Bio, 2009: Jay Wagle
Hi everyone, I hope you’re all doing well and I have enjoyed reading about you and all the things you have been up to. My bio is a little late because I’ve been in hospitals a lot lately.After graduating from high school I, like a lot of us, went straight to OSU. I joined Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, declared marketing as a major with a minor in psychology and graduated in 1968. I was in the marching band for two years and had a great time marching at the half at football games and watching the football team beat OU twice. (And remember that wrestling team!)
In the fall of 1968 I enrolled in the M.B.A. program at OSU. I graduated with my M.B.A. in spring, 1971.
During this period I joined the US Army Reserve’s 4003rd unit in Oklahoma City and later transferred to Co. C. 1st Bn. 354 regiment in Pueblo, Co. I was a chaplain’s assistant and became a Spec 5. My Honorable Discharge was in 1975. I know this is nothing like Viet Nam service, but I tried to help soldiers who had real problems and have always been proud of what I did.
While I was an undergraduate I was fortunate to get summer internships with Foley’s Department Store for two summers in the Stationary Department as a management trainee. (Houston, TX.) Between my senior year and my first graduate school year (’68) I took an internship in Distribution and Traffic (tank cars can be exciting) with The Dow Chemical Company in Midland, Michigan.
The real prize, though, was that I got a graduate school student fellowship with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1969. I was working in the procurement department at NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center while the Apollo 11 astronauts were on the moon.
After I earned my M.B.A. degree I took an instructor’s position in marketing at the University of Southern Colorado (now Colorado State University at Pueblo). This is a relatively small University and I found myself in the awkward position of being the only marketing “expert” on campus. That also meant that in every nine month period I had to teach (almost) every marketing course the school offered. I taught at CSU-Pueblo until 1975. During that time I spent a summer working on my Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln.
During the spring of 1975 I met my wife, Sandy. We are married still and are getting ready for our 34th anniversary this November. It is impossible for me to tell you how lucky I have been in love and in marriage and how grateful I am for it.
I have a daughter, Jennifer, who is 36 and a grandson Jacob 13. I adopted Jennifer in 1977. Having no knowledge of family planning at all, I also have a son, John (technically John Samuel Wagle the IV). He was born the day after my 40th birthday (1986) and is now a senior Geology major at NIU, finishing up a double major in geology and environmental geology. Losing all concept of planning, I have a daughter who is a senior in high school. Cassie (Cassandra Jean) made her appearance in 1992. I think she may go into social work and counseling in the school systems. We had some medical issues and tried for a long time for those kids. Again, I can’t tell how grateful I am for my wife and family. They have always been the most important part of my life. Skipping now back to work:
At Nebraska I had two full years and two summers of coursework and then looked for a job. I got an assistant professor’s job at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio in September, 1977. I went to Ohio “ABD” which means “all but dissertation.” This is a dumb thing to do unless you are starving (which, I felt, I was) because it’s so easy to get caught up in your new university’s classes, committees and other activities, you don’t finish your Ph.D. in time and you’re cooked. No Ph.D., NO JOB. My department chair at Ohio found me a rental in a town of 400 people 30 miles away so there wasn’t anything else for us to do, and my Dissertation Chair at Nebraska kept up the pressure, so this didn’t happen to me. I earned the Ph.D. in 1979 with the Nebraska classes and a dissertation called “A Theory of Corporate Response to the Social Environment: A Marketing Strategy Perspective.” I’ve been trying to get Oprah to put it on her list of books, but so far I haven’t had any luck.
I stayed at Ohio University until my Sandy graduated cum laude from their speech pathology program. At that time her program was ranked third in the nation. You should think about all the northeastern and far west private universities Ohio had to be better than to get that kind of ranking.
After she got her degree we moved to Northern Illinois University in 1981 and have stayed here. NIU is between 22,000 and 24,000 students, has a main campus about the size as OSU (but not as pretty or as well planned) and three major branch buildings at Rockford, Naperville, and Hoffman Estates. Sandy is a speech therapist for autistic or multiple handicapped children in the DeKalb, IL school district. I retired from NIU in September, 2005. A year after I retired I was made Professor Emeritus at NIU.
If you’re wondering, NIU is the University that had the Valentine’s Day shootings in Cole Hall that killed and wounded a number of students. It is very difficult for me to reconcile that kind of behavior with the kind of society all of us are trying to build and it is especially unfitting on a University campus. I taught out of that classroom, by the way, for two years.
During my time at NIU I was tenured and promoted to full professor. I got to create the Marketing Honor Society (3.2 or better NIU g.p.a.) and ran it as faculty advisor for 18 years. I was also the faculty advisor who restarted Phi Eta Sigma on campus (3.5 or better for your first freshman semester- a national society) and I advised them for six years. I was a member of Phi Eta Sigma at OSU as a freshman and my son John made it at NIU with a higher g.p.a. than the one I had at OSU.
I was the director for the campus-wide University Honors Program at NIU for three years. It was one of the best overall experiences I’ve ever had. It is one of the most advanced honors programs around.
On a less happy note, I was diagnosed with Myelodysplastic Syndrome in February of 2009. This disease has gone into Acute Myelogenous Leukemia in the last month and with all the variables considered like age and some other health problems the outlook is not very good. But, remember this, as Harry Harlan and some of the others of you who turned to the ministry would say: I believe in God the Father, in Jesus, my Savior, and in the Holy Spirit. I hope to see all of you again in a better place (but I think you should try to arrange it so you get there way later than I will).
©2009 Stillwater High School Class of 1964