Jerry Wilkinson holds degrees from Duke University and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, but he counts among his most prized possessions his late mother’s Maryville College diploma from 1953.
It has hung on a wall in his Atlanta office for decades — a cherished reminder of Myrtle Coker Wilkinson, who spent most of her life in Blount County, Tennessee, but made an impact far beyond the farms and lakes and mountains of her home.
“She used her education to better the wider world through the lives of the five children she bore and those she taught in elementary school classrooms,” Jerry said. “And I’m sure she never took the time to realize the scale of it.”
The Wilkinson Family donated the cherished diploma to Maryville College’s Archives, following the announcement that their mother’s name and story will become familiar to new generations of Scots, thanks to their generous $1 million contribution to establish the Myrtle Coker Wilkinson Honors Program.
“I think she would, at first, probably say that she wasn’t worthy to have this honors program named for her, but I believe that deep down, she would recognize it as a good gift,” Jerry said during a recent interview. “It’s a proper recognition — it’s about education, at a school that was pivotal in her life, in a place that was home.”
Jerry’s surviving siblings, Mitzi Wilkinson Davis and John Erby Wilkinson, and his aunt (Myrtle’s sister), Bobbie Coker Ramsey, agreed.
“I think she would be proud and happy,” Erby said, “for a couple of reasons — it is going to education, and it is a gift. The naming of the gift after her would not be nearly as important to her as assisting students in their educational pursuits.”
In a 40-year career at Blount County elementary schools such as Louisville, Christy Hill, Bungalow and Mentor, Myrtle was often responsible for teaching two grades in one classroom. All Wilkinson children, along with Bobbie, were on her classroom rolls, but she never played favorites, they said.
Placing an emphasis on reading and making sure that students left her classroom performing at the appropriate grade level (if not above), she changed life trajectories and inspired future community leaders.
The Wilkinson Family hopes the Myrtle Coker Wilkinson Honors Program will do the same.
It will be open to the newest cohort of McGill Scholars and Fellows in the spring but eventually will be expanded to more students who want to challenge themselves academically, while also acquiring servant leadership skills that benefit others.
That the McGill Scholarship Program (established in 2017) and Wilkinson Honors Program are connected is appropriate — benefactor Dan McGill and his family were friends of the Wilkinsons. Both programs will help the College meet strategic goals.
“This generous gift provides resources which will enable the faculty to design and deliver an honors program that attracts and retains high-achieving students who desire to ‘do good on the largest possible scale,’” said Dr. Bryan F. Coker, president, quoting the personal motto of the College’s founder, the Rev. Dr. Isaac Anderson. “The prospect of an honors program has been discussed here for many years, and we are extremely grateful to the Wilkinson Family for the generous gift which will make the idea a reality.”
Myrtle Coker was born on a farm in Louisville, Tennessee, on Sept. 13, 1915, one of seven children and the eldest daughter of Erby and Ethel Coker (no known relation to Bryan Coker). She graduated from Everett High School in 1932 and enrolled at Maryville College that fall — along with brother Walter Coker ’36 — to study elementary education. The Coker siblings commuted to campus, and when she wasn’t in class, she was involved in women’s athletics and earned money as a seamstress in the College Maid Shop, a student help program that sewed uniforms, choir robes and dresses that were sold in national department stores. Through it, she perfected a skill of sewing that benefited her family throughout her life.
After her sophomore year, Myrtle withdrew from Maryville College for financial reasons. The Coker family had only enough money to send one child; Myrtle generously stepped aside so brother Walter could finish. A History major, he also would go on to a career in teaching.
Despite the lack of a degree, Myrtle had enough schooling to qualify for teaching positions in the county schools. Her first appointment was at Louisville School in 1935, the same year she married Robert Gordon Wilkinson.
Records from Maryville College’s Archives show that Myrtle attended teacher workshops from 1948 to 1951, adding evening classes in 1950 so that she could complete the last courses required for a degree. And she did, on Dec. 18, 1953, at the age of 38. Son Erby was only 1 year old.
The love of reading and the importance of education would be passed on. Gordon and Myrtle sacrificed for their family again when their children reached adolescence.
“They wanted us to go to a high school that best prepared us for college,” Mitzi said.
Son Don graduated from Maryville High School, while the other four graduated from Alcoa High School. Sending their children those distances every school day meant figuring out the logistics of transportation. For many of those years, the family had only one car.
What would happen after high school graduation was never in question for any of the Wilkinson children.
