LEARNING BEYOND THE CLASSROOM

By Kevin Derryberry

Afew dusty miles east of Castlereagh Highway just over the Queensland border into New South Wales, Dr. Willis Veal and his traveling companion, Julie Hansen, passed horse-drawn wagons as they entered the small outback town of Lightning Ridge.

The town claims only 500 or so permanent residents, but there were thousands of folks who weren’t the type to register with the census or be troubled to share their last names—folks like Herman the Shark and the man they had come to meet, Sharif the Wrestler.

Not everyone would drive eight hours into the Australian Outback to find a town full of transient miners, but it was all in a day’s work for Veal. After all, he was a teacher, and teachers always do their homework.

The stories that family and friends tell of Veal, a former FSU College of Education faculty member, can sometimes sound like tall tales or the set up for a joke. Dr. John Hansen, a fellow former faculty member, begins one such story, “Have you heard about the night that Will found Jesus?”

The two men were in Lisbon, Portugal for a conference when Veal decided to see the sights. He got turned around in the dark and couldn’t find his way back to the condo on the coast where they were staying. This was long before cell phones and GPS, and Veal didn’t speak a lick of Portuguese.

He wasn’t sure how to make it home, when out of the dark he saw lights shining on the “Cristo Rei,” Portugal’s hilltop statue at the national Sanctuary of Christ the King. The statue served as the landmark he needed, and he followed the light back home. “Who knew he was in Portugal?”

Veal’s brother, Franklin Dewey Veal Jr., describes their life growing up in Pike County, Alabama. “Daddy was a sharecropper and mom was a teacher. There were seven children and Will was the youngest.” When their parents passed, Frank and Will were taken in by an older sister and the two stayed close.

Veal had a zest for life and wide-ranging interests that took him around the world. By all accounts, he was a good storyteller, a lover of history and a collector of unset gemstones.

His trip to Lightning Ridge was due to the fact that the dusty backwater town is home to the world’s black opal mining industry and unset black opals can be bought for a song and transported dutyfree back to the States.

In retirement, Veal and the Hansens ran a small business buying unset gemstones in places like Lightning Ridge and selling them to friends back home in the U.S.

By the time they visited Lightning Ridge, Veal had retired from his career in public education, but his interest in learning about the world never faded and he would go to great lengths to learn what he could.

Veal’s daughter, Sonja Veal-Volino, a Florida High and FSU MBA alumna (’93), shared that Veal once spent a week living on the streets in Jacksonville to better understand the experience of the homeless. His longtime friends the Hansons describe losing him during a trip through the English countryside, only to find him doing a rubbing in a local cemetery.

Veal’s brother, Frank, describes his curious nature thus, “He wanted to experience it for real; that was his life.”

He wanted to experience it for real; that was his life.” – Frank Veal

Over the course of his life and career, Veal sought experiences that informed his teaching. “You never felt like he was teaching history,” says Hanson. “It just felt like he was telling stories to his class. He had a sense of humor and interest in experiencing the world.”

The picture of Veal that the family tells is of a kind and funny man who cared deeply about his friends, family and the world around him, but they add that he was a fighter when he needed to be.

In 1968, Veal had been a Bay County, Florida teacher for eight years when the state’s teachers went on strike over teacher compensation. He served as president of the Bay County Classroom Teachers Association when the Panama City Herald called him “the most vocal and militant spokesman for their cause.”

The rhetoric reached a fever pitch when Veal, employing his trademark wit, publicly declared those crossing the picket lines to be “very well qualified prostitutes . . . uh, substitutes.”

Opponents displayed less of a sense of humor and reacted with a burning cross left in Veal’s front yard on the night of February 25, 1968. The tensions forced Veal to leave Bay County for Tallahassee and the Developmental Research and

Education is the leading of the human soul to what is best.” – John Ruskin

Lab School known as Florida High.

Veal was already in the master’s program at FSU in 1968, and Frank remembers him recounting the story of his first class in the College of Education. “It was on ethics in the classroom and Will stood up and applauded” as the instructor opened the class in support of teachers unions and arguing for the fair treatment of teachers.

Veal’s bachelor’s degree in education had come from his home town’s Troy State University in 1960, but at FSU he would earn his masters (‘68) and his doctorate in educational leadership (’76) and would continue to teach at Florida High and in the College as a professor of social science education.

Veal taught American history and government and economics and received high praise for his work in the classroom from former Florida High Director, Dr. Edward Vertuno. In his promotion letter of 1982, Vertuno described Veal’s classes as “creative, challenging, and enlightening. Never static, they often utilized the latest techniques coupled with timetested content and values,” adding that he “could not help but be impressed with Will’s dedication, preparation, and implementation of the latest pedagogical findings” in education.

Veal was also a leader in teacher education statewide through his work as the College of Education’s liaison with the Teacher Education Center. Veal worked with school districts across the State of Florida on professional development programs for teachers. In a letter of thanks from the School Board of Palm Beach County, the project manager Mona Jensen proclaimed that Veal’s “training is, in my estimation, one of the best staff development programs available to classroom teachers . . . If I ever have the opportunity to collaborate with Dr. Veal in the future, I will accept with delight.”

Dr. James Croteau, director of the Teacher Education Center in the early 1980s, shares that, “Will was very dedicated to make teachers more effective. He was a sweet man with a real sense of humor, but who always took education very seriously.”

Veal was a frequent traveler, a good father and a great friend who never stopped his love of learning. When Veal passed away from liver cancer in 1998, his burial marker was inscribed with the words, “Education is the leading of the human soul to what is best.”

More than twenty years after his passing, Veal’s legacy lives on in the people whose lives he has changed and the family members who loved him. In Fall 2019, Veal’s grandson, Rowan Volino, entered Florida State University as a freshman with interests in commercial music and entrepreneurship.

In 2019, Veal’s older brother, Frank, created the “Dr. Willis Dekalb Veal Memorial Scholarship Endowment” through a whole life insurance policy earned through his service in the Air Force. “That benefit has to go somewhere; I think I’d like it to go to honor Will.”

The Dr. Willis Dekalb Veal Memorial Scholarship Endowment will support students in the social science education program who will act ethically, employ a sense of humor and write their own tall tales as teachers who lead the human soul to what is best. n