3 Min Read Published on: 1 day ago John F. Kennedy was living in the White House when a youthful Evan Swanson taught his first history and biology classes at Maplewood Academy (MWA), a Seventh-day Adventist school in Hutchinson, Minnesota, United States, in 1963. The Berlin Wall had been erected just two years earlier, the moon landing still loomed in the future, and few Americans could conceive of a world without the Soviet Union. During that first year at Maplewood Academy, Swanson — soon nicknamed Swanee — served alongside faculty members old enough to remember World War I and the 1918 Flu Pandemic. His first students copied their class notes from a dusty chalkboard and learned the details of current events belatedly from printed newspapers or in class from Swanee himself.