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The power of one
The life and career of Bethel’s new president, Perry White, have been shaped by small schools and a few important teachers.
by Melanie Zuercher
In many ways, newly inaugurated Bethel President Perry D. White’s life and career trajectory have been affected by relatively little things.
Small towns. Important individuals.
White was born in tiny Edgewood, Iowa, to an auto mechanic father and an administrative assistant (“called ‘secretary’ in those days,” he says) mother. When White was seven, his father died and his mother moved herself and her only child to St. Louis for three years. So in one sense, a large city made an important impact, White says: he remains a St. Louis Cardinals baseball fan to this day.
When White was 10, his maternal grandmother’s illness sent him and his mother back to Iowa, this time to Cedar Rapids.
White says he counts those growing-up years in Cedar Rapids “a great blessing. I went there as an athlete, with no interest in the arts. Now that I have lived a number of places, I’ve seen few [communities] as well balanced in their support in the schools for the arts as well as athletics.
“That balance of athletics and the arts was formative,” White says. “Neither had a negative connotation. The pursuit of either was noble.”
In middle school, White was required to take either choir or band, and since he didn’t play an instrument, he tried out for choir – plus it meant the chance for a road trip to Columbus, Ohio, “and all the cutest girls were in choir.”
He ended up liking to sing so well that he went on to audition for the high school choir at Kennedy High School in Cedar Rapids, where he sang for a year under James Kimmell, “one of the music pioneers in the state of Iowa.”
Kimmell left after White’s sophomore year, to be replaced by Craig Arnold, a young teacher and a St. Olaf College graduate steeped in “the Lutheran college choir tradition.” Arnold was the reason the young Baptist Perry White first went to college at very Lutheran St. O laf. After a year there, however, he transferred to Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, which was closer to home and where many of his friends attended.
At Luther, White met choir director Weston Noble, whom he considers one of his two greatest teachers and mentors, along with Richard Giese, now president of the University of Mount Union in Alliance, Ohio. Both spoke at White’s inauguration.
“Of course, Weston will never admit he recruited me [to Luther],” White says, “and in fact I was not one of the 2,000 high school students he would call each year. But when I met him, I decided he was someone I wanted to work with.
“I don’t think he remembered my name for three years,” White continues. “In class, he always called me ‘My good Baptist.’”
Because of Noble and his high school music teachers, White’s career ambition became to lead a high school music program. “I have been blessed with great teaching rather than great talent,” he says. “To understand how to develop the talent you’ve been given is so important.”
White’s relationship with Noble really strengthened, he says, after he got his first job out of college, teaching grades 7-12 music in Elgin, Iowa. “There were 150 kids in the high school and 75 of them were in the choir,” White says. “All the basketball starters were in my bass section. It was an everybody-does-everything community.
“The idea of liberal arts is something I’ve been living all my life,” he continues, “to do and study and appreciate everything.”
White left Elgin to pursue graduate studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music (where he earned a master of music degree in 1988). During that time, he got “the first ‘best job’ of my life,” at Winnetonka High School in Kansas City, Mo.
That fulfilled the dream of teaching at “a large suburban high school.” Yet Winnetonka’s community was very much blue-collar, with many parents employed at the Ford Motor plant. “For many students, that was all they saw themselves doing,” White recalls. “And then they began to see that there were other things they could pursue – many went to college who might not have otherwise.”
Another important event in White’s life while he was living and working in the Kansas City area was meeting Dalene Zimmerman when both were cast members for a music theater production, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Then White got a job at Iowa Central Community College and headed off for Fort Dodge, Iowa.
The two carried on a long-distance romance for the next several years. They continued to sing, dance and act together in the summers in the Kansas City area, where Dalene had grown up. Summer 1992: Guys and Dolls; summer 1993: Big River; summer 1994: a wedding in Dalene’s home community of Prairie Village.
The next several years saw the couple in Oklahoma City, where Perry pursued doctoral studies at the University of Oklahoma in Norman and Dalene, a CPA, worked for a large company. Perry then got a job teaching at Kilgore (Texas) College while finishing his dissertation.
In 1998, a position opened up at Monmouth (Ill.) College in the music department. As a finalist candidate, White had an interview with Richard Giese, then president of Monmouth – an interview that had to be moved to an underground tunnel between buildings when tornado sirens went off in the middle of it. Perry White, says Giese, “literally took Monmouth by storm” – and White got his “second ‘best job’ of my life” as director of choral activities.
