Hanover
Shewmaker, however, was in regular attendance for more than 40 years, first at Alumni Gym and then at Leede Arena. Neither snow nor rain nor another lackluster campaign would deter the award-winning Dartmouth history professor from watching the Big Green. Shewmaker and his wife, Liese, had season tickets in one section’s row K, seats 9 and 10, from Leede’s 1986 opening until last year, when his failing health ended their run.
“We were so hopeful they would get a championship while he was still living,” said Liese Shewmaker, known to clang her mother’s Austrian cowbell at games. “We loved those guys. Sometimes some of them would be in Ken’s class, so there was a special connection anytime they were on the floor.
“There was a faithfulness there. Ken absolutely loved basketball.”
Optimism and fighting onward were familiar themes for Shewmaker, who battled severe diabetes and other health issues during the last half of his life. Despite requiring as many as five insulin shots per day and endless blood testing, the former college hoops competitor played a mean game of squash and was a longtime fly fisherman. His numerous friends and acquaintances rarely saw the discomfort he endured.
“He was a little embarrassed about it and he didn’t want people to know,” said Liese Shewmaker, whose exacting attentiveness to her husband’s medical needs helped extend his life. “He was not going to give himself a shot in public for love or money.”
Ken Shewmaker, 82, died on Oct. 31 at his family’s longtime home off Greensboro Road and on the banks of Mink Brook. His was a life dedicated to scholarship, the Lutheran faith and to not taking himself too seriously. Whether tumbling into the water during one of his first fly-fishing forays or tipping over in a wheelchair while playing badminton with a broken ankle, Shewmaker paired his prodigious professional accomplishments with a refusal to be stuffy.
“He was goofier than hell and so much fun to be around,” said close friend Willem Lange. “But he was also an absolutely honest man and that’s why I loved him.”
Shewmaker was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Oakland. He was the grandson of Frederick Wilhelm Mueller, one of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders,” volunteer Calvary members who served with the future U.S. president in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. Shewmaker’s high school team won the Bay Counties League championship during the mid-1950s.
At Concordia Teachers College in River Forest, Ill., Shewmaker took a class in which he was seated alphabetically next to Elisabeth Spalteholz. The couple married in 1960 and Ken earned a master’s degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley a year later, the same year in which son Richard was born. The three lived on San Francisco’s Mission Avenue.
“The master’s degree cost $129 and you got free dental care if you let students do the work,” Liese Shewmaker said. “I knew someone who would let us collect leftovers from Kay’s Coffee Cup restaurant and another friend sewed all my pregnancy clothes. You don’t have a lot of money but you’re not poor.”
Study for Ken Shewmaker’s doctorate in history at Northwestern (Ill.) University followed, along with the arrival of daughter Nancy.
Teaching stints at Northwestern and the College of Williams and Mary (Va.) led to a job at Dartmouth in 1967, when the family moved into college housing on Chandler Drive, near the town of Hanover’s current fire station.
The Shewmakers were unable to find a house of their own for several years. Then a tip from a friend in the school’s football program alerted them that head coach Bob Blackman and several of his assistants were about to leave for the University of Illinois.
An affordable deal was struck for the residence of one of the departing coaches and the Shewmakers’ Mink Brook retreat came to be. Ken taught the majority of his 38-year Dartmouth career while living there, becoming an authority on Daniel Webster and American foreign relations and serving as his department’s chairman from 1985-89. He was the first Dartmouth professor to receive the college’s distinguished teaching award, an honor voted upon by each year’s graduating seniors, for a second and third time.
Erika Monaghan Downs, a former student and 1996 Dartmouth graduate now teaching at her alma mater, recalled that Shewmaker often lectured on one interpretation of an event, era or theory, but assigned reading written from a different point of view. All sides of a subject had to be examined to fully understand it, the professor believed.
“He was strict and demanding but also very nice,” Downs said with a chuckle. “However, he didn’t lead with the nice part.”
Said economics professor and friend Michael Ehraf: “He was authoritative without being pompous and he was open-minded and open-hearted. He was a very attentive listener to people, even if they didn’t share his opinion.”
Shewmaker wrote or edited four books, two of them on Webster, and folded over the covers of students’ “blue book” essays before grading them, so as not to be swayed by seeing their names beforehand. He did not use multiple-choice exams.
Shewmaker kept a daily journal and their slim volumes date back decades. For diversion, he and Lange would challenge their wives to games of pinochle, at which Shewmaker was a rampant cheat.
“He would wiggle his eyebrows or press my foot with his,” Lange said, laughing. “We usually cleaned their clocks because of that communication, and I don’t think they ever caught on.”
Shewmaker was a member of the private Norford Lake Club, a members-only trout fishing venue in nearby Vermont, and became so adept at tying fly-fishing lures that he taught classes on that art and on fly casting at L.L. Bean’s West Lebanon store. He also wrote on fly-tying for several magazines and was sometimes accompanied by his cat, Sam, when he fished Mink Brook in their back yard.
Through it all were the challenges of severe diabetes. Shewmaker was steadfast in testing his blood and drinking orange juice if necessary before he lectured, only once having to end a class early. On one occasion, he recognized that a student and fellow diabetic was suffering hypoglycemia and helped him in the middle of a session.
“He felt lousy or miserable daily,” wrote daughter Nancy Shewmaker Marinelli in her father’s eulogy. “His fingertips were heavily calloused from the far-too-frequent finger pricks. He was a brittle diabetic, even with the best caretaker known to man, my mom. It was a nonstop rollercoaster to the end.”
Shewmaker also endured a 2005 triple-bypass heart surgery that led to an infection, leaving him in the hospital for 40 days.
Still, he impressed friend and retired Lutheran pastor Bob Wohlfort with his dignity and determination not to bring others down because of his misfortune.
“I’ve never been around a couple who talked so openly about dying,” Wohlfort said of the Shewmakers. “Facing it and not being frightened of it and having conversations about it. He got to a point where he was ready and everything was hurting and it was time to go.”
Wohlfort was with the Shewmakers after Ken decided to cease kidney dialysis and allow his body to shut down. Liese broke out a bottle of whiskey and toasts were exchanged with shots, no longer off-limits because of its sugar ingredient.
Tris Wykes can be reached at twykes@vnews.com.