Myron Wilson continues sharing the wealth around Cedar Rapids

CEDAR RAPIDS — When asked how he’d like to be remembered, Myron (“Mike”) Wilson, who turns 99 on Oct. 18, shrugged his shoulders, laughed and said, “I don’t care.”

Not a surprising response from this humble man who quietly has worked behind the scenes with his late wife, Esther, contributing — or what he prefers to call “sharing” — between $5 and $6 million to area arts organizations, social services and outdoor recreation causes.

Opera competition

His beloved wife of 72 years died July 8, 2022, and one of his latest contributions is $100,000 to create Cedar Rapids Opera’s Esther and Myron Wilson Vocal Competition.

The opera company will begin advertising the competition next month, with the first application deadline being in January or February. The details still are being ironed out, but the various stages of competition will then roll out. The final round, open to the public, will begin at 7 p.m. Aug. 31, 2024, at the Paramount Theatre in downtown Cedar Rapids.

“I hope that the competition can open some new eyes to opera,” said Daniel Kleinknecht, the opera theater’s founder. “We live in a part of the country where competition is everything as far as athletics, and people get behind (it). They love to see competitive sports.

“I'm hoping we can tune in to those people for whom competition is something they want to see. And instead of seeing people throwing a ball or tackling somebody, here we can hear people re-create art, and compete with the sounds that they create and the way they deliver an opera aria,” he said.

“That’s my hope — that we’ll be able to grow the audience, grow the community’s interest in opera from that lens.”

Grand prize is $20,000, second prize is $12,000, third prize is $6,000, fourth prize is $4,000, fifth prize is $2,000, the “audience favorite” prize is $1,750 and three runners-up will receive $1,500, so all nine artists invited to the finals can at least cover their expenses, Kleinknecht said.

The other half of the gift will go toward operating expenses, including hotels and travel for the judges who will be hired and flown in from around the country; production costs; and about $10,000 for administrative fees.

“The last couple of weeks I did a Google search of vocal competitions in the United States, and from what I found, only two are offering more money than this one,” Kleinknecht said, noting that he expects to receive more than 1,000 applications.

“The competition is basically a new way for us to live our mission by supporting the artists who create opera,” he said. “We've done a decent job of bringing up the fees we pay to young artists, and we haven't done such a great job with established artists. This is a way for us to support singers who are in their midcareer and above” — although younger artists also can apply, he added.

The winners can use the money however they wish, which is especially important when so many artists couldn’t perform during the pandemic. The prizes are resume builders, as well, Kleinknecht said.

The competition also been his dream for the past 10 or 15 years, and he decided the timing was right to approach Wilson with the project.

“This is his way of exclaiming his love for Esther, and it is right in line with their ideals of philanthropy. And they and they seem to love the mission of the opera,” Kleinknecht said.

Philanthropy

Wilson prefers the term “sharing” — rather than “giving” or “donating” — a practice that dates back to his childhood. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on Oct. 18, 1924, he grew up during the Depression, which would shape the man he became.

“I do remember,” he said of those lean years. “Nobody had anything, and so we didn't think about it — sharing was just a way of life. You just did that, and we didn't think another thing about it.”

His father was born in Norway in 1877 and came with his family to the United States in 1882. Wilson described him as a “self-made man” who manufactured the kind of files used for smoothing surfaces. He suffered a debilitating stroke in 1935, and lived another five years, so Wilson said he never really knew his dad. He does recall that his father “worked awfully hard.”

Luckily, Wilson’s parents had “some sort of an accident or health insurance policy,” which Wilson said “had to be very rare” in those days. It allowed his mother, a housewife, to raise Wilson and his older sister in their home.

“I didn’t realize how tough things were until I grew up,” Wilson said.

He graduated from high school in June 1942, “about six months into the war,” he said. Not knowing how long or how big the war would grow, he decided to pursue his education, enrolling in an engineering program at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland.

He served in the Navy from 1944 to 1946, working on electronic maintenance with radar sets. When he got out, he finished up his mechanical engineering degree, worked for a while, then went back to school to pick up two more bachelor’s degrees in engineering fields.

Advised to steer clear of big cities and look for little towns in which to live, he “found this company called Collins Radio in Cedar Rapids. That’s all I knew about it,” he said. But he applied, got a job, moved here in 1951, and retired in 1990 — just short of 40 years with the company.

Among the many supervisory roles he held there, he was director of quality assurance on July 20, 1969, when the world witnessed the U.S. moon landing, thanks to Collins technology. Even though Wilson didn’t work directly on that project, he was keenly aware of it, and credits Arthur Collins with creating the city’s vibrant arts culture.

“Cedar Rapids — you’ve heard over the years that the level of culture is so high, and that is really primarily because of Arthur Collins,” Wilson said. “Arthur wasn’t necessarily there, but he had brought people in who wanted it and who could afford to pay for it. So a lot of the level of culture was blown up because Arthur brought people in who demanded it.”

With retirement came another career — volunteering for causes important to Wilson and Esther, including Indian Creek Nature Center, area trails projects, museums, Orchestra Iowa, tutoring in STEM projects in area schools, the Rockwell Collins Retirees and helping to fund the Honor Flights that whisk veterans to Washington, D.C. Wilson and his son, Frank, were on the 2021 flight named in his honor.

Philanthropy kicked in years earlier — and drew the attention of the IRS, which investigated Myron and Esther several times because the couple were contributing “too much.” That didn’t deter them.

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They had about $2 million when Wilson retired, and he still has more than $2 million, despite sharing $5 to $6 million over the years and putting subsequent generations through college, with enough left over to help the great-grandchildren, too.

“We gave so much more than we ever had,” Wilson said. “And … the more we gave, the more we got. I'm not sure my investments are all that smart. But it does come back. And so therefore, once we kept giving, why, it kept coming back, and we were able to have more to give.”

Kleinknecht described Myron Wilson as “generous, dedicated, consistent, community minded,” and Esther Wilson as “quiet, reserved, bold and also committed.” A favorite memory of Esther is seeing her in the Theatre Cedar Rapids orchestra pit sewing the woman portraying Gilda into her costume the first time the opera theater staged “Rigoletto.”

“They were not afraid to get their hands dirty doing the work, as well as giving the money,” Kleinknecht said, noting the Wilsons handed him a check for $25,000 to erase the opera company’s deficit after the 2008 flood.

“They are among our most generous, most consistent philanthropists,” Kleinknecht said. “They would do anything for the community, anything that they believed in, and they're great illustrations of what philanthropy is and can be.”

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com