IT'S A BIRD! IT'S A PLANE! IT'S WONDER WAYNE!

By Edwin Cooney

Yes, indeed! I've got a very dear friend named Wayne. I've known only three Waynes in my life and they're all quite memorable. The first Wayne was the first black kid I ever knew. Wayne Anderson was often quite naughty, not because he was black, just because he was Wayne. I remember when we were in fifth grade anticipating our upcoming travels home from our residential school for Easter vacation. Wayne told the class, "My mama loves to see me come and she loves to see me go!" Wayne Number Two was the son of a Trailways bus driver in Batavia, New York. Wayne Fuller was a great guy and an excellent radio broadcaster. He actually broadcast baseball games of the Batavia Muckdogs of the New York-Penn League for a number of seasons. He also broadcast on WBTA-AM in Batavia. His specialty was oldies from the 1950s through the 1970s. Even while broadcasting, he worked for Trailways as had his dad. When Wayne passed away last year, his friends took him on a Trailways bus to his final resting place next to his mom and dad. 

Yet, there is one Wayne who is special to me and lives in my heart. I call him

“WONDER WAYNE.”

Dr. Wayne Mahood is a retired professor from the State University of New York at Geneseo. He was my professor of Secondary Education in Social Studies. Wayne taught education classes to potential teachers. I met him in late August of 1971 when I visited his office in a building known as "Blake C." I thought I'd introduce myself to all of my potential instructors before entering their classes.

Wayne was just 37 that fall. I liked him right away, primarily because almost from the very instant I sat down in his office he seemed exceedingly open to having a person with total blindness with an ambition to become a classroom teacher in secondary education in his class. From the very outset, he was both inquisitive and interested. Apparently, I made something of an impression on him. Almost immediately after I became one of his students, he made me the subject of an article he wrote for a professional journal. He once read me the article and it was quite flattering without being the least bit pedantic.

Wayne was most helpful to me both professionally and personally. In fact, he holds the distinction of being the only person to actually hire me professionally as a teacher. In the spring of 1975, I co-taught a graduate studies class in non-visual communication with a gentleman who had been my supervising teacher while I was student teaching. Additionally, Wayne recommended me for a high school social studies teaching position in the summer of 1973.

Through numerous luncheon conversations over the years, Wayne has taught me a number of valuable lessons such as how to draw distinctions between dogmatic and objective outlooks. He helped me to understand the significance of the social structure of various groups in society. During our education classes, we learned to take sociograms in order to realize the various levels of communication and socialization taking place in every segment of society.

When he learned that I was writing these columns, Wayne was very interested in becoming a reader. Few weeks have passed over the last fourteen years that he hasn't been available to offer a comment of some kind.

Wayne has an ongoing interest in local as well as in national history. He's written books about the Civil War and about a family member who was a sheriff in Missouri during the 1930s who suffered the indignity of having one of his black prisoners lynched from his jail. His special interest is the history and times of various generations of the Wadsworth family of Western New York.  The Wadsworths were longtime supporters of SUNY Geneseo. In 1960, when Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. resigned as Ambassador to the United Nations to join Richard Nixon as his potential vice president on the GOP national ticket, Jerry Wadsworth was appointed Ambassador to the UN by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Wayne has written several books on the history of that remarkable family which has been involved in public affairs since the 1790s. 

Forty-eight years have passed since I walked into Wayne's office during the week of Monday, August 30th, 1971. That was the week before the fatal Attica prison riots against Governor Nelson Rockefeller's Corrections Commissioner Russell Oswald. That was the fall that a Republican President, Richard Nixon, recommended that we Americans adopt wage and price controls in order to regulate inflation. It was the fall that Nixon prepared for his trip to China and we were all singing "Bye Bye, Miss American Pie."

There are two reasons I'm introducing Wayne to you. First, I would like Wayne to know  what he means to me and how highly I regard him. Second, although I am not related to him, he has nevertheless granted me a substantial legacy. That legacy is, to the extent I utilize it, a balanced outlook on matters public and private that I've tried to apply every time I sit down to write these weekly musings. A balanced outlook doesn't in any way rob one of the right to opinion, even severe or radical opinion on occasion. What it does do is allow one to reach decisions about events largely devoid of political dogmatism or what I call “canned thinking.” The fact of the matter is that Dr. Wayne Mahood, Professor of Education at SUNY Geneseo, showed me —  at one time a very dogmatic Republican — the pathway to both intellectual and even spiritual freedom.

Thanks, Wonder Wayne! Stand tall and proud, for you really and truly are "A LIVING WONDER!"

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY