A fast track through life

Contributed photo Richard Wainwright at a Palm Springs function with prominent socialite Diana Paxton, as pictured in Palm Beach Society magazine this summer.

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One of the more interesting stories from the Creston High School 60th reunion last weekend comes from someone who didn’t even graduate from the school.

Richard Wainwright moved with his family from Creston to Oregon while a student at CHS, and never became a member of the class of 1949. But, when he returns for class reunions to see childhood buddies, he has a long trail of accomplishments strung together since his Creston days.

“I really wanted to be someone, someplace,” said Wainwright, 78, now of Palm Beach, Fla. “I knew that from the outset.”

If the first man to step on the surface of the moon, Neil Armstrong, calls you a friend and a comrade, you must have been something, somewhere.

Wainwright recalls watching Armstrong’s walk on the moon in 1969 with a different perspective than most of us.

“That was fantastic,” Wainwright said. “I looked at it with admiration.”

Navy years

Wainwright and Armstrong served together in the same Navy electronics squadron during the Korean War.

“I was taking college correspondence courses while in the Navy,” Wainwright said. “Calculus and differential equations. I had a little trouble swallowing differential equations, so I had Neil Armstrong be my coach for that.”

Several years later, when Wainwright was chairman of the board for the college he attended in Washington, D.C., he asked Armstrong to be the commencement speaker. Due to a conflict on the west coast (see related article), Armstrong declined, but sent a personal greeting to Wainwright with his regrets.

Through the G.I. Bill, Wainwright was educated after his four-year Navy stint at Capitol College, then known as Capitol Radio Engineering Institute. It was founded in 1927 by Eugene H. Rietzke, a Navy veteran and radio operator who foresaw the need for an advanced school that could produce talented radio and electronics technicians.

That’s what a 21-year-old Wainwright was as he enrolled at the college. He became president of the student body, and co-founder of the radio and engineering club.

After graduating and starting his own small business in Maryland, Wainwright joined the board of trustees in 1969 just as the school was nearing bankruptcy and damaged from riots in the nation’s capitol in 1968.

College recovery

Wainwright became chairman of the board, enacted a 20-year business plan to lift the college back to prosperity, and engineered its move to a new campus in the safe haven of Kensington, Md.

“I said we needed to hire the dean from George Washington University’s engineering school, and we’ll pay him to get this thing out of the mud fast,” Wainwright recalled.

Spearheading a $3.65 million fundraising drive, Wainwright later received two honorary doctorates from the college. Enrollment went from 227 when he took over the chairmanship, to 857 when he stepped down four years later to concentrate on his business.

“I wrote the outline for the master’s program at the college,” Wainwright said. “It leads to entrepreneurship by learning how to deal with bankers, with accountants, everything you need to know to get a business started.”

In 1974, Wainwright’s electronics manufacturing business with 125 employees was nominated for National Small Business of the Year.

Inventor

Along the way, Wainwright developed three patents, including a magnetic circulator invention in 1973 that advanced the art of transmissions to allow the same antenna for both transmission and receiving.

At the age of 60, Wainwright sold his business and was hired by the U.S. Postal Service to be a “troubleshooter” for electronic postal machines.

Wainwright and his former wife are the parents of five children. One of his sons has followed in his own footsteps by developing an electronics patent.

Wainwright was knighted by the Order of Saint Stanislaus in the Bethlehem Chapel in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

An enlisted serviceman from humble beginnings in rural Union County, Wainwright now circulates in a posh social scene in the Palm Beach area.

But he doesn’t forget his roots, enjoying visits for the class of 1949’s 50th and 60th reunions. Pat Bishop of Creston, a classmate at Lincoln Elementary School, recalls his work in getting grave markers placed at Graceland Cemetery for two of his deceased brothers during his visit 10 years ago.

“That was the first time many of us had heard about him in 50 years,” Bishop said.

“I had some excellent childhood friends here,” he said, smiling as he embarked on his next adventure.