Forty years teaching Is that what he said How many functions Are left in his head?
A teacher of Math And The Liberal Arts With much dedication Gave his students some smarts.
photo courtesy emu archives
Salvelinus fontinalis (“Brook trout” in the jargon of scientists). From a poem on the 64th birthday of Wilmer Lehman ’57, who joined the mathematics faculty in 1959:
Eventually, it came out that Salvelinus fontinalis was the pen name of Bob Yoder ’57, an enthusiastic fisher of S. fontinalis. Yoder, who taught in the biology department for more than 30 years, was the resident jokester of the science center lunch bunch; upon his death in 2005, a volume of his collected poems was distributed to his colleagues. WOMEN NEED RESTROOMS TOO! The Suter Science Center reflected its day and age when it opened in 1968. Science was mostly a man’s world then. There were no women on the permanent science faculty, and the college didn’t bother to put in a women’s restroom on the downstairs level; the secretary (always a woman, in those days) and female students had to go upstairs. Before long, agitation against the basic unfairness of this situation began and EMU kept pace with the changing world around it by establishing restroom equality throughout the building. Because energy was cheap back when the building was built, insulation wasn’t much of a priority. When Lehman began to notice light streaming in large gaps that had opened up between the window frames and the block walls in his math classroom, physical plant staff came over to work at some retroactive solution. Still, the classrooms were a nice improvement over the “E Building,” a former egg processing plant on the south side of Mount Clinton Pike that housed the math department before the science center was built. Over his four decades of teaching, 4 | crossroads | summer 2013
Wilmer Lehman '57 was one of the first to teach in the Suter Science Center. He taught math from 1959 to 2000, through four presidents and seven academic deans. Notice the calculating machine with the roll of paper.
Lehman taught just about every math class that was offered by EMU. One of the memories that stands out was the time a student answered a test question with an unexplained Bible reference. Lehman was tickled when he looked up Psalm 139:6 – Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. Another long-time mathematics professor, Millard Showalter ’62 loved to encourage creative approaches to problem solving, and thus, routinely offered his Math in the Liberal Arts students an alternative and deceptively simple-sounding way to earn an A in the class: fold an 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper in half eight times. The challenge was a fun illustration of exponents; making that eighth crease was like trying to fold 256 sheets of paper at once.
RESOURCEFUL GALEN LEHMAN For years, Showalter’s students tried and failed, until Galen Lehman ’73 marched triumphantly into class one morning, with a look in his eyes that told Showalter his game was up. It had been easy, really. Lehman was supporting his college habit with a job at the Kreider Machine Shop over the hill from campus, where he had access to a 200-ton hydraulic machine press entirely capable of folding 256 sheets of paper. Lehman also earned an A honestly in the class and went on to become Dr. Galen Lehman, chair of the EMU psychology department and the longestserving member of today’s faculty. When Lehman joined the faculty, the department was inconveniently housed on the fringes of campus in the same E