AftertheWar2

Drake University and qualified for a media certificate by completing twenty-four semester hours at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, Illinois.
     About three months before I enrolled at Q.C., a couple with whom I had frequently double-dated arranged a blind date for me. That blind date led to another and another and another. We dated for five or six nights a week until April 9, 1949, when Mary Elizabeth Stickler became Mary Elizabeth VanBlair during my Easter vacation. In spite of all the dating on top of a heavy class load, I managed to graduate with honors. One mitigating factor was that I always came up with a class schedule that had no more than one class on Tuesday and Thursday, days which I set aside for studying and preparing assignments.
      After my graduation, we moved to Vandalia, Illinois, where I taught high school English until 1953, when I accepted a position with the Champaign (Illinois) School District, where I taught English on the junior high level for three years, the last two of which I served as department chairman. In 1956 we moved to Belleville, Illinois, where I taught English in the high school and rhetoric and American literature in the junior college. The high school and junior college both belonged to District 201. After a few years, most of my teaching was on the junior college level.
      In 1965 the voters approved forming a separate junior college district, and I had to make a decision. Should I stay with the high school and become chairman of the English Department as the principal had asked me to do, or should I go with the junior college. I liked my junior college schedule of all American literature classes, but at the same time I felt attracted to the position of English Department chairman. I liked our principal and knew I could work with him. Also, as chairman I would have an opportunity to work with curriculum and, hopefully, bring about some improvement. Because of the department’s size, I would teach only one class and thus have time to visit classes to see what was going on and to develop some ideas I had for the department. After several changes of mind, I finally decided to stay with the high school. Depending on student enrollment, I supervised from thirty to forty English teachers each year until my retirement in 1982.
      Mary E. and I have been active in church throughout the years and strongly believe that the Lord has led us. For example, both of our daughters are adopted, and each adoption came soon after each of the two moves we made, one to Champaign and then to Belleville. In each case, we can see where He kind of gave us a gentle shove in the direction He wanted us to go. He has brought Mary E. through several serious illnesses, two of which could very well have been fatal. I am convinced that God enabled me to hold my breath as long as I did before surfacing when we ditched and that I would not have survived my time in the cold water without His intervention. I also have to credit Him with bringing me through spinal meningitis in spite of the flight surgeon’s prediction to my C.O. that I would not be back.
      A few years ago a friend and I were reminiscing about our WWII years. He summed it up well when he said, “I wouldn’t take a million dollars for the experience, and I wouldn’t take a million dollars to go through it again!”

Dale VanBlair
After my discharge I returned to Quincy, Illinois, happy once again to be living at home with my parents. I gave some thought to going back to my machinist’s trade, but because machine shops are frequently very noisy, I feared that doing so could be hard on my one good ear; furthermore, I did not relish the prospect of spending the rest of my working years turning out parts on a machine. It could get very boring.
    After a few weeks of debating what to do, I enrolled at Quincy College (now Quincy University) in September, 1946, with the idea of becoming a history teacher. After what I had experienced during the war, I felt that I had something to pass along to adolescents. Though not well known, Quincy College offered me a good curriculum and small classes and, perhaps most important, would let me live at home. After being away for three years, I wasn’t ready to leave family and friends quite yet.
     In the seven years which had elapsed since graduating from high school, I had forgotten all the grammar I ever knew; however, I was one of those people who wrote reasonably well in spite of not knowing grammar. At any rate, I did well enough in the first semester of my freshman composition class that my instructor recommended that I be permitted to forgo the second semester of composition and be enrolled in creative writing. He also believed that I was cut out to be an English teacher and encouraged me to switch from a history to an English major, which I did. In later years when I found myself spending hours grading poorly written themes, I sometimes wondered if I had made a mistake; however, as things developed, I think I made the right decision.
    Because I was twenty-six when I enrolled at Q.C., I wanted to get my diploma as quickly as possible. As a result of maintaining a high grade-point average, I was permitted to take a heavier-than-normal course load each semester; thus, by taking extra courses and going to summer school, I completed the four years of undergraduate work in June, 1949, two years and nine months fter I began. I subsequently received an M.A. degree from