Treasure Chest Thursday - L. Roy Wilcox, student and educator, 10 June 2010

My father attended an elementary school that, many years later, he destroyed (he was the president of the Board of Education in Wilmette, Cook, Illinois when it was decided that the old building - where he had attended school at the end of his elementary school experience - had to be torn down: it was more cost effective than rebuilding it . . . one of his school board colleagues mentioned that he had a chance to do what most children only dreamed of: destroying his grammar school! But Dad told them that, for him, it was rather sad: he enjoyed school). I suspect that this slate was actually used in his earlier educational experience in Chicago, Cook, Illinois, but it is definitely the slate he used at some point in his life; he gave it to me when I was a child and I have treasured it ever since.



The only one of Dad's readers that survived. It has "Roy Wilcox" written inside. I imagine it was the beginning of the man's love of the English language (though a mathematician, Dad was also a lexicologist and grammarian; he loved to watch the news and keep track of the errors in syntax and grammar that announcers committed . . . we all have our hobbies!).

Dad would have been 98 years old two days ago (b: 8 June 1912; d: 31 Dec 1999).