This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
This coming Sunday, May 19th, at approximately four in the afternoon, Augustana College will confer upon Don Wooten an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters. I'm not much worried. Don has been an amateur for more than 80 years and is not likely to change anytime soon.
I'm using amateur in its original meaning: a lover, someone who acts from the heart out of passion rather than for glory or money. Don Wooten has spent his life doing just that, whether he's directing plays, discussing the weather, serving in the State Senate or traveling to the outer reaches of the universe.
We were all born amateurs, looking this way and that as the world unfolds around us. Grade school is a playground for amateurs: there's music, and stories and a bit of science. We remain amateurs on the way home from school too, stepping through ice in the puddles to see what happens, climbing trees to see a robin's nest, chasing a squirrel, smelling a daffodil, checking under stones for slugs and centipedes. All too soon, however, most of us succumb and shrink into lawyers or English teachers or nurses or machinists.
A few years ago, a candidate was being interviewed by the Augustana History Department to teach modern European history. His specialty was modern Germany from 1910 to 1920. When someone suggested that a liberal arts college might need something a bit broader, he allowed as how he might be able to stretch that to 1930. Contrast this with Don Wooten, who finally agreed to teach for a couple of years at Alleman High School, only after the principal let him teach a course called "Anything I Want to Teach." Of course, the world needs specialists. It might even need PhDs, but it is refreshing to know that amateurs still exist.
A young writer once sent a letter to Henry James asking how to become a novelist. And James replied, "try to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost." I know of no one who has tried harder than Don Wooten, whose heart and mind and passions take him from ancient Greek drama to Shakespeare, from synapses in the human brain to the edge of the known universe. He is still like a kid who first discovers the encyclopedia and moves from entry to entry and volume to volume, unable to put it down. So, I wouldn't worry too much about this honorary doctorate. I'm sure it will be little more than a temporary setback.
Rock Island Lines is underwritten by the Illinois Humanities Council and Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, with additional funding from Humanities Iowa, the Iowa Arts Council, and Augustana College, Rock Island.
