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Meet the 2007 additions to the alumni association’s Hall of Honor. These retired alumni, professors and business leaders are being recognized for their unselfish devotion and service to Utah State University and its alumni association.
Dale W. Adams ’56
From Bali to Brazil, Dale Adams worked in some 80 countries while teaching for 30 years at Ohio State University. As a banker and agricultural researcher, he worked to liberate international farmers from unfair credit programs lacking ceilings on interest rates.
As an undergraduate bent solely on getting into the Air Force, Adams says he studied a “mish-mash” of subjects at Utah State University, adding with total candor – that he majored in “fraternity pranks.”
“Then I worked my tail off in graduate school,” he says.
In the Air Force, Adams spent a year on assignment in Japan and Taiwan, where he became interested in international agricultural issues – problems he would further explore during graduate school at Michigan State. After school, Adams lived in Colombia for four years before relocating to Ohio, where his globe-trotting truly began.
An incessant traveler, Adams developed a lifetime love of reading, fueled perhaps by a lifetime aversion to lengthy plane rides. His favorite authors include Ayn Rand, Paul Johnson and Wallace Stegner.
A lifetime sustaining member of the alumni association, Adams was recognized by the association for his endowment for high school students in Kane and Garfield counties and his board service for the Summit County alumni chapter, among other contributions.
These days, the business meetings of Herb Champ, former CEO of Utah Mortgage and Loan Corp., are marked by coffee cups, family and simplicity.
“I’m just an ordinary guy,” says Champ, 82. Retired since 1983, Champ now spends the bulk of his time with family, including Helen, his wife of 55 years. “As you get older,” he says, “you try to make things simple.”
In 1949, six years after entering the military at age 18, Champ earned a bachelor’s in business from Utah State University, then Utah State Agricultural College. As a student, Champ managed the school paper, Student Life, which then serviced a student body of only 6,000.
When he returned from the European theater in 1946, Champ was hardened, worldly, and perhaps most importantly, older and wiser. “I was impetuous,” Champ says of his youth, but the military has a way of inciting maturity: “You grow up fast.”
Champ joined the family business after graduation, initially at an Idaho branch as “a peon, the boss’s son.”
“I told my dad, ‘I love you, but I have to go out on my own,’” he says. Two years after moving back to Logan in 1957, Champ became company manager. In 1965, he took over as CEO, continuing to work for the next two decades after Utah Mortgage and Loan had been sold to First Security Bank in 1967.
Helen kept just as busy, raising their two children and volunteering in the community. A long-time member of the AC Women’s Club of community and university supporters, she served as president of alumni advisors for Tri-Delta Sorority.
Carrying on the philanthropy of his father Frederick, Herb and his wife established an endowment in their name for USU athletics and also donate to the Cache County alumni chapter scholarship fund. The Champs are lifetime sustaining members of the alumni association.
Elliot (’43) and Wayne (’48 ’49MS) Rich
A sign on Elliott Rich’s office door in USU’s civil engineering department said, “Students Welcome Here,” and they were. He put his home phone number on all assignment sheets and failed to return exams the next class period only once in his 30 years of teaching at USU. He graded all exams himself and never gave the same exam twice. He launched the Model Bridge Contest in high schools to lure better students to USU and gave lectures to junior high students to encourage them to do well in math. The College of Engineering continues to benefit from his generosity today. He established an endowment and a scholarship fund.
Brother Wayne found the good in everyone throughout his 35 years of teaching for USU’s math department. So jolly was his outlook that departmental colleague and long-time friend Larry Cannon can still remember his boisterous laughter, which could be heard all over the building. “And he was so devoted to his students that he said he was ‘willing to stand on his head for them,’ and that was not just a figure of speech. One time when I passed his classroom, he was literally standing on his head on the desk at the front of the room. He was trying to illustrate the importance of finding a variety of ways to look at a problem, and that was his way of insuring that they would not forget the point.”
Since retiring, Wayne hasn’t forgotten his university. He serves on the emeriti association board and contributes to the Annual Fund.
Neil Whitaker ’79
When Neil Whitaker is passionate about something, he knows how to close the deal. The sales manager for Young Electric Sign Company has employed that skill on behalf of student recruitment, first as a volunteer for the Las Vegas chapter board and now in Cache Valley, where he was born. During his 10 years in Las Vegas he purchased season tickets every year and rarely missed home games in Logan. He is fleet of foot himself on the tennis court. The promise of USU basketball great Wayne Estes awed him as a youngster, and when Estes was electrocuted in a tragic accident after a game, Whitaker grieved with the rest of the community.