TOPEKA, Kan. – Galloping Goose from Goessel Day in Kansas will be celebrated Aug. 4, honoring the adventurous life of the late Kansan Randolph “Randy” Woelk. Governor Laura Kelly’s Office released the official proclamation today in Topeka.
Woelk was born Aug. 4, 1921, in Goessel and raised in a farmhouse north of Newton with no electricity or running water. A second-generation Mennonite immigrant, Woelk knew only two words of English – lunchpail and toilet – when he started attending classes at a one-room schoolhouse in Harvey County. Woelk earned his nickname –the Galloping Goose from Goessel – by excelling in athletics during high school years in the 1930s.
Woelk’s defining moment on the running track came in the spring of 1939 when he broke the legendary Glenn Cunnigham’s mile-run record for high schoolers at the University of Kansas Relays. His KU Relays time was among the top 20 high school performances in the country in 1939. Later that season, he became Goessel High School’s first state champion in any sport when he won the Class AA mile title, recording a time that would have easily won both the small and large school classes. Following a solid running career at Kansas State Teachers College in Emporia, Woelk enlisted in the Army in response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. As a Mennonite, Woelk could have claimed conscientious objector status but chose instead to defend his country. He attended officer training school in New Jersey and then was a member of the Army Signal Corps in the Pacific Theater.
After returning home from WWII, Woelk began a teaching career that included stops in Montezuma, Wichita and Beloit. He was part of the CHEM Study project that remade the way chemistry was taught in American high schools in the 1960s and 1970s. Woelk was the rare high school teacher to receive a Fulbright Educational Exchange Grant, which led to him teaching for a year at Kakamega Secondary School in Kenya. Woelk was also a natural-born salesman, first going door to door peddling Compton’s encyclopedias and later Fuller Brush housewares. He was also an avid ham radio operator, earning the coveted National County Hunter Certificate seven times.
