Meet a Colleague: Don Gaylord Don Gaylord serves as a research archeologist and instructor in Sociology and Anthropology.

W&L News Office
August 20, 2025

Q. How long have you worked at W&L?
I’ve been at W&L for 12 1/2 years. I started in January 2013.

Q. What is your favorite course to teach, and why?
Field Methods in Archaeology (SOAN-210), which I teach in the Spring Term. I love teaching it because it exemplifies what I love most about the uniqueness of archaeology and W&L. Field archaeology is a discipline that requires both physically demanding hard work and mentally challenging brain power. At the end of the day, you are often exhausted, but it is a good tired that comes from using your mind too. The second thing I find fulfilling about this course is the Spring Term format itself, which is (among many other things) a unique feature of the experience at W&L.

Q. What do you like most about working at W&L?
Teaching such gifted and hard-working students, of course, but I especially enjoy the incredibly bright and talented people, at every sort of campus position, that I get to share my life with.

Q. Where is your favorite location on the W&L campus?
Liberty Hall, the whole landscape, not just the ruins of the Academy House. I like to just sit in the woods near “the foundation” of Liberty Hall Structure 9 and contemplate life, the universe and everything.

Q. What’s your favorite thing to do when you’re not working?
I love to cook food and share it with friends and family. Being in the kitchen and dining room with my family — telling stories or jokes — was such a foundational part of my childhood. I probably love to eat much more than I should, but at my age, what’s a guy to do?

Q. Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Wharton, New Jersey. I lived in the same house my whole life, until I left for enlistment in the United States Navy after high school. Wharton was a former iron furnace town on the Morris Canal, named after Joseph Wharton, one of the principal shareholders in Bethlehem Steel who founded Swarthmore University and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. It was kind of like a much-smaller version of Allentown from the Billy Joel song, where all the factory jobs were gone, and people had moved into the trades or service industry for wealthy folks who worked in New York City.

Q. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
First, when I was little, I wanted to be a lawyer, because being from New Jersey arguing a point — and winning the argument — was everything. Then, through most of my teen years well into my time in the Navy, I wanted to be a famous rock guitarist. I even listed that in my high school yearbook as my life’s goal.

Q. Who inspired you to teach? What about them inspired you?
My mom and dad were both storytellers who loved to explain everything about the world around us. From how to install and repair the electrical circuitry in our house, to how to tell when the pie-crust dough was just right, I spent much of my childhood at my parents’ elbow asking question after question, and they were never too annoyed by my questions to explain things to me. I also had an elementary school teacher, Mr. Bocchino, who read “The Hobbit” to us, in little bits over the school year instead of just making us memorize and copy verb conjugations from the chalkboard. He was kind and concerned and showed us that teaching and learning were about more than just facts and figures.

Q. What is the most adventurous thing that you have ever done?
I was a reactor operator on a submarine and traveled 20,000 miles during one deployment for undisclosed amounts of time in undisclosed locations north of the Arctic Circle in the general vicinity of the former Soviet Union. Needless to say, I am glad to be outside breathing the open air and getting some sunlight in my day-to-day life now.

Q. What music are you listening to these days?
I went to see the Cowboy Junkies in Charlottesville a couple months ago, more than 30 years after having last seen them at Toad’s Place in New Haven, Connecticut. They are a band made up mostly of two brothers and a sister. Their most-recent album “Such Ferocious Beauty” is about the grief and loss of caring for their parents at the ends of their lives, including their father’s fight with dementia. My dad died of Alzheimer’s a year and a half ago and the songs they played and stories they told at the concert have lingered deeply with me.

Q. If you could have coffee with one person, who would it be and why?
My dad. It would be a black Folgers coffee made using a pour-over Melitta filter. The day would be just on the verge of sunrise before a fishing or hunting trip. We would share our coffee during vigorous conversation and storytelling, side-by-side, in his pickup truck on our way to somewhere beautiful outdoors — probably “Northwood” our old haunt in the forests north of Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey. Why? Because I miss him more than I ever dreamed possible when I was a teenager butting heads with him like stubborn bulls.

Q. If you could live anywhere, where would you build your dream home?
Somewhere in the foothills on the eastern margin of the Appalachian Mountains or the various valleys that run through the mountains from North Carolina to New England; preferably there would be more autumn leaves and winter snow than dreadful summer heat and humidity.

Q. What is your favorite film (movie) of all time?
“Amélie.” I’ve always been a closet Francophile, and I love the quirky story and characters. I love the idea of trying to bring joy to other people, despite how hard it might be to find in your own life.

Q. If they made a movie about your life, who would play you?
I’ve been told repeatedly, by many unrelated people who couldn’t possibly be in collusion, that I look a lot like two people: the musician/singer/actor Meat Loaf and Brendan Gleeson, the Irish actor who played Mad-Eye Moody in the Harry Potter series. While both are incredibly talented, I find the latter more flattering — especially given the deep Irish Catholic roots (though not biology) of my childhood.

Q. What is your desert island food?
Cheese. I’ve always said “I never met a cheese I didn’t like.” This is presuming, of course, that I could catch all the fish I needed on the island.

Q. Tell us something most people don’t know about you.
I played bass in a grunge/heavy-metal band in college at Rutgers.