The Last Graduate

Back in the 1960s, as a student at the Theological School of St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, Dave Weissbard drove a Volkswagen Beetle, arguably the most iconic car of the counterculture. When he crushed in the roof after rolling the Bug on a sharp turn coming back from student preaching at a nearby Congregational church, the dean asked him to stop parking out front—it made the school look bad. “It looked like an elephant sat on it,” he recalls, with a chuckle.

Today, Rev. Weissbard, 85, drives a hybrid, an iconic car of our times. And after serving as minister at Unitarian Universalist congregations in three other states, he and his wife, Karen, are back in Canton and live not far from the campus. With “really fond memories of Canton,” he says, they decided the town would be a good place to settle when he retired from the ministry nineteen years ago.

Weissbard’s graduation from the theological school in 1965 has special significance: He was the last person—literally—to graduate before it closed its doors forever in 1965. Diplomas were handed out to students in alphabetical order, and Weissbard with his “W” name was the last of the ten students in the final class to cross the stage.

The theological school, founded in 1856 to train Universalist ministers, never had more than fifteen or twenty students at a time, “which was economically pretty difficult,” says Weissbard. Canton is in a remote part of the state, just twenty miles south of the Canadian border, making it a challenge to start a seminary here, he says. But when Universalists wanted to establish a New York seminary, a group in Canton, including those with ties to the First Universalist Society—now the UU Church of Canton—lobbied to have it sited there, in part by raising money to also establish a college.

The college thrived—today, St. Lawrence University has about 2,000 undergraduates—but the theological school did not, though it holds the distinction of being the first theological school to graduate a woman, Olympia Brown, in 1861.

At a recent interview at the UU Church of Canton, where he is a member, Weissbard wears a suit and tie and a large button on his lapel celebrating the congregation’s bicentennial (it was founded in 1825). He doesn’t look much different than he did in the ’60s. “I was already fairly bald,” he says, and his sartorial style was somewhat traditional. “I wasn’t into hippie.”

With a wry smile and funny asides, Weissbard looks back fondly on a ministerial career that almost didn’t happen.

‘You Can’t Stop Time; You Can’t Stop Change’

Weissbard is originally from Albany, New York, where his parents were pillars of the Unitarian church. He entered St. Lawrence University in 1958 with plans to earn both an undergraduate degree and master’s degree in theology, with an eye to becoming a minister. Enrollment in seminary also guaranteed a draft deferment during the Vietnam War, he says. Weissbard was the leader of a campus group that held discussions on civil rights, and as an undergrad he attended a conference in Syracuse on the proposed consolidation of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America (the two formed the Unitarian Universalist Association in 1961).

But Weissbard also considered a career in broadcasting. In college he was general manager of St. Lawrence’s student radio station, and in seminary he worked as an announcer at a Canton radio station. He chose ministry after visiting First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts. “It really clicked,” recalls Weissbard, who served there for nine years. “I loved it and still question my ever having left, it was so good.”

During the turbulent ’60s, the sermons of the young minister were often controversial. One, “On Going to Pot,” opposed what Weissbard felt was the persecution by local police of high school students who smoked cannabis. In another, he linked the Vietnam War to George Orwell’s 1984 “in terms of the lies we were being told” about the war, he says.

“I thought the job of a sermon was to provoke people into thinking about something maybe in a different way than they’d thought about it before—if they’d thought about it at all,” Weissbard says.

In October 1969, after Weissbard chartered a bus to take protesters to Washington, D.C., for a huge anti-war march, a congregant wrote to the local paper disassociating himself from the minister. But when Weissbard organized a later trip to another anti-war demonstration, the man “was the first person to buy a ticket,” recalls Weissbard, with a smile.

He next served for five years at the UU Congregation in Fairfax, Virginia, and then, in 1979, became minister at the UU Church in Rockford, Illinois, for twenty-seven years. While there, he hosted a Sunday TV program presenting the liberal religious point of view, which reached 4,000 households weekly. He’s particularly proud that many viewers who didn’t agree with his positions told him they nonetheless found the show compelling.

Weissbard describes himself as a humanist. When he entered ministry, he says, many older ministers felt excluded by the move toward humanism. Today, Weissbard is the one who sometimes feels left behind by changes in Unitarian Universalism. However, he adds, “You can’t stop time; you can’t stop change.”

As for the current state of the world, he says, “There continues to be hope as long as we can speak up—as long as we do speak up.”