Rev. Don Wheat, 92, died on March 5, 2026. Born in Dayton, Ohio on Halloween 1933, Donald Hoover Wheat was the rare working-class, Great-Depression baby named for President Hoover.
Parents William and Frances Cabbell Wheat eloped out of rural Kentucky in the white migration to find Northern jobs. Unaccustomed to help from politicians, they gave their fourth and final child the middle name of the president who awarded pensions to WWI vets, including reluctant draftee William Wheat.
Young Don was no stranger to Depression hardship. Supper one night was the broth produced by boiling three beans. Another night Frances secretly fried Don’s pet chicken – a deception discovered when one of his brothers asked him to “Pass the Chirpy.” He had a lifelong aversion to chicken, recalling Chirpy’s sacrifice.
He inherited his thrift and opposition to war from his dad, who spent a career on auto assembly lines but never owned a car. From his mom, a saleswoman at Rike’s Department Store, he acquired his addiction to pranks and laughter. Many blamed her genes when Don debuted his Roosevelt High School newspaper humor column, “Corn by Wheat.”
The Wheats attended a Christian Church on Dayton’s fancier side, where congregants helped Don find summer jobs and attend Hiram College. He married the love of his life, Ann Warren Wheat, in 1957 after they met at a summer church camp.
He attended seminary at the University of Chicago, falling in love with ideas and his adopted city and he believed that no ensemble was closer to the angels than the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
His first church was in the Indiana farm town of Rensselaer, where sons Mark and Andrew emerged. Early in his ministry, Don tried to take a bunch of farm kids to summer camp only to be told that they were needed to harvest fruit. After unleashing his fiery sermon “To Hell with Strawberries!” Don drove off in a Merry Prankster bus full of relieved campers.
In 1963, Austin Boulevard Christian Church on the Chicago-Oak Park border hired him as minister. Daughter Sarah was born in 1968, as he grappled with the realization that he was not a theist. On the cusp of those heady Days of Rage, he jumped ship to head Chicago’s Third Unitarian Church in 1969.
Third Church participated in the civil rights, fair housing, and Vietnam War struggles of its day. The Chicago Police Department’s Red Squad detonated smoke bombs at the church in Don’s first year there — shortly before those cops helped assassinate Black Panther Fred Hampton.
Don was a Democratic Socialist, who shared his pulpit with such influential speakers as Dr. Benjamin Spock and psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. In one memorable talk, Mamie Till explained her rationale for holding an open-casket funeral for her 14-year-old son, Emmett, after his brutal 1955 murder by racist Mississippians.
Don’s most famous sermon was a paean to corrupt Illinois Secretary of State Paul Powell, whose death prompted the discovery of $800,000 in cash stuffed in shoe boxes in his Springfield hotel. Covering that sermon in 1972, Time Magazine zeroed in on the cash that Don’s church raked in when the ushers took up the collection … in shoe boxes.
A central theme of Don’s sermons was that life is not fair. Plumbing this in his book, Why Not Me? he argued that only in surpassing this naïve expectation can we fully commit to advocating for a more just world — and to taking care of one another when the universe falls short.
Knowing this didn’t fully prepare Don for what the universe threw at him. Cancer took Ann in 2015 and — worst of all — their son Mark in 2023. As Ann was dying, Don developed a Parkinson’s tremor. That affliction gradually pushed his infectious smiles and laughter behind a Parkinsonian mask, even as his mind stayed sharp until near the end.
He outlived his big sister (and second mother) Juanita Stolle, and his elder brothers Elwood and Ralph. He leaves his daughter, Sarah Wheat, his famous son-in-law, Tim Staley, and their sons, Emerson, Foster, and Cormac; his son, Andrew, his daughter-in-law, Julia Bower, and their sons Micah and Nicholas; and his daughter-in-law, Montse Auso; his niece, Danita Stolle, and her spouse, Frank Bonura.
Don and Ann retired across the big lake, where they loved to entertain grandsons and treasured visits with longtime friends and the new ones they discovered in South Haven, Michigan. He loved creating something out of nothing. What beats celebrating Bastille Day by sharing a quiche and glass of Beaujolais with friends and family on the bluff overlooking stunning Lake Michigan?
Next time you sit down to a plate of Chirpy with those you love, Rev. Wheat invites you to keep alive his go-to prayer for the living: “Here’s to the wonder, the glory, the miracle, and the joy of life.”
Details of a Third Unitarian Church memorial service to follow. Consider a gift to Third Unitarian Church or its Austin Scholars Award Fund.