Edison Portrayer Tries to Get Kids to Turn On to Science

Thomas Edison is alive and well. Just ask Drew Wilson.

Better yet, ask most of the elementary school students in Orange County.

“I tell the kids I’m 143 years old and that makes them worry about me,” said Wilson, 65, who talks to an estimated 25,000 students a year in his one-man Thomas Edison show at school assemblies.

“I’m up there to leave them fired up and ready to do something, to be inventors, just like Edison,” he said.

At the same time Wilson challenges them to win his Great Idea Award.

“Let’s invent something; let’s come up with a great idea,” he urges and at the same time points out that Edison had 1,093 patents.

“I’m not up there just to give them 45 minutes of distraction,” he added.

Wilson acknowledged that he sometimes has a difficult task.

“It’s tough to reach a bunch of little kids. They have an attention span of about a minute and a half,” he said during an interview in the back yard of his Mission Viejo home.

But the former commercial art teacher, who has experience in community theater with his wife, Bonnie, experiences a good time during the talks that he sometimes gives five times a week.

He often invents stories when the children question him about being Edison, who died Oct. 18, 1931.

“I tell them I have a time machine that helps me make the crossover from myself to Edison,” he said. “Young kids don’t have trouble with that. It’s when we turn them into adults that things fall apart.”

Although he retired from teaching four years ago, “I’m going to keep this going as long as I can,” he said. “This is too much fun. It’s not work, it’s sheer pleasure.”

Wilson has researched his alter ego extensively, partly because of his admiration of Edison since his own school days.

“I like most everything about the man, including his sayings, especially, “Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.”

During some of his talks, Wilson moves from the stage into the audience to give the children a close-up look at his vintage seersucker suits, like the ones Edison wore, and his shock of white hair, which he parts on the left side as Edison did.

“I look enough like Edison to get my point across,” he said.

Quite naturally he works for the Southern California Edison Co.

“I have a free rein about what I’m going to say in my talk,” said Wilson, an antique-car buff and an Angels baseball fan. “Mostly I want to interest the children in science.”

But he adds: “I honestly believe reaching out to kids is as close to immortality as I’m going to get. Some are going to take part of what I told them and do something great. Who knows what they might build someday?”

Besides schools, Wilson also addresses community and professional organizations, such as the Edison Electric Institute in Washington.

Wilson said his dream is to play Edison on television.

He continues to act, most recently on television’s “Divorce Court,” playing the part of a husband having an affair and being threatened with divorce.

“One of the kids who saw the show came up to me and asked if Mr. Edison was going to get a divorce,” Wilson said, smiling.

Yet another letter has arrived about an Orange County person with an unusual name.

This one is Frontis D. Evins III of Mission Viejo.

“I didn’t like the name when I was growing up,” said Evins, who went by the nickname Dubby . “But I like it now.”

In fact, he said, he hopes someday to have a son named Frontis D. Evins IV.

Acknowledgments--Lake Forest resident Linda Fischer, 47, a certified medical assistant, was named Medical Assistant of the Year by the Orange County Chapter of the California Medical Assistants Assn. She is office manager for Dr. Pramod Batra of Garden Grove.