In June 1959, John Bellairs graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree (AB) in English. He was also the recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for the 1959-60 school year; a postgraduate scholarship granted nationwide in the 1950s to highly qualified students who were considering a teaching career.
Charles Bowen explains that the fellowships were big news in the academic world at the time. "There was a general feeling that not enough bright young folks were being attracted into college teaching, and some millionaire put up the money to fund a large number of one-year fellowships. The idea was to pay for the first year, and those who proved themselves worthy would find subsequent support through the universities they were studying at."
"I don't think that John was especially attracted to teaching per se, but the scholarship was slanted towards future college instructors and he would not have been able to afford graduate school without some sort of scholarship," explains Myers. "Wilson scholarships were fairly numerous at the time, but John of course was a Magna cum Laude and quite deserving. It is certain that postgraduate work would have then been a natural decision because, then as now, having an undergraduate degree in English doesn't really open many alluring doors career-wise."
Notre Dame during that era was extremely adept at obtaining scholarships for deserving students, with Frank O'Malley in the forefront of this effort. "He was a member of the selection board for the region that included Illinois and Indiana, and I think the force of his personality had something to do with the fact that, in the early years, Notre Dame won an extraordinary number of them," recalls Bowen. "O'Malley claimed that we were educating our English majors better than most of the other universities and colleges in the region."
It was a prestigious award, Bowen continues, "but not so much so as the rarer ones like the Rhodes, which if I remember correctly was given to only one person from each state. In 1959, Notre Dame had either 31 or 33 Woodrow Wilson fellows, and John and I were both among them. When I got to Yale Graduate School, I found that practically everyone in my cohort of English majors had a Wilson." For being awarded the fellowship, John's name, as well as the names of his fellow classmates, appears on an award plaque in the Great Hall of O'Shaughnessy Hall.
Graduate school was exactly what Bellairs decided upon and he chose a location that he had visited numerous times as a undergraduate: Chicago. Bellairs was back in the folds of academia by October, when he began work for the Masters Degree in English at the University of Chicago.
