------I noticed that these news stories were no longer on the web and were now archvied, so I wanted to make sure to post the stories on my blog------
Above: my Grandmother and my Uncle Eugene in uniform, 1968; my Grandparents, my uncles, aunt, and father shortly after the birth of the triplets.
My father has two older brothers, and himself is a triplet, with his triplet sister Eleanor (Lolly) and his triplet brother Eugene. Eugene studied for two years at the University of Oklahoma, and then, decided to join the U.S. Navy as the war in Vietnam was raging. He had served aboard a couple of submarines over a period of 3 years, and then began serving on the submarine U.S.S. Tecumseh.
While on shore leave at Pearl Harbor, he was in the back seat of a friend's jeep, and when an oncoming car lost control and crashed into the jeep head-on, my Uncle Eugene was killed instantly.
All this happened a week before my father's college graduation in 1969. He left the university immediately to get back to New York for the funeral. He assumed that he would graduate with the spring class in May, but his father (my grandfather) passed away of cancer just before that graduation ceremony.
I graduated from the University of Florida in 1999. My Dad was extremely emotional about seeing me graduate, and he gets emotional probably once a decade, so when I asked him about it, he told me that he never got to graduate, and then told me the story. I knew about my Uncle and my Grandfather, I just never knew that it impeded his graduation. I decided then and there to one day find a way for him to graduate. So his 60th birthday was January of 2006, so that's what I gave him as his present.
So - I contacted Purdue and arranged for my father to graduate! I took him back to West Lafayette, Indiana. The President of the University shook his hand and congratulated him by name as he walked across the stage. There's two stories below that we were both interviewed for by the Indianapolis Star and the West Lafayette Journal and Courier.
One thing my Dad says in the second article that I think is very poigniant - "Just because you lose someone doesn't mean you've lost the opportunity to make them proud of you."
Elliot Wilk: 'Make them proud'
By Tanya Brown
tbrown@journalandcourier.com
Elliot Wilk with a certificate of which he is particularly proud. It's a certificate of participation from the space program for his work while employed at Pan Am Aerospace. He was one of the Pan Am workers who worked on contract for downrange tracking on the Apollo mission to the moon launch.
Elliot Wilk
Age: 60 Current Residence: Boca Raton, Fla.
Education: B.S. from Purdue University, 1969. Master's of science from C.W. Post campus of Long Island University, 1979.
Family: Three children, Lonny, Jeffrey, and Julie
Profession: Retired electrical engineer technical salesman.
Florida resident Elliot Wilk has waited 37 years to turn the last page of the chapter that was his undergraduate career at Purdue University.
The events that kept him from commencement are still fresh to him, still tragic in the way that losing a sibling and a father will always be.
Wilk, one of a set of triplets, recalls being told that his triplet brother, Eugene, had been killed in a car accident while on military duty in Pearl Harbor in 1969. The tragedy came days before the trio's birthday.
"I didn't know about it. My family didn't want me to know because I had to take my finals and graduate."
When the body was returned from the Pacific, Wilk's family had to tell him. Purdue waived the rest of his finals and sent him home to New York. His diploma followed in the mail.
"I thought maybe it would be nice if I went to graduation in May," Wilk said. "But my father was sick with cancer and he died in May. And that was that. I went on with my life."
His life included a distinguished career as an engineer for the likes of Pan Am Aerospace and Motorola and, later, raising his three children alone after his ex-wife succumbed to brain cancer in the early 1990s.
Youngest son, Lonny, now 28, helped orchestrate his father's belated graduation at Purdue today.
"He doesn't set his mind on despair," he said of his dad. "In profession and mind, he always looks for logic and how to make things work."
Wilk said commencement will be as much for Eugene and Benjamin Wilk as for himself.
"Just because you lose someone doesn't mean you've lost the opportunity to make them proud of you."
Man finds it's never too late to graduate
60-year-old alumnus will walk in Purdue ceremony
By Staci Hupp
May 13, 2006
Elliot Wilk has checked off much on life's to-do list: Marriage. Children. Retirement.
The one that got away 37 years ago was college graduation.
At 60, Wilk's career as an engineer is over, his days now filled with golf and bridge games. Yet the Florida man is back at Purdue University, his alma mater, today to reclaim a lost rite of passage.
Wilk will stand, in cap and gown, with hundreds of men and women young enough to be his children. His own son will sit in the sea of weepy parents and digital cameras.
Wilk grew up as a triplet in New York City, headed to Indiana for college but left the West Lafayette campus during final exams in January 1969. His brother Eugene, a Navy sailor, had been killed in a head-on Jeep crash.
"I look back now and I say that I was a boy up until that point in my life," Elliot said. "It was like knocking the pins out from under you. "
Purdue officials mailed his degree, which he later framed along with a slide rule he used in calculus class.
Wilk assumed he'd go back to West Lafayette that May and graduate with the class of 1969. And then his father died of cancer.
After that, a new phase of life beckoned Wilk.
He went to work for the space program at Cape Kennedy in Florida. The same year, Purdue graduate Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
The space program marked the start of a fulfilling career that included work on nuclear submarines and semiconductor sales for Motorola.
Wilk's personal life also fell into place when he got married and started a family.
He was the type of father who decorated the walls of the family home in maps. His children watched network news instead of MTV. "He would always try to challenge us intellectually," said Wilk's oldest son, Lonny.
And he did so alone, after the mother of his children died of brain cancer in 1991.
By then, Purdue was a memory, as faded as the photographs of Wilk's fraternity brothers.
Hints of Purdue trickled down to Wilk's children over time: The beer can with a Boilermaker logo on their father's desk.
The framed slide rule. Their father's stories, including the time he drove to California to watch Purdue win the 1967 Rose Bowl.
It wasn't until Lonny Wilk graduated from the University of Florida in 1999 that he felt his father's void.
"He's an engineer, and they're not emotional people," Lonny said. "But he got a little emotional. I had no idea that he had never gone through graduation."
That moment stayed with Lonny. Last fall, he called Purdue University and arranged a spot for his father.
"I just buckled up my knees when he told me," Elliot Wilk said.
Purdue alumni often show up for graduation a semester late, but "we've never had this type of request before," said Christine Leasure, an assistant registrar. "We're excited to have him."
Wilk's name will appear on the program today. He will be handed a diploma cover as he walks across the stage.
And he will stand with a generation of electrical engineers who learned with laptop computers rather than slide rules. As Wilk sees it, they might as well be the same age.
"It's no different from the Marines charging a hill," he said. " 'Hey, we all got here.' " Graduation will allow Elliot Wilk to bring his life full circle.
In his pocket he plans to carry the yellowed telegram that brought the news of his brother's death 37 years ago.
"That was the point in time that the road diverged so strongly," Wilk said. "That was the start of it. And now I seek the closure."
years ago) was going to be singing at the Logo Awards in the US, with a cover of the Katy Perry song "I kissed a girl" (click photo on left to watch video). So - he was going to perform this song in English for an American audience. Ok.
To start off, this entry may arouse a bit of consternation, but i still want to write it and get it off my chest.
I studied Hebrew at the Hebrew Day School with Morah Genya and Morah Maya, Temple Sinai with Cantor Shapiro, and the University of Florida under Dora Friedman (pictured, left. The greatest Hebrew instructor to walk the Earth...I can still here her calling "Ar-yeh!")
and tv shows to choose from. One of the main options was an Israeli action-drama tv series called "HaBorer" or "The Middle Man".
1) Oh Shimmy...nibble on my other ear too and the West Bank is yours...
Some Jewish people lived in Russia
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