when Doc died, wrote: “We remember Doc Wilson as the man with the misleadingly vacant stare and the powerful intellect. Always the scientist and teacher but also an astute observer of the intricate affairs of mankind, Doc saw far more through his trick, often smudged, glasses than could the clearer eyes of the youths who surrounded him.”