Three Diplomas, One Dining Room Wall

The first one

Walter Mrozek was born in 1940 on a 120-acre dairy farm outside Little Cedar, in the north end of Porter County. His father left school after eighth grade to work the farm; his mother finished tenth. When Walter told them in the spring of 1958 that he wanted to go to the Polytechnic, his father asked how many cows it would cost.

“He wasn’t being funny. That was the unit. I told him tuition was ninety-one dollars a semester, and he worked it out and said, ‘About a cow and a half a year.’ Then he went out to the barn and didn’t say anything else about it until he drove me down in September.”

— Walter Mrozek ’62

He arrived at Wesconsin Polytechnic Institute at Porter with $140 and one suitcase, rented a room in a Founders Triangle boarding house for $6 a week, and washed dishes at the old dining hall for meals. He studied Industrial Arts Education because it was the shortest path he could see to a steady paycheck, graduated in 1962, and taught shop at Porter Falls High School for 34 years. He estimates he supervised the building of about 2,000 birdhouses, 600 gun cabinets and one canoe, “which floated, eventually.”

Walter is 86 now and lives in Cedar Bluff with his wife, June, who never went to college and has, since 2019, taken eleven non-credit courses through the Porter Lifelong Learning Institute. “She’s catching up,” Walter said. “She says she’s passing.”

The second one

Their daughter, Linda, enrolled in 1984 in what had by then become the University of Wesconsin–Porter Falls. She lived at home in Cedar Bluff to save money, commuted in a 1977 sedan with no working heater, and in her sophomore year took a teller job at Porter Valley Bank’s Main Street office to pay for books.

“My dad had a degree, so technically I wasn’t first-gen. But he’d been the first, and we didn’t know anybody else who had gone. Nobody at our kitchen table knew what a registrar was. I learned by standing in the wrong line in Millwright Hall for forty minutes.”

— Linda Mrozek Haas ’88

She graduated in Business Administration in 1988 and never left the bank. Forty years after she started as a teller, she manages the Main Street office she started in, two blocks from Depot Plaza. She has hired, by her count, 23 Porter students as part-time tellers, “because I know exactly what that job is worth to somebody standing in the wrong line.”

The third one

Her son, Sam Haas, arrived in fall 2022 to study Manufacturing Engineering. He lived in Heritage Hall, poured his First Forge disc during orientation week, and took Statics from Provost Bjorn Halvorsen, who still teaches it every fall. He took MACH 1100 from Lyle Haugen, the subject of another story in this issue, whose own father-in-law, it turned out, had been one of Walter’s shop students in 1967.

“Mr. Haugen looked at my name on the roster the first day and said, ‘Mrozek’s grandson? Your grandfather taught half of Porter Falls to square a board.’ I had not even turned on a lathe yet. There was no hiding after that.”

— Sam Haas ’26

He did two co-op rotations at a pump manufacturer in Lake City and started there full-time in June. His senior capstone, a redesigned fixture that cut a valve-body setup from 22 minutes to 7, now runs on the plant floor. He still has the pewter disc. It sits on his desk at work, next to the hammer.

What changed, and what didn’t

We asked the three of them to compare notes. Some of the answers were checked against University Archives; others were taken on faith.

The family has a running argument about which diploma has the “right” name. Walter holds that the school was at its best when it called itself a Polytechnic. Sam points out that it does again. Linda says she would like everyone to stop taking the frames down to compare the fonts.

The dining room wall

The three diplomas hang side by side on the dining room wall of Linda’s house in Cedar Bluff, above a sideboard that Walter built in a summer workshop in 1971. In May, Walter, now walking with a cane, sat in the front row of the family section at commencement. The night before, he had asked to walk out to Founders Hall at dusk to watch Sam’s class at the Ring of Iron, a tradition that did not exist in his day.

“I asked him if they still make you take shop. He said they call it something else now. I said, but you still have to make something with your hands before they let you out? He said yes. I said, then it’s the same school.”

— Walter Mrozek ’62

About 28 percent of each entering class at Porter is made up of first-generation students like Walter was. The First-Generation Student Center, open since 2021, has now enrolled 500 of them in its mentoring program, and children and grandchildren of alumni can apply for the Ironclad Legacy Award. Linda has already asked whether there is a form for great-grandchildren. There is not, yet. Sam is 22.