This is the second in a series of columns by Dr. Sam Dicks, university historian, concerning the history of what is now Emporia State University and the people who helped the university get to where it is today. The name of his column, "Wave the Old Gold," is taken from the title of a song that served as an alma mater (school song) in the early years of the institution.
EMPORIA, Kansas -- Franklin Leonard Gilson (1875-1946) was probably better known throughout Kansas and the nation than any other Emporia State professor during the first half of the 20th century. A native of Iowa, he was one of the first faculty members hired by President Thomas Butcher in 1913. He had been teaching at Southwestern College in Winfield since 1901 and while there married student Lulu E. Purdy in 1906.
They built a home at 801 West Twelfth Avenue soon after arriving in Emporia where they raised their family. The house at the southwest corner of Twelfth and Washington remains today.
His wife is best known to current Emporians for beginning the Gilson Scrapbooks, an extensive collection of newspaper clippings about local people still maintained at the Lyon County Historical Society. She also kept a scrapbook of Frank Gilson's family history and professional career, which recently was donated by the family to the University Archives at ESU.
Frank Gilson was best known and is still remembered for The Gilson Players, a dramatic group which toured mainly by train throughout Kansas and elsewhere, performing a wide variety of plays from light comedies to Shakespeare and Eugene O'Neill. Most Emporia productions were in Albert Taylor Hall, but his summer productions of "Midsummer Night's Dream," many in the Peter Pan Park Amphitheater, were especially popular. Roosevelt High School students formed the Junior Gilson Players and often appeared in the outdoor productions in the park.
A legend which still endures among some of the more imaginative theater students is that late at night the ghost of Frank Gilson appears on the catwalk or in the catacombs of Albert Taylor Hall, where he had so often directed or appeared on stage.
He wrote and co-wrote a number of works, including elaborate historical pageants. His Treaty of Medicine Lodge pageant, performed every five years, was the best known, but there were other pageants commemorating John Brown, the Cherokee Strip, the founding of Kansas State Normal School, and other topics
He may be best remembered in years to come, however, for a poem he wrote in 1919 titled "Satis Est" for the Bulletin of the Kansas Association of Teachers of English. This work, often retitled by others as "Just A Teacher" or "I Just Teach School" was soon copied by other educational journals and newspapers (the New York Times carried it twice) and attributed to "Anonymous" or "Unknown." His former students sent clippings from throughout the country to him of the poem for which he rarely received credit. Here is the work often praised as the finest poem ever written in honor of teachers:
SATIS EST
I write no poem men's hearts to thrill,
No song I sing to lift men's souls,
To battle's front no soldiers lead
In halls of state I boast no skill,
I just teach school.
I just teach school, but poet's thrill,
And singer's joy and soldier's fire
And statesman's power, all, all are mine.
For in this little group where still
I just teach school,
Are Poets, Soldiers, Statesmen, all,
I see them in the speaking eye,
In face aglow with purpose strong,
In straightened bodies, tense and tall,
While I teach school.
And they uplifted gaze intent
On cherished heights they soon shall reach,
And mine the hand that led them on!
And I inspired! Therefore, content,
I still teach school.
In 1936 he wrote a brief message in the Bulletin urging students to attend a local lecture by the explorer, Admiral Richard Byrd. He noted how many Emporians had boasted of hearing Will Rogers or Theodore Roosevelt. "Such boasting is not idle. It makes one bigger to come into contact with bigness. It makes one feel himself more heroic to see and hear a real hero."
To Roosevelt and Emporia State alumni who were Gilson students or Gilson Players, Frank Gilson was a real hero because he just taught school.
CONTACT: Dr. Sam Dicks, 620-341-6431
August 20, 2001
Last Updated July 2, 2007>