It’s when May dissolves into summer that America still manages to celebrate education, with rigorous pomp and melodic circumstance, with its ready panoply of commencement speakers, because despite our roiling culture, achievement in learning is still widely considered a noble pursuit.
I’m convinced of this just by the glow on the face of Don Schwall, who just took his bachelor of business education degree from the University of Oklahoma only 63 years after he’d begun his studies, and yeah, that’s a story.
But not the story you want to start with.
You wanna start with the story about Schwall outscoring Wilt Chamberlain as an All-Big 8 forward for the Sooners, or the ones about him striking out Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris in the middle of their epic home run race in 1961, or the one about meeting his future wife in the bullpen of the Boston cathedral called Fenway Park, or the one about him appearing on the fabled postgame show “Kiner’s Korner” in a toga at the urging of incorrigible rapscallion Bob Prince?