Eugene C. Spangler ’39, WSU associate professor emeritus and director of theater services, perhaps saw the broadest range of university opera theater productions ever. Among his favorites, he said in a 2001 interview with The Shocker, was the 1966 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Spangler, during his 45 years at the university, served as coordinator of theater services and then as chairman of speech communication. “It’s interesting to note,” he once explained, that at Wichita State, “opera grew out of the speech department.” Spangler, a WWII U.S. Army veteran, always was interested in the beauty of collective effort, or, in German, gesamtkunstwerk, literally, the synthesis of the arts.
Gene Spangler died Dec. 20, 2008, in Wichita.
