Where the Heart Is: Wilsons Make Lasting Contributions to Auburn Agriculture

By: Jamie Creamer

A couple of years ago, Stanley and Barbara Wilson moved to Auburn–for the fourth time in their 50 years of married life. But this time, it's for good.

Stanley Wilson's relationship with Auburn began in the late 1940s when he enrolled in what was then Alabama Polytechnic Institute's School of Agriculture.

Wilson had grown up on a row-crop farm that lay partly in Covington County and partly in Escambia, right next to what today is the Solon Dixon Forestry Education Center. As a youth, Wilson worked hard alongside his father, and he realized early he didn't want to spend his life sowing and reaping.

But animal agriculture–that was another story.

"I grew up showing steers in 4-H and really loved that part of agriculture," Wilson says. "So when it came time for college, even though I'd grown up pulling for that 'other' school in Alabama, I came to Auburn to study animal science."

He earned that degree in 1953 and shortly thereafter married Barbara, an Andalusia native he'd met when she, then a student at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, was visiting Auburn on an API football weekend.

The couple's first move was back to south Alabama, where Wilson worked for a year on the family farm before leaving to fulfill a two-year commission in the U.S. Army. When that mission was completed he decided to go back to Auburn so he could get his master's.

Once he had accomplished that goal, in August of '58, Wilson and his wife said farewell to the Loveliest Village on the Plains and headed to Oklahoma State University, where, in 1961, Wilson was awarded his Ph.D. in animal genetics.

From there, the Wilsons moved to West Lafayette, Ind., where Wilson joined the animal science faculty at Purdue University. Almost immediately, though, he moved from the classroom to administrative offices, first as coordinator of a regional poultry genetics laboratory and finally as director of a pioneering research lab in quantitative genetics.

When the opportunity arose in 1975 for Wilson to return to Auburn University as associate director of the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station (AAES) and assistant dean of the School of Agriculture, he didn't think twice.

"Like I said, we'd left our hearts in Auburn," Wilson says.

In his new role, Wilson's number one priority was to bring national recognition to agricultural research at Auburn.

A wave of faculty retirements also had left a number of vacancies, and Wilson focused on recruiting outstanding individuals for those posts.

In 1980, Wilson's status and influence at AU rose substantially when Hanly Funderburk, successor to long-time AU President Harry Philpott, created the position of vice president for Agriculture, Home Economics and Veterinary Med-icine. Wilson applied for and landed the job, along with the massive responsibilities it entailed.

The job was all-consuming, and it was, Wilson says, the high point of his professional career.

"That was the one job I've ever had that I enjoyed above all others," Wilson says. "Other than my family, it was the most important thing in my life."

The beginning of the end of Wilson's influential role in agriculture at Auburn came in 1984, when James E. Martin was named Auburn's new president. The Wilson/Martin relationship was rocky from the start, and in late 1984, after much turmoil, Wilson agreed to resign from the vice president position but asked for a faculty position in the Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences.

"The department voted unanimously that I should be made a faculty member, and I was led to believe that would happen, but I got a letter from the president the next day denying that request," Wilson says. With that, Wilson's connection with Auburn University was severed.

That was 20 years ago, but the Wilsons remember the agonizing ordeal as if it were yesterday.

"That was the most difficult thing, and the most difficult time, I–we–have ever endured," Wilson recalls. "It was devastating."

The Wilsons refused to let it get the best of them, though.

They wound up back in south Alabama, at the Wilson family farm. Wilson's father, at the age of 86, had decided to retire from farming, so Wilson took over and launched what quickly became a highly successful cotton and peanut operation.

They enjoyed the change of pace that farming offered, but both of the Wilsons sorely missed the university environment. So in 1989, when Wilson was contacted about a job as executive vice president of the Ames, Iowa-based Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST), the empty-nest couple pulled up roots and headed west to Ames, home of Iowa State University.

Wilson had been at CAST only two years when his father died, and he and the missus moved back to south Alabama to be close to Wilson's mother, who desperately wanted to continue living independently.

It was at this point that Wilson decided to fulfill a lifelong dream: he got into the purebred cattle business. He bought a dozen Angus heifers and built a profitable operation in rural Covington County.

In 2001, though, Wilson's mother suffered a severe stroke and needed nursing home care. The Wilsons searched for and found an excellent facility–one that just happened to be in Auburn.

Since the couple didn't own land in Auburn, the move meant Wilson would have to give up his Angus operation. But instead of liquidating the entire herd, he sold 18 head and donated the remaining 42 along with all of his equipment–a package valued at $150,000–to AU's Department of Animal Sciences for use in its beef teaching program.

"Despite what we'd endured here in the 1980s," Wilson says, "this university did more for me than any other institution or organization in that it gave me the opportunity to be educated. We wanted to give something back to Auburn, and specifically to my department."

In addition to the Angus herd, the Wilsons donated $200,000 toward construction of CoAg's new beef teaching unit at the intersection of Shug Jordan Parkway and Wire Road. The beef teaching unit was named in Wilson's honor.

Today, the Wilsons live in an upscale north Auburn residential area, in a sprawling home that Wilson himself designed a dozen years ago. It's a home that incorporates all the features they liked best about the many dwellings they have occupied in their life together.

"I counted it up one day, and we have lived in 20 different homes," Mrs. Wilson says. "It would be 21 if you counted the trailer, but I don't think we included any part of the trailer in this house."

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