WAND: With Robby, at HBS.

Courtesy John Wand

John Wand (MBA ’81) was about to enroll in Harvard College when his high-school sweetheart in Boise, Idaho, told him she was pregnant. The couple married and moved to Cambridge, but after a couple of years, Wand’s wife left him and their two-year-old son, Robby. Wand’s experience as a student and single dad was the subject of a made-for-TV movie, “Freshman Father,” that aired on the Hallmark Channel in June.

“If you think about coming from Idaho, the social stigma around a teenage pregnancy was greater back then,” Wand told the Boston Herald (June 5, 2010). It was also a time when the concept of “single dad” was largely unfamiliar to many Americans. After graduating from Harvard College, Wand and Robby lived in Arlington, Massachusetts, while Wand was a student at HBS. Despite the movie’s Hollywood touches and departures from actual events, Wand said he hoped it would show people in similar situations that there can be happy endings. “I’ve had a pretty wonderful life,” said Wand, who in 1983 married classmate Beverly Patton (MBA ’81) and today is an adjunct finance professor at Seton Hall University.

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