News

'Keg' Wheeler, father of youth phys-ed, dies at age 91

By Bill Moss, Published: September 13, 2012

ZIRCONIA — Kenneth B. "Keg" Wheeler, a barrel-chested former Marine who started the modern physical education program in Henderson County schools and founded an outdoor education program that thrilled a generation of local kids with the wonders of the woods, died Monday, Sept. 10, at Elizabeth House at age 91.

Keg Wheeler, nicknamed by a maternity ward nurse when he entered the world weighing 11 pounds, devoted his life to sports and physical fitness, starting with his own as an athlete and extending to coaching, elementary P.E. and passing on successful practices that got kids active.
He served as director of elementary education for the Henderson County schools from 1965 until his retirement in 1986, and spent 10 more years after that running the fifth grade program that included activities like a "nature relay," where kids had to find a tulip in a pile of leaves.
He came by his love for outdoors, athletics and competition at an early age.
Born May 19, 1921, in Wilmington, he was the fourth child of the Rev. William Hardin and Lula Richter Dowe Wheeler. When he was a baby, the family moved to Charlotte, where his father served the next 18 years as superintendent of Thompson's Orphanage, where he got early exposure to competitve sports and playing hard to survive.
A gifted athlete, Keg played football for Central High School and was selected for the 1941 Shrine Bowl, the All-Star game pitting prep players from North Carolina and South Carolina. He volunteered for the Marines after Pearl Harbor, completed bombardier training and served in combat with a long-range photographic reconnaissance squadron in the South Pacific.
Keg Wheeler was, to family members and later to a school kids, a model of physical prowess.
"He was a real life hero," said Joe Alexander of Asheville, the son of Wheeler's late sister, Sarah "Sally" Wheeler Alexander. "I think all of us, among his nephews, looked at him with awe. He was an All-Star football player, he knew wrestling and boxing. He could play tennis. He knew how to camp in the wilderness. He knew how to do all sorts of things."
The youngsters were dazzled at the things Uncle Keg would do, like ride a Harley.
After initially serving in the Marines during World War II, he was recalled to active duty as a Marine Gunnery Sergeant during the Korean War. He was stationed Camp Lejeune on the North Carolina coast, where he asserted his love for athletics among younger recruits.
"He was playing organized football in his 30s, when the base team would play small college football teams," Alexander said. "And in his 40s he competed in the Highland Games."
At age 39, actually, he set a record hurling a 100-pound log in the Scottish Games at Grandfather Mountain.

Married Jo Anne Dingus
Wheeler played football one year at Wake Forest and studied veterinary science at South Georgia College before he transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for undergraduate and master's degrees in physical education. On Aug. 26, 1952, he married Jo Anne Dingus, whom he met during a picnic for the counselors of Camp Arrowhead and Camp Glen Arden for Girls.
He coached and taught phys-ed at Auburn University and at a Virginia college before he came to the N.C. mountains in 1965 and accepted the new position of director of physical education training for the elementary school students.
He created landmark, inexpensive elementary PE and outdoor-education programs that became state and national models. He adapted PE for the handicapped. Later, he was invited by the leading educational publisher Prentice Hall to compile his teaching methods and activities in a textbook for elementary school teachers.
He applied the tactics and culture of the Outward Bound program as he devised phys-ed and outdoor ed programs for kids. In 1974, he made Balfour Elementary School an demonstration school for health and PE for kids. He installed a "confidence course," a military-like obstacle course of tires, ropes, parallel bars and jumps into a pile of sawdust, turning timid kids into world beaters as they gained confidence in their ability and pushed their bodies to levels they had not known.
His nephew recalled that Wheeler, in schools and as the chief counselor at Camp Arrowhead for many years, knew how to gently push kids. In one exercise in particular, Joe Alexander recalled, Wheeler taught campers how to scale steep rock faces.
"Kids would come back from that having mastered it and they'd be 10 feet tall," he said.

Loved the outdoors
Wheeler's theories went beyond athleticism. He exploited the pure beauty of the mountains and wanted to kids to appreciate it, and in many ways was ahead of his time in linking outdoor fun with nature.
"We liked kids to see what a wonderful world we have," he said in an interview when he was inducted into the inaugural class of the Henderson County Education Foundation Hall of Fame in 2003. "They are link to the future. Our environment depends on them. North Carolina has more wildflowers than just about any state and most are in the mountains. Outdoor education also gets kids out, away from the TV. Otherwise, they're missing so much."
Jo Anne, his wife, said Keg was the same throughout 60 years of marriage.
"It was his life," she said. "He lived his own creed, to stay physically fit. To be of sound mind and sound body. He loved it and he lived it."
In later years, he kept up physical exercise.
"He walked and he had one of those heavy bags, like boxers use, that he used to practice on, " she said. "That was his cardio-vascular exercise."
As she put it, her husband "started the phys-ed programs for the schools. Before that it was recess."
She was not as avid an exerciser. "I had to stay in and make a pot of soup," she said.
Wheeler was preceded in death by his sisters, Sarah (Sally) Wheeler Alexander and Jean Wheeler Pharr, and his brother, William Hardin Wheeler, Jr. Besides his wife, Jo Anne, he is survived by their daughter Cynthia (Cindy) Ann Wheeler of Auburn, CA, and son, Kenneth (Tad) Bradford Wheeler, Jr. of Bat Cave; grandchildren Sally Virginia Lee in Rome, Italy, Jessica Anne Wheeler of Forest City, and William Patrick Lee, of Asheville; and seven nieces and nephews: William B. Wheeler of Southport, Edward B. Wheeler of Morganton, James Hardin Wheeler of Auckland, New Zealand, Jeannie Pharr Gilland, and Henry N. Pharr of Charlotte, William T. Alexander of Hagerstown, MD, and Joseph H. Alexander of Asheville.

Memorial service

A memorial service will be held Thursday (Sept. 13) at 10 a.m. at St. John's in the Wilderness Episcopal Church in Flat Rock, with the Rev. John Morton and the Rev. Alex Viola officiating. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in memory of the Henderson County Education Foundation "Keg Wheeler Outdoor Education Fund," PO Box 1267, Hendersonville, NC 28793.
The family expressed its gratitude for the care and comfort provided by the staff at Elizabeth House and the clergy and congregation of St. John's in the Wilderness Church. A guestbook or sympathy card is available at www.forestlawnhendersonville.com. Forest Lawn Funeral Home is assisting the family.
Alexander said that Keg, the baby of the family, was preceded in death by his his three siblings.
"He was the last of them," he said. "I think we lost a good one but I'm glad he was with us for 91 years."

Information from the family's obituary, from Forest Lawn Funeral Home, and from the 2003 Henderson County Education Hall of Fame biographical sketch of Wheeler, was used in this report.