After two years at Monmouth, White was offered the chair of the music department. In that interview, he recalls, Giese asked him about future goals. “I could see myself as the director of a school of music,” White said. Giese’s response: “You should think about being the president of a college like this” (Monmouth, founded in 1853 by Scottish Presbyterians, is a four-year, private, liberal arts college with around 1,350 students).
Giese became, after Weston Noble, the second great mentor in White’s life. He was responsible for moving both Perry and Dalene into development work, with which neither had previous experience. In 2004, Monmouth’s vice president for advancement left and Giese tapped White for the role. “He helped [Dalene and me] learn the ropes and coached us through,” White recalls. “We were able to close the largest capital campaign in Monmouth’s history, at $62 million.”
Meanwhile, when the VP for advancement left Monmouth, the dean at the time, George Arnold, also left, for the presidency of Silver Lake College in Manitowoc, Wis., which belongs to the Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity.
One night in 2008, Arnold called with an offer for both Perry and Dalene – in advancement, marketing, public relations – with an opportunity for Perry to get back in a choral classroom. Though they spent most of the drive to Manitowoc and back outlining reasons they would refuse, in the end the offer was too good.
In May 2010, Perry and Dalene had the opportunity for something completely different – a pilgrimage to Assisi, led by Sister Laura Wolf, chair of the Silver Lake board. “It was not a conversion attempt,” White says. “It was to get the leadership at Silver Lake – most of us Protestant – to understand the order’s heritage, culture and values. I’d never had any connection with Catholics before going to Silver Lake.”
And now Bethel, which in a way closes the Anabaptist circle that began with White’s Baptist upbringing. On the Sundays they are home, Perry and Dalene (who grew up Methodist) attend Bethel College Mennonite Church, just across the lawn of Goerz House, where they live with their yellow Lab, Adelaide. They have both joined the BCMC choir and enjoy singing under the direction of Marles Preheim ’55.
“Bethel College Mennonite Church is a great blending of my [religious] experience,” says White, “a relaxed worship style with a high quality of music. It’s the first place in our married life that we’ve found that combination. It was a very pleasant surprise to find that – and to be able to sing in a church choir with a trained conductor.”
White has said several times, including in his inaugural address, that “it didn’t take Dalene and me long to become extremely proud of Bethel College.” It’s the kind of place, he says, where students can find the kind of important, lifelong teachers and mentors such as he did in Weston Noble and Dick Giese.
His “ecumenical college experience” has shown, he says, “that in many ways we [at Luther, Monmouth, Silver Lake and Bethel] are alike, facing the same challenges, boards addressing the same issues though perhaps at different times.”
Bethel resembles its sister institutions in Kansas, too – but “like Coke and Pepsi, it’s the same product, yet they’re different – the ingredients, the amount of specific ingredients.
“There are great teachers at a lot of schools. How our values are reflected in what we do is what makes Bethel unique.”
A college conversion experience
One of four children, Dalene White grew up in suburban Kansas City, Kan., and graduated from Shawnee Mission South (the high school alma mater of a number of current and recent Bethel students).
All of her immediate family still lives in and around Olathe – her parents, brother, two sisters and their families. Her father’s family farm in Linn County “is still a big part of our life,” she says. “We grow grain, corn and beans, and run some cattle.”
When it came time to go to college, the idea of a small, private institution never crossed her mind.
“Until Perry came into the family,” she says, “none of us knew about small, liberal arts colleges. My father went to Kansas State, my sister to Emporia State, my brother to the University of Kansas. We had the idea that small colleges were too expensive.”
Since “KU had a good business program,” that was what Dalene chose. Now she says, “I would have done really well at a place like Monmouth or Bethel. I didn’t form any lasting relationships at KU. I’m really envious of the memories and the friends that I see with graduates of small colleges.”
When she and Perry moved to Monmouth for him to take a faculty position in the music department, Dalene went to work as a manufacturing auditor.
“I was getting a little weary,” she says. “Richard Giese invited me out for breakfast one morning and asked me: ‘What would you think of being a major gift officer and planned giving advisor?’
“I said, ‘I have no idea what one does,’ and he said, ‘I think you’ll do just fine.’ I decided I was ready for the switch. For the first time, I had my own role at a small liberal arts college.
“I got to talk with alumni about how their college experience had transformed their lives. KU was pleasant but not life-changing. I fell in love with the stories and the impact [the college experience] had had.”