Gerald W. Smith Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

Ge~ald W. Smith
1
Well, after attending both the First Congregational and the Presbyt rim
church I joined the Presbyterian church where they had a young, ve
dynamic outstanding rdnister by the name of Ray Freeman Jenney . He was
extremely active on the campus at Knox College and was a dynamic pr acher,
dynamic man in the pulpit, and a dynardc pastor. I joined his &rurp and
was already a mber of it by the tire I went to Watsga that smr 1
Dr.
Jenney becam quite interested in what George Hoyle and I were doin at
Wataga so he cam out and visited us and he visited with m during he
swnmer on numerous occasions. At the end of the smr and when th fall
term started, he tried to counsel IE to think about the ministry.
went so far as to take IE over to Peoria to the Presbytery and have me put
under the care of the Peoria Presbytery as a potential minister in the
Presbyterian church,
And so during w junior year in college, I gave thou&& to that idea but
by the tirne I entered rrly senior year at Knox w original interests were
paramount and without any real struggle at all, I just made up q mind in
rry senior year that I was going to pursue idea of being a high school
teacher and of being a high school principal. (lau@s)
Q. Let m pick thBt up there for a minute, Gerry. Back before the war
and after the war I was quite active in student personnel work and I got
acquainted with the students that were In UYJaana in a way in which most
faculties would not have a chance to get to how them, simply because we
were trying to work with them using the mthodology of the new student
personnel mverrient which had come into being in the late 1930's. Of" course,
the choice of a cmeer, of a life's work was somthing very much on the
mind of the students then, it was af'ter the Depression and then af'ter the
war. I remember how many of the students at the university were there
to become teachers and this used to puzzle m, why so mmy of them wanted
that--the Aggies, of course, cam from the farm and they wanted to be
fmrs , the engineers they wanted to be something else, they hew this, but
so many of the others had as their goal to becom teachers. I finally
concluded that the reason for that was, or one of the reasons was, that
they had never really had a chance to observe any professional group close
up other than teachers in school, because they had spent their whole life
ming to school. Nau, would you c m to coment on your own decision?
A. Yes, I think: that this was very much a factor. All thro@ hi school
I lived in this cormunity that I spoke about. There were no lawye2 in
there, the closest lawyers were in the county seat in Princeton.
were no doctors in there, our doctors cam from Malden; I was not
tied in with any industrial opportunity, I knew nothing about the
ties in the industrial world, I was to learn more about them while I was
at Knox. So I think that, probably, having developed some desire to do
the thin@ that professional people do, the thing I felt closest to and
hew most about was the profession of teaching. That was probably true
of other students in the school as well, the young ladies . . .
Q. This was clewly true of re, back in high school days.
A, Yes, yes. Well, I'm sure that this was true a lot. Had I grown
jl:
up
mre related--in rrty mature yews I have becom very much interested
laws, in reading law and court decisions. Actually rrg work has been