By the time he was 12, Dr. Milton Wheeler had visited every state in the continental United States, which is all there were – Hawaii and Alaska hadn't been admitted yet. He had also been to every province in Canada and all of Mexico except the Yucatan. "My dad enjoyed it," Wheeler said of the frequent trips. "I can't say my mother did," but she did appreciate their educational value. "Mark Twain said a year of travel is like four years of college," Wheeler said. As a young boy, the best part of his travels was "going up to the top of skyscrapers," he said. "And, also, attending baseball games." Wheeler said he saw every major
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league team play, including one game when the Browns beat the Yankees 4-1, "and that's saying something." But despite his years of travels, it wasn't until 1972 that he made his first overseas trip. Before that time, Wheeler, a professor of history at William Carey University, had taken groups of students to various North American sites, but had never made an overseas trip. "What sparked it in '72 was a student's question," he said. The question: Why can't we go see these places we've been studying? That seemed like a good question to Wheeler, so a group of three male and two female students loaded up
for a grand tour of Europe. Since then, Wheeler has made 91 trips to Europe and a total of 144 overseas, including 15 to the Holy Land. "We still go on domestic trips," he said, such as the Grand Canyon and Branson, where he once led a group of 89 people in two buses. "We had the Merry Christmas bus and the Joyous Noelle bus," Wheeler said. "I'd hop off one and onto another every hour and a half." The trips are always made between semesters, during holidays or during the summer so that students don't miss any classes, and there are sometimes as many as five or six a year. Although Wheeler admits that the
preparations can be extensive, it is worth it "to see their eyes light up," he said of his students. "It is such a pleasure for me to see people identifying with these cultures." Over time, the trips have grown to include more than just students, with a number of "regulars" signing up for the tours. "Two people have gone 25 times," he said. "Another has gone 18 times. I've had some people say, 'Sign me up for anything that's coming.' There's one doctor who joked that he has a reservation for 2021." After just returning from a trip to England in March, Wheeler is next scheduled to take a group to Turkey in November. Continued on page 42