It’s no coincidence Shirley Antes’s many years in education continued to lead her back to southeast Kansas.
Like Dorothy realized in “The Wizard of Oz,” there’s no place like home.
It was why Antes on multiple occasions opted to direct the famed musical in her 58-year career.
It’s also why the Iola native relied on an Oz-esque approach to her Oct. 31 acceptance speech, filling it with metaphors utilizing the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion, when she was honored with Emporia State University’s Distinguished Alumni Award — the school’s highest recognition for ESU grads.
“Emporia State University has always been home to me,” Antes, 78, told the Register. “I’ve been going down this yellow brick road for the past 58 years.”
ANTES was born Shirley Upshaw in Iola, before she and her family moved to Carlyle when she was a first-grader. Father Howard was a probate judge; mother Alice ran the Carlyle post office.
She graduated from Iola High School in 1965 and what then was Allen County Community Junior College two years later, when the school was still on the third floor at IHS.
As an aside, she holds the distinction of being the first actress to appear on the Bowlus Fine Arts Center’s stage with a school production of “J.B.” — a modern day retelling of the Story of Job — under drama instructor George Mastick.
After Allen, Shirley transferred to Emporia, where she graduated in 1969 with a degree in speech and theatre.
It didn’t take her long to find a job. That fall, she was back in Iola to teach speech and drama. Among the musical productions she led were “The Sound of Music” and the aforementioned “Wizard of Oz.”
“It was kind of neat to be able to come back to your home town and be able to teach in the building you graduated from,” she noted.
Antes was recruited in 1973 to teach English, speech and theater at Northern Heights High School in Emporia — and again brought “Oz” to the local stage, as well as “Oklahoma.”
From there, she was recruited to teach at Cottonwood Falls, where Estes earned her master’s degree and married her college sweetheart, Carl Antes, after he returned from service in Vietnam.
In the meantime, Antes, trying to balance a full-time-plus teaching schedule with starting a family, shifted gears and taught computer education systems at Flint Hills Technical College, which required still another degree, a bachelor’s in business education.
Antes quickly moved up the ladder, eventually becoming dean of instruction at Flint Hills. Antes earned masters degrees in 1988 and 2000, for business education and then educational administration.
She then moved to a proprietary college that required her to move to Ohio and then to Indiana, all within a six-month period.
