William Louis Gaines grew up in Monticello, Ind., the son of a railroad worker.
He went on to serve in World War II, march with Martin Luther King Jr., meet royalty and be named an Honorary Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
He was, his friends said, a globetrotting Renaissance man who revered his down-home Midwestern values.
“He came from extremely humble beginnings,” said friend David Martin. “This was a guy who just found a path and followed it. He led an amazing life.”
Mr. Gaines, 82, died Tuesday, Feb. 8, in his Chicago home. Friends recalled him as a humble man who cared deeply about higher education, race relations and his fellow man.
“He really was about as self-defined a person as you could find, and he went to the top,” said Christopher Breiseth, who met Mr. Gaines at the University of Oxford in England more than 40 years ago. “He spent time with kings and queens and prime ministers.”
Mr. Gaines was born in Monticello, the oldest of seven children. He received a bachelor’s degree from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, a master’s degree from the University of Nebraska, and a PhD in history from Yale. He studied at the University of London from 1949-50 on a Fulbright Scholarship.
During World War II, he served in the Army and entered the Foreign Service in 1951. Five years later, he began a career in international education when he was appointed executive secretary of the U.S.-U.K. Education Commission in London.
Mr. Gaines would remain in international education the rest of his life.
In 1961, he became associate director of the Commonwealth Fellowships in New York. The following year, he became the first director of the Africa-America Institute, developing deep ties to Africa.
From 1974 until his 1992 retirement, Mr. Gaines served as president of the Chicago-based Institute for the International Education of Students, guiding the institution through some of its most challenging years.
A tall, graceful man with a humble manner, friends said he was often mistaken for British. Although he never had children of his own, Mr. Gaines was godfather to 12 children.
“He never married but he was very close to a lot of people,” said Michael Steinberg, executive vice president of IES. “He was, for everybody, Uncle Bill. He was for my kids, who were not his godchildren. They were very close to him, even as adults.”
Steinberg said Mr. Gaines was always very proud of his roots and his parents, who instilled a deep sense of virtue and values.
“He was very outgoing. He made friends wherever he went–he had friends all over the world,” Steinberg said. “Some people might find him a bit old fashioned in the sense that he believed in the old-fashioned values of hard work and doing things the right way.”
He wrote long, often religious letters to friends, always signing his name with a fountain pen. A devout Episcopalian, Mr. Gaines was an active member in Chicago’s Church of the Ascension on North LaSalle Street.
“When you got right down to it, he was very homespun,” said Breiseth, president of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in Hyde Park, N.Y. “He was a terrific storyteller.”
Friends said he kept a handwritten journal that he wrote in every day, from age 17 through his last years. The journal, which chronicled both his own life and historical events of the time, is being donated to the library at Yale.
“He was an incredibly intelligent man. He wrote everything longhand, but in a very readable form,” Martin said. “He was an incredibly gifted writer. People who have read parts of that journal have said `protect this document.’ It’s extremely rare and valuable.”
Mr. Gaines is survived by a sister, Mary Lou Nitzschke and 20 nieces and nephews.
Services will begin at 11 a.m. Saturday at the Church of the Ascension, 1133 N. LaSalle St., Chicago.
