Eddie Wolsch
Eddie Wolsch is a semi-retired high school counselor, retiring from full-time employment in public education after 33 years. As a past member of the Texas Association of College Admission Counselors (TACAC) he served as the policy analyst for the Government Relations Committee in which he tracked and analyzed bills related to the mission of TACAC. With an interest in the educational needs of the various underserved populations of students of talent, he also served at the state-level on a committee devoted to that issue for the TX Association of Gifted and Talented, guiding such students to the Ivies and other top-tier schools.
Of Platt and Wendish descent, he has had a life-long interest in his heritage. He has been a long-time member of GTHS and is also on the board of the Dallas Goethe Center. He graduated with majors in history and social science at Howard Payne University where he also studied German. He then pursued an M.A. in history at Midwestern State University before switching to an M.Ed. in counseling, due to a lack of job opportunity as a professional historian.
In addition to managing the family farm, spending time with grandkids, and renewing his study of German, hobbies include genealogy, study of the history of the areas from which the lines of his family originated, and of the German farm community he calls home.
His primary research interest however is of a group of Freidenker from his home community the matriarch of which helped develop the Socialist Party in TX and was prominent in the Party nationally and in Germany. Corresponding with Clara Zetkin, a co-founder of the German Communist Party (KPD) among many others prominent in radical politics in the late 19th c./WWI era, her papers are archived at the Southwest Collection (SWC) at TX Tech University. As a volunteer at the SWC he selects those letters related to that experience which the SWC then posts to their site to aid researchers. He has contributed materials to two authors from his research on this family for inclusion in their books on “Red” Tom Hickey, a member of the family, and the Meitzen family publishers of the Rebel, organ of the TX SP, who were colleagues of Hickey. Combining his educational background and interest in promoting preservation of his German heritage he volunteers annually to judge the research contest at the state level of the TX chapter of the American Association of Teachers of German.