WAUKESHA – For the past 32 years, the story of the local University of Wisconsin campus has unfolded before Blake McNulty, an associate professor of history who retired from UW-Waukesha at the end of the academic year. The Columbia, South Carolina, native came to the Midwest to study history in the doctoral program at UW-Madison in 1964, but mostly he enjoyed observing the live history that he witnessed.
Fascinated by the stories that comprise the human experience, McNulty remembers the tales of students and colleagues at the Waukesha campus. From the romantic to the rowdy, from the political to the petty, these bring a mischievous twinkle to his eye, “but I can’t tell,” he says. Still he serves as a reservoir of the history of the campus and, indeed, much of the UW System.
A 1960 graduate of the University of South Carolina, R. Blakely McNulty, Jr., began with a great interest in the Civil War. He earned a master’s degree from the same school and then headed north to Wisconsin to work on a Ph.D. “The summer was hot,” the Southern transplant recalls, and he spent evenings swatting at bats that swished down to pester him in his Madison digs. About the same time, the civil rights movement was heating up, and questions surrounding the Civil War and slavery were rising to the fore.
Soon, however, student protests about American involvement in another civil war, this one in faraway Vietnam, captured attention on campuses and then in the media. McNulty was drawn to the subject. And he felt the itch to teach in faculty rather than graduate assistant capacity.
In 1968, Bob Nesbit of the State Historical Society set up a meeting between McNulty and Murray Deutsch, the dean at the two-year-old UW-Waukesha campus. Deutsch was hiring. Not minding the chance for greater interaction with his peers, McNulty first shared an office with Gordon Goodrum, another historian, and later with Robert Dills, an economist. Finally, he got his own office, moving into space vacated by political scientist Ed Jackamonis, and has stayed there ever since.
McNulty organized a national conference on teaching history and another on the Vietnam War. He thereby established prominence in that latter area of study and developed and taught a course on it. He also developed a course on film as social history and another with Terry Rozga from the Communication Arts department on Hollywood images of minorities. Both film classes have been very popular with students.
Retirement offers new opportunities, and McNulty, 63, will dive in immediately with a trip to Belize in June to scuba off the Blackbird Caye. That has become his sport of choice. “I will scuba dive as much as my wife allows me to spend the money,” he says. Together they will travel to southern and eastern Africa for six weeks during summer 2000. Periodically they return to France, the homeland of his wife, Marie-Claude, as well.
At home, he plans to clean up his workshop, keep up his badminton, and teach whenever possible. Following the example of his wife, who works as a docent for the Milwaukee Art Museum, McNulty would like to volunteer his time, too, possibly doing something similar.
The McNultys live in Waukesha. They have three grown children.
A retirement party/pig roast honoring retirees Blake McNulty and Morris Wickliffe (physics) will be held at noon Sunday, June 18, at the UW-Waukesha Field Station, located just south of Highway 18 on Waterville Road in Oconomowoc.
