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With little fanfare, Andy Heck (’70, P ’98) takes the two aging rolls of butcher paper out of a plastic grocery bag and begins unrolling them on the kitchen countertop at his home in Pawleys Island, South Carolina. “The scroll,” as he calls the two rolls of paper, is the bridge between those different parts of his youth, a get-well message of more than 100 feet sent to him by Wake Forest after he was seriously wounded in Vietnam in 1968. If the onetime Deacon football star unfurled the scroll end-to-end on a football field, the paper would stretch from the end zone to the 35-yard line. As he ..read more

Al Koehler (’63), at left, and Butch Hassell (’64) at their impromptu reunion in South Vietnam in 1966. As a history buff and longtime Wake Forest sports fan, I was intrigued when I received a grainy, slightly blurry photo of two American GIs from former Deacon basketball player Al Koehler (’63). Al predates me to Wake Forest by 20 years, but I recognized his name; along with more widely known teammates Len Chappell (’62) and Billy Packer (’62), he was on Wake Forest’s 1962 Final Four team, still the only Wake Forest team to advance that far. The photo shows Al and teammate Butch Hassell (’6 ..read more

Truth is, I came to Wake Forest reluctantly. I wasn’t one of the starry-eyed freshmen wanting to become a Deacon. Because of the need to be near my mother during a difficult time in her life, I hurriedly applied to Wake in April of my senior year in high school, less than a month after my father’s sudden death here in Winston-Salem. Wake Forest took me in. Even if I didn’t want it to. It was a different Wake Forest then. A small Baptist school, Wake was notable for compulsory chapel every Tuesday and Thursday; mandatory Old and New Testament courses; near racial segregation; and dormitory bed ..read more

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