Reid Anderson is a Charter member of Delta Nu, attending from 1951 to 1955. He was the first President of the TKE colony at NWMSC, before our official Charter was granted. He attended on the G.I. Bill after serving the U.S. Army in the Korean Conflict from 1950 to 1951. After three years of education, Reid taught for a year at Leon (Iowa) High School. After graduating in 1955, he then taught two years in the Kansas City school system.
From there, he was assigned a very interesting teaching position in Fontainebleau, France, as a ninth grade World Geography teacher in a Military Dependents School. He adds that it was interesting because the students had been all over the world as their parents were Majors, Colonels, and Generals. The students he suggested, “…often knew more world geography than the teacher!” The school was just south of Pari and on occasion he would travel into the city. On one such occasion, he saw General Eisenhower and his son John, who had come to visit his father at Military Headquarters!
After his service in France, he returned to his home in Kansas City, teaching 8th and 9th grade students in Common Learning and English. To finish his career at Kansas City, he became a School Social Worker or “truant officer”, as he indicates was the real nature of the job. He helped students that had problems attending school and worked out problems with teachers, principals, and parents.
Reid married Carolyn Criswell and they had one daughter Jenny Ellen, also of Kansas City. The Andersons now winter in Porto Virda, Mexico.
Frater Anderson sites that “His TKE experiences gave him the support needed to ensure the confidence a young man needed to teach and to be a successful administrator – where every day was unique and different from the past day.”