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  • Wil Linkugel and Gifting 101
  • Mari Boor Tonn (bio)

Wil Linkugel was many things, among them a fabled storyteller. Given the chance to get in the last word—a comment I trust would yield his winning, wide grin—I return his favor by beginning with my own Wil origins tale. With his beloved wit, he might dryly point out that I am a starring figure in places in the Wil Linkugel narrative. But, in truth, he plays both the leading roles and a vast cast of supporting ones throughout—in the truest meanings of such words. With a dutiful spoiler alert, the basic plotline of the brief essay that follows is this: Gifting—gift-receiving, gift-giving, and gift-circulating—are key themes about Wil Linkugel as a person, colleague, and award-winning public address teacher and scholar. All of these roles were cut from the same bolt of charity.

So, Wil, here are some stories back at you.

I no longer recall the exact date of that icy December in 1983 when I arrived in Wil Linkugel’s office outfitted in what I fancied as my best smart suit, with white nylons (the fashion then, alas) muddied noticeably after slipping repeatedly on the slushy, steep-hallowed hills of the University of Kansas with hopes of altering the course of my professional life. By then, Wil himself had become a revered institution in his own right since arriving ABD from the University of Wisconsin to the flagship university of his home state of Kansas in 1956 after earning two degrees from the University of Nebraska in 1953 and 1954, the latter two interspersed with teaching four years in a one-room Nebraska county schoolhouse and another two in a [End Page 695] nearby high school. (The inclusion of his early engagement with young prairie minds in his brief obituary, when rationed ink might have been spilled further detailing his sizable academic achievements, is a telling measure of the man.)1 By then, at Kansas, Wil had helped build the Communication Studies department, directed its debate program, supervised the basic course, was serving his second tour of duty as chair, and had pioneered some of the first courses in the nation on the rhetoric of black Americans and women’s rights during the turmoil of the 1960s, as the latter stages of these social justice movements and their consequences continued to unfold.

I never learned if he remembered, but I had first met Wil Linkugel briefly years before at one of those noisy hotel-room convention parties after presenting a paper a colleague and I had written in the wee hours while engaged in administrative work at Pittsburg State University, three hours south by car on US-69. At 29, with a newly minted MA in hand, I was the first female to sit on the Deans and Directors Council (even temporarily) directing Continuing Education, after a couple of teaching stints in nearby rural high schools, parts or all of which would have grown a feminist if one were not so inclined already. Among my local circle, my job was nothing short of enviable, and I had a picture-postcard family to boot. So, to the puzzlement of many, I yearned to use my energies and mind differently, imagining doing the research and teaching akin to faculty for whom I scheduled extension classes and cars to far-flung spots. As I sped the snowy highway practicing out loud why I deserved 11th-hour admission into the doctoral program, I fantasized that Wil Linkugel—who had written his 1960 Wisconsin dissertation on the scrappy suffragist Anna Howard Shaw and had penned many pages empathetic to souls with feminist bones—would appreciate my aspirations and what I convinced myself was a version of raw talent meriting his gamble.

Wil and others did. During that December meeting featuring the Great Soiled, he asked searching questions, sized me up, teased me tongue in cheek on my living in a small Kansas town made most famous for its long-departed band of unruly “crazy” Socialists, and coached me directly on taking the GREs (needed immediately for consideration) with an honesty I would mimic later for my...

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