Lois Gullerud
Southwestern College Class of 1952
Viola-Champaign-Urbana Symphony

from the 2009 edition of Faces of Southwestern-Homecoming 2009

Southwestern College was an obvious choice for Lois (McNeil) Gullerud when she was choosing a college. After all, she already was part of a Builder family- bother of her parents graduated in 1922, her older sister and brother-in-law (Mary Ruth and Dan Boles) graduated in 1942; brother Jim and sister Margaret attended, and Margaret’s husband (Asher Kantz) not only graduated from SC but also taught at the college.

Add to that the fact that Lois’s father, Rev. Emory W. McNeil, was an administrator at the college from 1931 to 1949, and it was a foregone conclusion that she would become a Moundbuilder.

No, Lois’s crisis of enrollment came later, when she was a junior and spent the summer studying music in Colorado Springs. Lois was an extraordinarily talented violinist, and her Colorado teacher felt she was wasting her time at a tiny Kansas College. Lois should be enrolled in the Cleveland Institute of Music, he told her.

“I seriously thought about it,” Gullerud says today, “but I just had another year to go, and I remember one of the professors – it was either Bill Poundstone or Bill Monypeny- wrote to me and reminded me I had a lot of credentials right here.”

Of course, the professor was right. The young musician stayed at SC and finished her drgree in 1952, and has never regretted the decision. Her education provided a foundation that has led to an unbroken string of memberships in performing groups throughout the United States.

After earning a graduate degree in Wichita, Lois taught for a year at Arkansas City, commuting with legendary SC musicians Ross Williams and Howard Halgedahl to participate in the Wichita Symphony. It was while she was at her next job (teaching strings in Wichita Falls, Texas) that she met her future husband, an airman stationed there.

“I was the principal second violin in the symphony there, and Ernies’s a great appreciator of music. He didn’t have the possibility of learning in the kind of situation I did, but he’s been very, very much a supporter for me to continue playing,” she says.

In fact, the opportunity for Lois to perform always was a primary consideration when the family (which eventually included three sons) considered job changes over the years. When Ernie became a family counselor in Colorado Springs, Lois played in the Colorado Springs Symphony Orchestra. It was here that she made the shift to viola from violin.

Then when they moved to St. Louis so Ernie could earn his doctorate at Washington University, Lois continued to play viola in the St. Louis Philharmonic. Finally they settled down in Champaign, Ill., and Ernie began a 30-year career teaching in the school of social work at the University of Illinois. Of course, Lois joined the Champaign-Urbana Symphony, and became a fixture at the first stand viola.

“Music is something you’re never without and it never leaves you. You can always use it,” she says. “I didn’t teach school after I left Wichita Falls, but always have has private students. The first few years I was here, there were a group of people who played in a bunch of orchestras- some of us would travel down to Memphis to play. At one time I was playing in five different orchestras.”

So when you don’t see Lois during homecoming this year, it’s not because she isn’t still a Builder at heart. She is. She’s so supportive of the college, in fact, that she has established a scholarship for string students who want to teach.

No, Lois will miss Homecoming because her orchestra also has a performance scheduled Oct. 17th, and after all music has done for her, she won’t shirk this responsibility. After all, she says, music has always been there for her.

“Music is one of those things that can always get you an entrée into a place or people,” she says. “Most of our friends are from the musical circles. They appreciate music or performers.”