Two pages of the 1961 Blueprint were devoted to Charlie Commander. A clean-cut, bespectacled man, Commander in one photo was perched on the front steps of the Georgia Tech YMCA, the brick building on North Avenue that now houses the Alumni Association offices.
The ’61 yearbook was dedicated to Commander for “his years of instilling Christian ethics in the students of Georgia Tech, for his deep devotion to his work, for his tireless efforts, through group and individual projects, to help the students reach for a broader concept of life, for his unceasing work toward character development in the students he has come in contact with in the hope for a better and more Christian world.”
“His perseverance as general secretary of the Georgia Tech YMCA,” the Blueprint editors continued, “has helped him to overcome insurmountable odds in establishing a Christian attitude on a seemingly immoral campus. His efforts have earned for him the deep respect and admiration of the student body. To men of the caliber of Charlie Commander we owe a lifelong debt of gratitude for their guidance and inspiration.”
Charlie Commander was secretary of the Young Men’s Christian Association at Tech from 1940 until his death in 1967 at the age of 52. He’d spent practically his entire professional life working for Georgia Tech students. Early in his Tech career, Commander and his wife, Wylene, even lived among them in an apartment on the second floor of the YMCA.
Commander was a faculty member of ANAK and Omicron Delta Kappa and in 1962 was awarded the Dean Pershing Award in recognition of his outstanding service to students. The Commander Building on McMillan Street was named for him once construction was completed in 1969.
In a 2001 interview with the Alumni Association’s Living History program, Carlton Parker, a former executive director of the Tech YMCA who worked under Commander, said, “He was probably the most creative person I’ve ever known. Quiet and very organized and orderly, but also a very creative person. He could just figure out how to get people together to do great things.”
Those great things included the creation of Freshman Camp, a program to bring incoming first-year students together to socialize and make friendships prior to the start of classes, and a leadership conference that brought student leaders of campus organizations together with faculty and the Institute president to get to know each other before each school year. He also brought many international students to the Tech campus to study through the World Student Fund.
But Commander’s most important contribution to Tech may be his work to make the 1961 integration of campus run smoothly, and more importantly, to make Tech’s first black students comfortable on campus.
After getting the permission of Tech President Edwin Harrison, Commander organized a series of dinners at a YMCA on Luckie Street. He recruited a handful of students each week to sit down to a steak supper with the three black students who had been accepted to Tech, Ford Greene, Ralph Long Jr. and Lawrence Williams.
In an article published in the May 1967 issue of the Georgia Tech Alumnus following Commander’s death, editor Bob Wallace said the YMCA secretary “actually did little talking himself but led the boys into open discussions of their own attitudes and prejudices. It wasn’t the only thing done to prevent another Athens or Oxford or Tuscaloosa but it had an impact all its own. And we got through the crisis in such good shape we owe a great deal to him for it.”
Born in Florence, S.C., Robert Charlton Commander dedicated most of his life to the YMCA. He was a member of the National Council of YMCAs and an officer of the board of directors of the Southern area council of the YMCA.
Commander decided to pursue a career with the organization after serving three years as president of the Clemson chapter while an undergraduate student. He later was director of the youth program at the New Haven YMCA while preparing for a bachelor of divinity degree at Yale. From there, he went to the Virginia Polytechnic Institute YMCA, for which he worked for a year.
During World War II, Commander, who participated in ROTC at Clemson, refused the Army’s offers to serve in the chaplaincy, instead serving as an infantry officer in the Pacific theater.
“Charlie had very difficult eyesight, so he had to sign a waiver in order to go abroad in the military service,” Parker told the Living History program. “He signed the waiver and carried with him three pairs of glasses the entire time that he was in the Pacific. I think probably a large part of the early end of his life resulted from some of the illness that he experienced during the war in the Pacific.”
According to the Alumnus, Commander died of pneumonia just a few days after a recurring lung problem had sent him to the hospital. He had had major surgery a few months before.
As Wallace concluded his written tribute to Commander’s long and lauded tenure at Tech, “There is not enough room in these pages to tell the complete story any better than to say that he was a man who cared about others whether they were good or bad or indifferent.
“He spent half of his life making Georgia Tech a better place for students and the faculty and even those of us who were his administrative colleagues.” Wallace wrote. “He is missed.”
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