Edinger's legacy at Coker is rock solid

HARTSVILLE_ As Coker College celebrates its week-long tradition of Coker Olympics of Winter, one faculty member will look back on 35 years of student frivolity at its finest. For Dr. Fred Edinger, this will be the year he puts his COW Days out to pasture.

A professor of geology who arrived on the Coker campus in 1972, Edinger, is retiring at the end of the school year. COW Days will be a small part of the legacy he leaves behind.

A native of California, Edinger was serving as the advisor to the then newly-formed Coker College Union in 1976 when the idea of COW Days was originally proposed. Edinger, then the Associate Dean of Student Development, said students were looking for something to combat the doldrums of the cold, gray wintery months away from home. He never dreamed that out of that makeshift brainstorming session would come a tradition that Coker students would embrace more than three decades.

Edinger received his undergraduate and Master of Education degrees at Whittier College in Whittier, Calif., and a Master of Education from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Greensboro, N.C. In 1991, he completed the Ph.D. in geological sciences at the University of South Carolina.

He arrived at Coker College in 1973 with a group of about 10 other faculty/staff hired that year under then President Dr. Gus Turbeville.

Edinger said he and Jim Lemke are the only ones from that group still teaching full time at the college.

Twice selected as Coker College Master Professor of the Year in 1999-2000 and 2005-06, Edinger has served as assistant director of Institutional Research, a member of the National Association of Geology Teachers and the Carolina Geological Society. He is a published author.

Because there is no geology major at Coker, Edinger said he teaches mostly introductory classes to the sciences, giving him the opportunity to teach more students than he normally would if he taught a major subject.

“That has been a highlight of my career,” Edinger said. “It is something I think is really important to be able to teach so many students.”

Edinger said there have been lots of changes since he came to the small liberal arts college which then had only about 300 students. He said the increase in the size of the student body as well as the faculty has been one of the biggest changes. Another significant change has been the larger facilities that have been built on the campus, he said.

Retirement is something Edinger has been planning for awhile.

“We (Edinger and his wife, Nancy) set a date four years ago, and I’ve stuck with it,” he said.

His wife decided to retire a year earlier. A former elementary school teacher, she retired as a member of the staff at Coker College.

“I am certainly the age to retire,” Edinger said. “Although I enjoy teaching, after 39 years, you realize spending all that time at work there are other thing you want to do.”

One of the things Edinger said he would like to do before he is too old is visit Antarctica.

“Never in my geological experiences have I been able to do this,” Edinger said.

Edinger said, “I want to do it while I can still climb and get out of the boat.”

The trip is already planned for next year. He said he and his wife will take a boat tour from Argentina to Antarctica for about two and half weeks.

Other motivations for retiring Edinger said were to spend more time with their two adult children and grandchildren who all live in South Carolina. A few projects or other destinations are also beckoning for his attention.

Edinger says he is a “bit of a collector” and his office walls are covered with license plates he has acquired.

“If I’ve been there, I can put up a license plate,” Edinger said.

He has visited all 50 states and has served as a professor or faculty participant the last 10 years in Coker College “Coker Abroad” trips to Iceland, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Greece, Turkey and, most recently, to China.

There are plates from Germany, Cayman Islands, and Virgin Islands as well as many of the states hanging on the wall. He says there are still more to collect, but now that he is retiring he doesn’t know where he would hang them.

“Cleaning this out will be the worst thing,” Edinger said pointing to his collection.

“I will miss it,” he said.

He hasn’t counted out coming back to teach a class or two.

“I suspect they will want someone to teach a summer or night class,” he said. “I’d be available.”

Edinger will serve as the first speaker in Coker’s “The Last Lecture” series, which begins in