You Don't Always Get What You Ask For: Lessons of Love from Dad

Jim Wilcox wakes up every morning with one goal in mind: to make someone laugh. As he was growing up in San Jose, California, where the mornings can blind you with sunrays and the evening songs can sing you to sleep, his list of what he wanted to be when he grew up was brief. First, he wanted to be a rock ’n’ roll singer. Second, he wanted to be a professional comedian. And third, he wanted to be the editor of a small mountain-town weekly newspaper. Well, if you’d put a mountain in Oklahoma City, he’d be doing all of those things at Southern Nazarene University, where he has taught since 1979. He occasionally performs onstage in many of the university variety shows. He has more than a dozen captive audiences each week in his writing classes, who laugh as they learn. And he is the adviser to the student newspaper.