WAUKESHA – Charlie Calkins taught geography at Carroll College for 23 years and then came to the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha as a visiting professor in 1993. At the end of the current academic year, his visit will be over. Calkins, 61, is retiring from the profession of teaching and will do what geographers do, travel.
Intending to major in history, Calkins entered Carroll College as a freshman in 1959. There he met Professor Benjamin F. Richardson, Jr., who had such a love and knowledge of geography that Calkins became enchanted. He, too, then made that passion his life-long work. “I’ve never been sorry about my decision to go into geography,” he says, but he did refine his focus to concentrate on its cultural aspects and graduated in 1963 with a bachelor of science degree.
After he earned a master’s degree from the University of Oklahoma in 1964, he began teaching at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota but returned to school in 1967 to work on a Ph.D. He spent the summer of 1968 studying at the University of Costa Rica and later wrote his dissertation on beekeeping in the Yucatan Peninsula. By the time he received his doctorate from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, in 1974, he already had been teaching at his alma mater for four years.
Calkins rose to full professor and chaired the geography department from 1988 until the school re-assessed its priorities and released most of the department. At the same time, long-time UW-Waukesha geographer Dan Zielinski retired, and the other liberal arts college in town asked Calkins to come teach at the local UW campus.
“I’ve enjoyed working with my colleagues,” he says, and adds, “It’s been a privilege to work with the young men and women whom I call my students.” Their faces keep getting younger each year from his perspective, however, so it’s time to check out the geography.
“It’s been pure joy, a lot of fun,” he proclaims.
A Wisconsin native (alumnus of Sheboygan North High School), Calkins found research material at his doorstep as well as in the Yucatan. He studied the impact of ethnic groups on the historical geography of Wisconsin – in buildings, in language, in crops. More specifically, he has looked at the Walloon-speaking Belgians in the Door Peninsula, where he spends much of his leisure time.
He has served on the Waukesha County Historical Society Board of Directors, Waukesha County Museum Board, Waukesha Landmarks Commission, and Pioneer America Society, and for several years judged the National Geographic Society’s geography bee, a national contest that tests geography knowledge of 4th-8th graders.
In addition to all the places he wants to see with a geographer’s eye, Calkins will use his new-found time for more frequent visits with his grown children, Christine in the Twin Cities and Jonathon in Washington, D.C.
Calkins and his wife, Lois, live in Waukesha. |
