'He's been such an inspiration to me'
Robert Warner • The Enquirer • May 26, 2008


Kenneth Wilson smiled as he led the 14 seniors at Battle Creek Academy in one last recitation.
"We, we, we, we, all the way home," said Wilson, a 25-year teacher at the school.

"You say it," he said, turning to the students in mortarboards and gowns on their graduation day.

"We, we, we, we, all the way home," they recited.

It seems Wilson is the kind of teacher students want to follow.

In his commencement address at Sunday's graduation ceremony, Wilson never talked about the disease that has cut short his teaching career and left him stoop-shouldered and slurring his words.

Sure, Wilson might have gotten "a bad break," as Lou Gehrig said almost 70 years ago, when he, too, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

But he wasn't going to let it interfere with his final speech to his students.

Speaking slowly, laboring over his words, the religion teacher and guidance counselor recalled how this year's senior class had won a canoe race as freshmen, despite breaking a paddle.

He chose the children's book "Paddle-to-the-Sea" as the theme of his address.

The book depicts the adventures of a boy's miniature canoe and its hand-carved passenger as they live his dream voyage, wending their way from a small Canadian stream through the Great Lakes and on to the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Atlantic Ocean.

A message the boy carves in the canoe saves the day over and over: "Please put me back in water. I am Paddle-to-the-Sea."

"You may feel that Paddle is by himself," Wilson said. "Not true. Look at it more closely."

He drew four parallels from the book to the lives ahead of the graduating seniors.

"Your journey from here will be an adventure," Wilson said. "Someone is always watching you. ... Christ is always watching over you. ... And you can make a difference in this world."

He talked of the closeness of this year's graduating class, and noted the school's vision statements makes repeated use of the word "we," symbolic of the school's unity.

His mind undulled by his illness, Wilson appropriated a line from the toe-tickling children's verse to come up with "We, we, we, we all the way home."

After the ceremonies, Wilson sat in his longtime classroom and talked about the effects of ALS and his outlook on life.

The neurological disorder causes progressive degeneration of motor neuron cells in the spinal cord and brain, according to the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Association.

When he and his wife, Joyce, a physical therapist, realized he was exhibiting signs of the incurable illness, beginning in June 2007 with weakness in his grip in the morning and later a slight slurring of his speech, Wilson said, "I cried. I couldn't believe it."

"After that initial sadness, I determined to fight the onset of symptoms in every way I could — spiritually, mentally and, I guess, medically."

When his students realized something was wrong, one of them asked the ultimate question.

"Mr. Wilson, are you going to die?"

"I said 'Yes, we're all going to die,'" Wilson recalled. "'I just happen to have a diagnosis.'"

Finishing the school year was a goal Wilson set for himself.

"I felt that I had things to offer that others could not," he said. "So I wanted to be here to make the offering."

"So prideful," he said, reflecting on what he'd just said.

He said he'd miss "the stimulus to prepare material that I have been learning about my subject. When I learn I have to share."

He'll miss the students, too.

"I'll miss the questions," he said. "I'll miss their journaling. I have them journal every day."

Wilson stumbled over the word "journaling." He turned to his wife and said simply: "Say that."

"I wouldn't want this disease with any other person," Wilson said of his wife of 33 years.

He's 65, and had one more year of teaching in him, he said, but ALS has made him forego it. Now he's looking forward to a late-June nostalgia tour along the route of the former US-66 from Chicago to California.

And he plans to work on a book with his daughter that preserves his religion-class teachings.

As he talked, former and current students stopped by to shake Wilson's hand and see how he was doing.

"I'm great," he'd reply.

Megan Martin, 16, who'll be a junior in the fall, said she'll miss Wilson terribly.

"I was really, really upset," Martin said of when she heard of Wilson's illness. "I cried a lot.

"He's been such an inspiration to me," Martin said. "I wanted him to be here for my senior year."

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