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Acorn Fund: Doc & Regina Preston Fund


Our parents, Dallas Dwain Preston and Regina Ann Higgins were products of Quincy and proud of their heritage in the Gem City. Dwain, son of Claud and Nellie Preston, and Regina, daughter of Bernard and Alberta Higgins, but fathered by Leo Jansen after Bernard passed, were introduced one famous night at the Park Bowl Bar by mutual friend, Jay Lenne. A few months later, under a sprawling oak tree in South Park, the Quincy Junior High teacher asked the receptionist at Dr. Wechbach’s office to marry him. They were married in St. Francis Church in 1962 and a daughter was born in each of the first four years following the wedding. 

Dwain taught at Quincy Junior High while earning his Master’s degree at WIU, but the family moved to Champaign in 1968 so Dwain could earn his Ph.D. After eight years as an English professor at Western Illinois University they came home to Quincy where Dwain returned to his first love—teaching English to secondary students at Quincy Notre Dame. For over two decades Dwain and Regina were icons at QND—and, arguably, two of the institution’s most loyal friends. Students and colleagues alike enjoyed the presence of the in-house poet (also known as Doc after an article was published in the school paper noting his Ph.D) and the woman who worked in the foundation office, but knew every student and teacher in the school and enjoyed nothing more than a student worker willing to share their life stories with her over frozen M&Ms. 

Both Doc and Regina were staunch advocates of literacy, learning, kindness, humor, and empathy for the plight or joy of others. They were proud of their roots in the central United States and many of Doc’s poems are a tribute to the flowers, trees, highways, animals and people of western Illinois. After mom died in 2006 dad went to visit a daughter in New Jersey. On the way home late that summer he penned his poem “To Regina” which is a beautiful tribute to a love our parents shared and to the history which made them the people they became. 
 
…“But ah! What memories they are,
The buoy of my very life,
Which would have been of little worth
Had you not been my wife.

The night Jay Lenne introduced 
Us in the Park Bowl Bar,
Our wedding day, our honeymoon,
That worn-out Plymouth car.

The Plaza beers, our baby girls,
The moves from place to place.
And I remember through it all 
Your face, your lovely face…” 

The Doc and Regina Preston Fund is dedicated to the goal of providing funds for purposes which promote the things Dwain and Regina dedicated their lives to: community, faith, the arts, learning, kindness, and generosity. It was their firm belief that humanity is not perfect, but we can always strive to be better and our goal with the Community Foundation is to foster those ideas that leave the world a better place than we found it. There is a scholarship in their name at QND and in no way do we intend to take from that as QND was an integral part of their lives. The Doc and Regina Preston Fund is our effort to expand their legacy throughout the city they returned to and loved as home for over 50 years of their lives.

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