“Tom [Dr. Auffenberg] would give me a shirt every Christmas and there would always be an inside joke to the shirt. But let me tell you a sweet story about some students. So students knew about this exchange that Tom and I would have. The year that Tom passed, some of my sweet students knew that this would be the first Christmas in a quarter of a century that I hadn’t gotten a shirt from Tom Auffenberg. So I opened a package up on Christmas Day and it was a shirt. On the front of the shirt, it had a picture of a chinchilla with the phrase ‘chin chillin.’ A note accompanied the shirt and it said, ‘Dr. Wink, we don’t want this first Christmas without Dr. Auffenberg to be one without a shirt.’ And it was signed by 17 students. Isn’t that sweet?”
Dr. Johnny Wink
Professor of English and Latin, 43 years
Arkadelphia, AR
