A constant writer, with a bent for discovery
He was universally known as “Doc” from the years he taught at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee, 1958-1964. Students loved him, including the young ladies who helped in the history department and in the Lincoln Museum he headed. They loved his wife, Lois, and the Temples stayed in touch with many to the end. Doc was popular.
He was an only child, born on a 90-acre farm 35 miles north of Columbus, Ohio. He could read, write, shoot, drive, plow, play clarinet and dance before his peers could, then went to the township high school (Class of 1942, with 23 others), then on to Ohio State University with an engineering scholarship.
The story that he was General Eisenhower’s driver a few times at the end of World War II was true. Doc worked on a radio installation unit (this also involved building new runways) as Ike’s army moved out of France and into Germany in 1945-46. They, too, corresponded a bit for some years. Once Doc used a Thompson submachine gun to return fire at a lone Luftwaffe fighter over their post, while all others dove for the ditch; he was awarded the Bronze Star.
Puzzling his parents, he returned from seeing history to studying history, at the U of I. He knew Arte Johnson (funny even then) and Hugh Hefner (outré even then). He was the last student of James G. Randall, the nation’s dean of academic Lincolnists, and helped finish JGR’s fourth and final volume, Lincoln the President (1955), after the great scholar died. Doc also helped Ruth Randall research her books on the era’s women. At the U of I sesquicentennial in 2007, Doc was named one of the 150 most distinguished alumni in school history.
Ph.D. in hand, he was commissioned by Thorne Deuel, on behalf of the Illinois State Museum, to write Indian Villages of the Illinois Country (1958; twice reissued). Then the Harrogate years with wife Lois; then invited back, to dive into Lincoln, etc., at the Illinois State Archives for 52 years, 1964-2016, where he rose to chief deputy director. He served under nine secretaries of state and 10 governors, both parties, and later said that “only one” of his immediate chief archivist bosses was an s.o.b. He perhaps got along best with Jesse White, by whose time in office Doc was more a national institution than any civil servant had been.
Lois died after 22 years with Doc. Soon, one crowded lunch hour in the diner under the hotel at Fifth and Capitol, the manager asked if Doc minded sharing a table with a stranger. He was seated with Sandy Wilson, who became his wife of 42 years (d. 2022) and who rose to head docent at the Old State Capitol. They coauthored “her” book, Illinois’ Fifth Capitol (1988; rev. 2006), on that tourist-magnet site. In later years he was sustained, too, by devoted archives assistant Teena Groves and by neighbor Sharon Miller.
One celebrated example of his bent for discovery came from the book with Sandy. Where did Lincoln and two other legislators hastily exit the building through a window in order to prevent a quorum? Not in Vandalia; not the Old State Capitol; not the old Presbyterian Church (the Senate had temporary quarters there). Doc found the contractor’s dated invoice for some repair work, in the State Archives: The “jumping scrape” occurred from the temporary Hall of Reps, the Methodist Church at Sixth and Monroe. Coincidence? Probably Doc’s most enduring book was on Lincoln’s religious life, From Skeptic to Prophet (1995), as useful in its way as Paul Angle’s 1935 local history of Springfield down to 1865.
Hundreds of small and much larger findings peppered Doc’s career, and he was a constant writer: 600 articles, 20 books, thousands of handwritten or by-another typed letters. Some of the historical markers around Springfield and beyond result from his detection. Events, too: retracing the old post road on horseback, 1976; Grant’s 1861 march, revived in 1979; many an anniversary at Oak Ridge Cemetery, working on behalf of the Masonic order (33rd degree) or a Civil War unit (general) reactivated by the governor. He was also a land surveyor. For more skills and stories, see Alan E. Hunter, Thursdays with Doc, a 277-page oral history (2024).
Having grown up more or less alone on a farm, Doc spent the rest of his life among and excelling within large organizations: Ohio State; the U.S. Army; the U of I; the cadre of Lincolnists; First Presbyterian (deacon); the Lincoln Academy (laureate); the State Archives. He made lifelong friends at each stop, and today his home is equally broadcast: books to U of I Springfield; personal papers and artworks to the ALPLM; a nice endowment to U of I Urbana.
James Cornelius met Doc in 1997 in the U of I Library in Urbana. From 2020 when COVID isolated the elderly, he visited Doc and Sandy every Thursday to talk Lincoln and to carry out the trash and recycling.
This article appears in January 1-7, 2026.