Not only did their children all graduate from college, four of them earned master’s degrees, and three earned doctorates. Jerry and Erby received merit- and need-based scholarships to study at Duke University — Jerry in electrical engineering, and Erby in biomedical engineering. Jerry continued his education at the Wharton School, where he earned an MBA, and completed post-graduate courses at Harvard University. Erby earned a DVM/Ph.D. focused in veterinary pathology from Cornell University and taught at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Michigan. Don graduated from Tennessee Wesleyan University, served in the Tennessee Air National Guard and built a successful career in the insurance industry. He died in 2010.
Like Erby, Mitzi and sister Joyce Wilkinson Colvard also became professors. Mitzi earned a doctorate from the University of Tennessee and taught every level of nursing — undergraduate through doctoral — in UT’s College of Nursing for 26 years before retiring. She and her family live in Maryville. Joyce, who passed away in 2017, taught at De Anza College in California following positions with the Agency for International Development, Mobil Oil and Price Waterhouse.
Gordon died in 1982, Myrtle in 1994 — decades before they would see the arc of their children’s careers, but not before being able to reflect on the extraordinary foundation they laid in their Louisville home. As a young father, Jerry went home one Christmas — tape recorder in hand — to interview Gordon about his life: memories of historical events, surviving the Depression, which years he considered the best and why.
“And then I asked him about education and what I called the sacrifice he and my mother made for us. You know, they never vacationed and always worked,” Jerry said. “And he said, and I get emotional now remembering it, ‘It wasn’t a sacrifice. It was an investment.’”
Equally memorable for the Wilkinson children is their mother’s generosity.
Myrtle took care of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and neighbors. She bought Tupperware and Sarah Coventry jewelry from friends — not because she needed it, but because she wanted to help people whose bank accounts were smaller than her own. She gave family and friends a place to stay when they needed it. After retirement, she helped care for grandchildren.
A woman of great Christian faith, she taught Sunday School for more than 30 years.
“No one could have been more generous than she was,” Bobbie said of her sister. “And a lot of her helping, people didn’t know about. She didn’t want it to be known.”
While in her mid-70s, Myrtle was diagnosed with eye melanoma, and the cancer eventually spread to her leg and liver. Characteristic of her others-first way of life, she agreed to be in studies that would increase the knowledge doctors and researchers had about the disease.
“When they started that study on her leg, I remember her saying to me, ‘Well, it may not help me, but it may help somebody else,’” Bobbie remembered.
Four years after Myrtle’s diagnosis, the Wilkinson children laid their mother to rest alongside Gordon in Maryville’s Grandview Cemetery.
“I’ve led a remarkable life because of them,” Erby said. “I was thinking the other day, I’ve been really lucky. I had great parents, I grew up in a great place, I got into every school I wanted to get into, I got every job I wanted. I’ve had a pretty incredible life just because of the way I was raised and my education.”
And that’s exactly what Myrtle wanted, Bobbie said.
“She loved her family, and she wanted the very best for them – and for me. I knew that all my life,” Bobbie added.
Interviewing his father with the hand-held tape recorder is a memory that has never left Jerry. As the founder and chairman of The Wilkinson Companies, a privately held real estate investment and management firm, he has made several successful investments that show up in portfolios and statements. But he has also remembered the pay-it-forward kind, too, of which he may never see the return. The family has generously donated to — or invested in — several institutions of education and faith. Many gifts are given in honor of Gordon and Myrtle.
Myrtle’s name adorns the walls of the Alcoa High School Commons Area and headlines scholarship opportunities that benefit Alcoa teachers, teachers-to-be and female graduates who pursue STEM fields, especially engineering. An endowed scholarship at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering carries Myrtle’s name, and along with husband Gordon, she is memorialized through the educational wing of Immanuel United Methodist Church in Louisville.
Established in 2017, the Wilkinson Family Servant Scholars Program at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia, strives to “link the college’s brightest students with community leaders and mentors so they can study local needs — and decide how best to meet them.” Seeing Maryville College committing to the broader community in similar ways, the family was motivated to invest in a program that would enable more students and faculty to have a greater impact in Blount County.
The story and legacy of Myrtle Coker Wilkinson will be memorialized in the Maryville College Honors Program. It is the story of the impact of how one person committed to education will make a difference in the lives of many.
“Myrtle Coker Wilkinson was a remarkable woman, and I know her story will inspire generations of students,” President Coker said.
Maryville College is a nationally-ranked institution of higher learning and one of America’s oldest colleges located in Maryville, Tennessee, between the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the city of Knoxville. Maryville College offers more than 60 majors, seven pre-professional programs and career preparation from their first day on campus to their last, in the words of our Presbyterian founder, to “do good on the largest possible scale.”
Karen Eldridge, Executive Director of Communications: karen.eldridge@maryvillecollege.edu.
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