Ex-Marine visits math class at Pitt
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
By Amy McConnell Schaarsmith
November 25, 2014
“Dad, being a Vietnam veteran, didn’t quite get the recognition those guys deserved,” said Mr. Wheeler, 46. “I thought we could shine a little light on what he’d done for us.”
Robin Rombach/Post-Gazette
Jeffrey Raymond Wheeler sits Monday in the back of a mathematics class taught by his son Jeffrey Paul Wheeler at the University of Pittsburgh.
The speeches, the handshakes, the red-white-and-blue cake -- it was all a surprise, and a lot more public acclamation than retired U.S. Marine Corps Sgt. Jeffrey Raymond Wheeler, a Vietnam War veteran with terminal lung cancer, was used to receiving for his service in Da Nang in the mid-1960s.
Sitting up as straight as he could in his wheelchair, Mr. Wheeler, a 68-year-old former coal miner from Wheeling, W.Va., listened quietly to words of praise from a veterans services spokesman for the University of Pittsburgh. He shook hands with his many well-wishers, accepting their thanks and thanked them in return for attending the reception.
Mr. Wheeler’s cancer has left him weakened, making the wheelchair necessary. But when it was time to face the cameras, he stood and to a spot in front of the Marine Corps and United States flags, and spoke from his heart. Why, he was asked, was one of his final wishes to see his elder son, Pitt mathematics lecturer Jeffrey Paul Wheeler, teach a class?
“He’s special in my life, like my other son,” he said, as his wife, Ruth Ann, stood nearby. “God blessed me, blessed both of us, with two wonderful sons.”
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