Putting Thoughts to Paper

Dominic Gaziano (BA Pre-Medicine ’58) and Rosalie Fuscaldo Gaziano (BA Speech ’59) met during freshman week in September 1955, and all five of their children are also Eberly College of Arts and Sciences alumni: Philip (BA Chemistry ’82, MD ’86), Michael (BA Chemistry ’83), Todd (BA Political Science ’85), Dominic Jr. (BA Chemistry ’87, MD ’92) and Tom (BA Chemistry ’90). After graduating from West Virginia University, the Gazianos pursued careers as authors, attorneys and physicians, completing graduate and professional degrees at the University of Chicago Law School, Harvard Medical School, Oxford University and Yale Medical School. Rosalie served on the Eberly College Advisory Board (now called the Visiting Committee) from 1990 to 2008.

Our family of seven – two parents and five sons – were all graduates of the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at WVU. From that beginning, we collectively went on to become one writer, five physicians and one lawyer. The Eberly College made great contributions to our lives and careers, most of all through the Department of English.

It was in English classrooms that we learned the power of reading and writing which has enlightened our personal and professional lives.

Through the reading of literature, we learned the power of empathy, the diversity of human experiences and opinions, and the gift of the ideas of others. As a family, we have collectively traveled to six continents, but my wife Rosalie and I made our first travels into the worlds of Faulkner, Dickens and Emerson in our English classes before our family began.

Rosalie, the most prominent author in our family, not only shared her love of literature with our children but also captured our history in her memoir, “It’s Your Turn, Chickadees.” The title of the book is an expression from Rosalie’s father that she keeps hearing him say in her head as words of encouragement as our family braved years of travel and life overseas.

Each chapter contains city by city details as we navigated an overloaded Ford Cortina station wagon with five young boys through England, France, Germany and Italy. Rosalie recalls how a neighbor observed the family getting ready to leave on an early trip:

Our Scottish neighbor had looked at us from her front window with unbelieving eyes as we left. “You’re taking five children to London?” I remembered her asking. Then she had muttered a proverb about a frugal Scotsman spending half his money on food and saving half, but a poet spending half on travel. Were we poets, I wondered, or fools?

Each of us has learned that the practice of writing is the practice of thinking on paper, of cultivating and curating our highest, best thoughts. We think because of the words we put together. Without a mastery of the tongue, even scientific thoughts will be disorganized. This practice of thinking on paper has fueled books and poems as well as more than 1,000 academic medical articles and legal briefs.

My eldest son, Philip, says that reading and appreciating literature helped get him through medical school. My youngest, Tom, says that he appreciates education for the sake of learning itself and as a tool to put toward something valuable, to give back to the community.

Our family’s shared love of reading has enabled us to quickly understand and analyze complex ideas in technical, medical and legal texts in our professional lives, as well as continue to enrich our personal lives with a lifelong love of literature that’s now being passed on to my grandchildren.

As individuals and as a family, we understand the value of a liberal arts education, the humanities in general and English as a core component of such an education. WVU English professors go to great lengths to prepare students to think critically, question and explore through the acts of reading and writing.

Whatever field you eventually go into, including science, medicine, law and engineering, you’re much more effective and efficient in carrying that out if you have a foundation in the humanities. English literature, composition and grammar are so important for whatever a student undertakes.

In essence, as a family we are fully aware of the benefits and indebtedness we have for the education we acquired at WVU, especially the Eberly College. It is for all these reasons that we chose to endow a position in the Department of English, the Gaziano Family Legacy Professorship. Our hope is that this endowment will support faculty and their students to experience the learning that we experienced in our English classes at WVU and that those experiences will bear the same fruit for them and their contributions to the world.

The Gaziano Family Legacy Professorship will fund a senior scholar of national reputation who is not only an exemplary teacher and researcher but someone capable of working across the department’s existing programs of literature, composition and creative writing. The search for the first recipient of the professorship will begin in the 2020-2021 academic year.