Alumni Spotlight: Ralph M Stair N’63

Ralph was flunking 7th grade at a public school in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Tests showed he was performing at the 2nd or 3rd grade level academically. A school counselor told his parents he should drop out of school and become an auto mechanic or find a similar occupation. After extensive testing, his parents discovered he had severe hearing loss caused by swollen adenoids, which was successfully treated with painful radiation treatments through his nose. Later, it was discovered he was also dyslexic. Instead of sending Ralph back to public school, which had completely failed him, his parents decided to send him to Northwestern Military and Naval Academy, even though St. John’s was much closer to Waukesha. Ralph’s father’s best friend went to Northwestern. His father was also a Naval Academy graduate, so Northwestern Military and Naval Academy was the logical choice. Ralph’s 8th-grade year at Northwestern was a struggle. He was still flunking his courses and was forced to go to a mandatory study hall for 2 hours every evening. He could only look at the surface of his desk with his textbooks or face disciplinary actions. He was also performing poorly during parades and was forced to go to labor detail for 2 hours every afternoon, consisting of marching and rifle drills. He was hazed a little during his first year. The wrestling coach, looking for a smaller cadet at a lower weight class, approached Ralph during afternoon labor detail and offered to eliminate the labor detail if Ralph agreed to go out for the wrestling team, which he did. He met and instantly liked the older wrestlers and was never hazed again. The wrestling coach was also the football coach and a math teacher. At the end of his 8th-grade year, Ralph received a gold medal for most improved cadet. While at Northwestern, Ralph was undefeated in wrestling for his last two years, a member of the undefeated football team, received a perfect 1,000-point score on a weight training competition based on body weight, and fell in love with chemistry and math. Ralph became the Executive Officer and roomed with the Battalion Commander during his senior year. After Northwestern, Ralph received a B.S degree in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University and an MBA from Tulane University.  While he was at Tulane University, he taught math and physical education at an all-black high school across the Mississippi River while he finished his MBA. He fell in love with teaching and decided to get a Ph.D. in Operations Management from the University of Oregon. His first teaching assignment was to teach BASIC computer programming to business students at the University of New Orleans, but Ralph had never taken any computer or programming courses. Ralph bitterly complained to the textbook publishers that the few available computer textbooks were terrible, offering examples only in science and engineering, not business. A local book salesman was tired of Ralph’s complaints and told him to shut up or write his own book, which he did. At 80 years of age, Ralph looks back fondly at his teaching career at the University of New Orleans, Florida State University, and brief teaching experiences at the University of Washington and England. He loves seeing his textbooks used around the country and the world, being adapted and translated into Mandarin, Spanish, and Portuguese. You can see Ralph’s textbooks by searching for Ralph Stair Textbook and clicking on images to see his textbook covers.  He enjoys browsing the 15th edition of Principles of Information Systems, published a few months ago by Cengage. He often wonders what his life might have been like if he had become an auto mechanic as advised by a school counselor instead of going to Northwestern. Northwestern was the best decision his parents ever made for him. It changed his life.