Carthage College Athletics

Ehrhardt H. “Big Wag” Wagner, a native of Davenport, Iowa, enrolled at Carthage College in the fall of 1921 with his younger brother, Herbert L. “Hub” Wagner.  Their father, Christian H.W. Wagner, a china and house wares merchant, eventually put four children through school at Carthage.
 
Wagner lettered four times in football (1919-22), four times in basketball (1920-23) and two times in baseball (1921-22).  He graduated in 1923 and earned a Carthage scholarship to continue his studies at the University of Illinois.
 
After he received his master’s degree from Illinois, Wagner taught trigonometry and analytic geometry at the University of Michigan in 1924-25 followed by two years of teaching in Sparta, Ill., and two more years teaching at South Dakota State University.  By 1929, he was back in Ann Arbor, Mich., working on his doctoral degree at Michigan, which he received in 1932.  One of his mathematics students at Michigan was Gerald Ford.
 
While in Ann Arbor, Wagner met Helen McCorkle in a class and they were married on Dec. 24, 1925 in South Bend, where McCorkle’s grandparents were thought to have lived.
 
Wagner worked for a year as an actuarial clerk with Life and Casualty in Chicago, while the newly-married couple lived 166 miles away in Peoria, Ill.  Later, he became a full-fledged actuary with Alliance Life Insurance Company and lived in Wilmette, Ill., until 1949.  Alliance was bought up by Republic National Life Insurance that year, and Wagner was transferred to Dallas, Texas as a vice president.  Helen died from heart troubles in 1975, and Ehrhardt passed away in 1985.

Wagner’s younger brother, Herbert “Hub” Wagner and his youngest brother, Eugene “Gene” Wagner, were charter inductees into the Carthage Athletic Hall of Fame in 1984, while Ehrhardt was inducted in 1986.