Valerie Wilson, director of Educational Resources at Regular Baptist Press, retired in December 2007. She was hired by Merle Hull in 1968 to write a new Sunday School curriculum for 2s and 3s, then ended up staying at RBP for the rest of her career.
“I didn’t start out to be here forty years. I thought I’d finish the 2s and 3s books and then go back to teaching,” says Valerie, who had previously taught Christian Education classes at Faith Baptist Bible College in Ankeny, Iowa.
But as she was completing the cycle for the new 2s and 3s curriculum, Merle Hull proposed a new project. Knowing there was a need for Vacation Bible School materials from a uniquely Baptist perspective, Hull said to Valerie, “I have an idea for how we can do our own VBS material—you could do it.”
And so the first RBP Vacation Bible School lessons rolled off the presses in 1972. Not that Regular Baptist Press had any printing presses of its own—all of the lessons were prepared at the RBP office in Des Plaines, Illinois, and then printed by Standard Publishing in Cincinnati.
“Back then,” recalls Valerie, “when you wrote, you typed everything on printer’s paper with exact margins that showed how many words you could fit on a line and a page. The printers did all of the typesetting, which was still hot metal from the Linotype machine.”
Much has changed since then. Valerie remembers when RBP hired an office worker to punch paper tapes that were sent out to the first electric type compositors, then the transition to an in-house electronic photocomposition system, the arrival of the first Macintosh computer systems with PageMaker software, and most recently InDesign software.
“The new technology has enhanced the way our materials look, but it hasn’t made the editor’s job any easier,” says Valerie.
By this time, the managing editor of RBP, Ruth Harriman, had died. Valerie continued to help the editorial team and then became editor of Sunday School materials. “From 1952 to 1980 there was hardly any change in the way our products looked,” Valerie says, noting the significant product revisions that began under her supervision and continue today.
Valerie led 352 Sunday School seminars for Regular Baptist Press and traveled over 150,000 miles. That’s the equivalent of six trips around the world, and it tells you a bit about Valerie’s passion for Christian Education. Many of these seminars were taught with her coworker and close friend Don Anderson.
But not all of her job was performed in front of people. Much of the editor’s work occurs behind the scenes—and when correctly done, isn’t even noticed by the reader. So here are two insider secrets: Valerie was editor of Murray Murdoch’s famed biography of Robert Ketcham, Portrait of Obedience. And most notably, she edited Ernest Pickering’s Biblical Separation: The Struggle for a Pure Church.
And the rest of the books? “Oh, I don’t know how many I edited; it was a slew of them,” says Valerie. “I never really kept track.”
Valerie, who graduated from Baptist Bible Seminary in Johnson City, New York, in 1964, was honored by BBC&S with a Doctor of Religious Education degree in 2002. Her last years at RBP were spent nurturing a new generation of younger editors who grew up hearing the Sunday School lessons Valerie wrote.
For now, Valerie plans on continuing to live in Schaumburg and plans on working as a freelance editor for RBP. In fact, projects are already lining up for her as she returns from a well-deserved vacation.
Download these classic Baptist Bulletin articles by Valerie Wilson
