At 68 years old, university President Wallace Loh has certainly lived a full life. He’s moved from China to Peru to Iowa — and throughout much of the United States — before landing in College Park.

At heart, Loh is a storyteller. So it’s unsurprising that when Loh tells his life story, he has plenty of entertaining anecdotes to share.

Paying for college

After growing up in Lima, Peru, Loh moved to Iowa to attend college. His parents ran a grocery store in Peru and gave him their entire life savings—$300— to begin his life in the U.S.

That, of course, wasn’t enough to pay for college. He took on a host of odd jobs, including washing dishes in Grinnell College’s kitchen and taking care of a rat colony.

One of Grinnell’s research labs used wild Norwegian rats. Loh, along with other lab employees, would go out and trap the rats. They would then breed the animals through several generations before they were used for lab experiments.

“I still have bites on my fingers from cleaning the cages and feeding them,” Loh said. “They were pretty fierce creatures.”

Eurotrip

While Loh was at the University of Michigan in the 1960s working toward his Ph.D., he took two years off to study in Belgium. He wanted to study in Europe but “had no money,” so he received a fellowship to study at the University of Leuven in Flanders, Belgium.

When he arrived, there was a massive demonstration in the city’s main square. The conflict between Belgium’s Flemish-speaking and French-speaking, Loh said, paralleled this country’s civil rights movement. Thousands of students were sitting in the streets singing “We Shall Overcome,” the anthem of the U.S. civil rights movement.

“Why are they singing, ‘We Shall Overcome?’” Loh asked a young woman at the demonstration.

“This is our civil rights movement,” she told Loh. “What we want is to expel the French-speaking students from Leuven.”

Loh was shocked the Flemish-speaking students viewed advocating for separate but equal facilities as equivalent to a civil rights movement. The incident spearheaded a psychological study he published and affirmed his dream of going to law school.

Meeting Barbara

Loh and Barbara Loh’s relationship began with a random meeting in a Seattle coffee shop. It was especially random, Barbara Loh said, because her husband doesn’t drink coffee.

While Barbara Loh was buying a cup of coffee, Loh was filling up his water bottles in the middle of a bike ride. The two struck up a “random” conversation, and found they had both spent time in Belgium — Loh studied there as a student, and Barbara Loh had just returned from a trip. They exchanged numbers, and Barbara Loh thought the pair would become good friends.

Like many love stories, their friendship gradually blossomed into something more. They dated for a year and a half before marrying in 1985.

“I think if we had met 10 years earlier, we wouldn’t have looked at each other,” Barbara Loh said. “I didn’t see it as a romance, but it evolved into that slowly.”

‘I dropped the damn blue book’

When Loh was a law professor at the University of Washington law school, he took ski trips on every academic break: winter, spring and long weekends.

That was in the 1980s before the advent of high-speed ski lifts. So Loh would take a stack of blue books, in which his students filled out their exams and assignments, and he graded them on the way up the mountain.

On one ski lift ride, Loh “dropped the damn blue book.”

“As soon as I got down, boy, that was the fastest I’ve ever skied in my life,” Loh said.

He managed to retrieve it. The blue book was soaking wet, he said, but still legible enough to read the handwriting.

Family first

In the 1990s, Loh’s career was on a meteoric rise. After serving as the law school dean at the University of Washington, he served as provost at the University of Colorado, Boulder and policy director for then-Washington Gov. Gary Locke.

But Loh’s mother was in her 90s, and he promised her she would never live in a nursing home. So he moved to Seattle, three blocks away from her home, and took a post as dean of the arts and sciences college at Seattle University.

His colleagues told him he had taken a significant step backward career-wise. They warned Loh the move would hold him back from future opportunities. Loh, however, wanted to take care of his mother and see more of his daughter, who is now in her 20s. Loh, Barbara Loh and others looked after his mother, Lily Loh, until she died a few weeks before her 100th birthday.

Shortly after his mother passed away and his daughter went off to college, the University of Iowa offered Loh the provost job in 2008. And, of course, he came to this university two years later to begin his presidency.