"Fun All My Life"

At the University of Missouri one night last week, some 500 students stood outside a small, red brick house yelling their heads off: "We want Monkey Wrench! We want Monkey Wrench!" Finally a white-goateed man appeared in his doorway, waving his arms and nodding his head. After more than 40 years of teaching history, Professor Jesse E. Wrench, 70, was retiring, and his students had come to pay their respects. "My gosh," said he, "I don't know why you're honoring me. All I've done is to have fun all my life."

As generations of Mizzou's men well know, the professor was only telling the truth. Loping over the campus, his cape flapping in the wind, he always seemed to be having fun--of his own special kind. For years he wore plus-fours (until a doctor told him they were bad for his circulation), but he kept his silk shirts with their flowing sleeves. To compensate for his balding dome, he wore his hair long in back. In winter he crammed it inside a beret; in summer he used a hairnet.

A Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell, Monkey Wrench never bothered to pick up an advanced degree; campus legend has it that he was outraged when the University of Wisconsin told him that he would have to type his thesis (he had written it out in longhand on scraps of brown paper). The lack of a master's and a doctorate, however, was never a handicap. Students flocked to his classes, crowded into his office in the afternoon, swarmed into his cluttered living room at night. There, with his wife ("Grandma") and daughter (Helena Ayesha Theodora), Monkey Wrench would entertain for hours. "Treat 'em like grownups," he would say of his students. "But remember, they're nothing but kids. You've got to be as young as they are."

At football games, dressed in the loud yellow jacket of the Tigers, the professor was usually on hand to lead the cheering. At dances he acted as "bouncer," at elections as "policeman." Sometimes he could be seen mowing his lawn in his underwear, sometimes taking a constitutional at 3 a.m., and sometimes wandering through the Southern Missouri hills, cape and all, looking for Indian mounds.

Last week, as his students gathered about his house, they made sure he would know how they felt. They showered him with scrolls, letters, a gold watch and a plaque. Then, suddenly, the fun was over. "This is all very nice," said Monkey Wrench, "but all of you ought to be home studying for exams." With that, he led one last cheer and shook hands all around.

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