A HISTORY OF WARMAN

Dana's master of history, Don Warman, retires

Commencement, Saturday, 10:30 a.m.

After 42 years of teaching history to the students of Dana College, Professor Don Warman announced his retirement earlier this year. To honor his service to the college, Warman was named professor emeritus of history at Dana’s Commencement Ceremony.

Best known for his wit and insatiable urge to learn and teach, Warman taught thousands of students in his time at Dana, including several who would later go on to become his colleagues on the faculty. In his first years at Dana, he interested a young man in English history. When that student later finished his doctorate in history at Duke University, Warman pushed the administration at Dana to hire him. They taught together for 33 years until Dr. Richard Jorgensen retired last year. Warman’s retirement ends their long dynasty in Dana’s history department, making for one of the most dramatic changes in the college’s history.

“Professor Warman will be missed,” President Myrvin Christopherson said. “You can’t help but like the guy. He makes history come alive.”

Warman’s family moved around the country during his childhood, but his unusual intelligence caused one school to skip him from the fifth to ninth grade. In Warman’s early teens, his father died, and Warman hit the open road, hitchhiking all over the United States at the age of 13.

After graduating with a degree in social science from Park College in Kansas City, Mo., he held a series of odd jobs, including selling typewriters in the Kansas City stockyards (he never made a sale in six months) and one in which he was hired and fired within three days.
In this time period, Warman married his wife, Sandy, and started a family. He was drafted into the U.S. Army when his son was 6 months old, despite his conscientious objector status.

It was at Fort Sill in Oklahoma that Warman gave his first history lecture. As a non-commissioned officer, one of his duties was to give lectures on military history to the troops. (He was chastised on giving one lecture on the Battle of Little Big Horn, told, “We don’t talk about the ones we lost.”)

Warman was given an early discharge to pursue his master’s degree at the University of South Dakota. He also spent a year working on a doctorate before becoming the first historian at the Homestead National Monument in Beatrice, Neb. Much of the text found within the museum today was written by Warman during his tenure there.

After a one-hour interview with then-Dana College President C.C. Madsen, Warman was hired as a new member of the Dana College faculty in 1961. It was at his first faculty dinner that Warman decided he never wanted to leave. “This is where I want to be,” he remembers saying to the rest of the faculty. “This is where I need to be.”

Warman lived through several changes at Dana. In his time the college went from predominately Lutheran to a college that reflects the demographics of the Omaha area. He was involved in Dana’s humanities program for a quarter-century, a program, he said, “Every student who’s taken it loves 10 years out.” He also saw its end.

Warman also embraced changes in technology for use in the classroom. He’s creator and developer of Professor Gigabyte’s Gateways to Infinity (www.dana.edu/dwarman), a well-known academic clearinghouse of reference web sites begun in 1995.

But Warman’s real passion is teaching. He said he was born to teach. He would never leave teaching, but a series of strokes has left him physically weaker.

“I would rather teach than eat,” Warman said. “And obviously I like to eat.”

Warman’s favorite classes over the years have included Russian History, History of the Non-Western World and Late 20th Century History. But he holds a warm spot in his heart for his classes in anthropology and geography, topics he’s never took a single day of instruction in.

“First and foremost, Professor Warman is a teacher,” said Dr. John Mark Nielsen, professor of English and one of Warman’s former students. “Professor Warman has pursued learning with a passion throughout his long career.”

In recognition of Warman’s service to Dana the Donald G. Warman Award for Outstanding Senior Student in History will be presented for the first time to a student next year.

Warman and his wife, a retired English professor, moved this summer to New Hampshire to be near their oldest son.