Abner McCall . . . G-man? by Robert F. Darden Spring 2020
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6 Letters & Ideas: We Need You 8 Opening Essay: Not disorder.youSomeone,Enough[BLANK]somewherethatknowhasfoughtaneatingWhatdoesitlooklike to fight back? By Jennifer Wagner (M.S. ’19) 14 Cover Story: Abner McCall . . . G-man? Most know of the man behind the near-mythic tales of his time leading Baylor through expansion and change. Few, though, know of the man who had shoot outs with criminals, trekked through mountains, caught bank robbers, and trained with a Tommy gun. By Robert F. Darden (’76) Voice of Alumni Since 1859 Vol. 84 | No. 1 Allen Holt Executive Vice allen@baylorlinefoundation.comPresident Jonathon Platt Editor-in-chief, The Baylor Line editor@baylorline.com Robert F. Darden Editor Emeritus, The Baylor Line emeritus@baylorline.com Haley Gandy Publication cedargandy.comDesigner Kellie Juandiego Member kellie@baylorlinefoundation.comServices James McInnis Chief Financial james@baylorlinefoundation.comOfficer Janet Nors Chief Advancement janet@baylorlinefoundation.comOfficer Baylor Line Interns Sophia Alejandro Mary Cate Archinal Olivia Bragg Emily JourdanMichaelaCousinsDudrowPratt The Baylor Line PO Box 2089, Waco, TX 76703 hi@baylorline.com254-732-0430 Spring 2020 1 24 Special Section: 55th Annual Hall of Fame Awards Banquet The Baylor Family gathered to honor alumni who are continuing the legacy of exceptional performance through their life, work, and passions. Join us in celebrating these deserving honorees. 38 Family Feature: The New Standard Not everyone got on board with Coach Ryan McGuyre’s demands for greater dedication. Some didn’t like the intensity. Some wanted volleyball to be one of many activities in their life. Most of the holdovers, however, came around. Just ask the players on the 2019 Big 12 Champions team how his methods are working out. By Shehan Jeyarajah (’16)
WagnerJennifer (M.S. ‘19) Robert F. Darden (’76) JeyarajahShehan (’16)
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Jennifer is currently working toward her Ph.D. in Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is working toward becoming a professor and researcher in paleontology. Her interests are in plant evolution and earth system science. She also has a passion for advocating for mental health awareness, especially on college campuses. Whenever Jenn is not in her studies, she is exploring outside with her husband and their three dogs.
. Darden’s writing has appeared in publications from The New York Times to the Oxford American. He lives in Waco with his wife, Mary Landon Darden. Shehan is a staff writer at Dave Campbell’s Texas Football. Previously, he covered Big 12 and SEC football with Cox Media Group and contributed coverage of Baylor to Dallas Morning News
be sent to voices@baylorline.com Contributors BaylorLine.com
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Robert is a professor of journalism, public relations, and new media at Baylor. He founded the Baylor Black Gospel Restoration Project and has also authored over two dozen books, including: Nothing But Love in God’s Water, Volumes I & II and People Get Ready! A New History of Black Gospel Music
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. His work has appeared in Sports Illustrated, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Austin American-Statesman, among others. He lives in Las Colinas with his wife, Bhargavi Jeyarajah. email and can /BaylorLineFoundation @BaylorLineFoundation /in/BaylorLineFoundation
Spring 2020 Sponsored Content 3 YOU CAN LEGACYCONTINUEHELPTHE The Baylor Line Foundation is doing more than ever in the Baylor family. We need to keep it up. Over the past year, your donations supported 54 students with over $100,000 in Legacy Scholarships, continued the storied 74-year history of The Baylor Line magazine, and supported one of our largest Hall of Fame awards banquets to-date. Your continued support makes it possible for the Baylor Line Foundation to be your voice. Donate now at baylorline.com/legacy
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first issue of what we call The Baylor Line is tricky to nail down. Before the magazine you’re now reading lies a storied past. We were once The Baylor Century and before that The Baylor Monthly. I’ve found myself flipping through the pages of these old prints both for research and for pleasure. It’s more than easy to get lost in their treasures. Even before the alumni publication there was an organization bent on strengthening and supporting the Baylor Family. That organization too, as I’m sure you know well, has been known by many names. The Baylor Ex-student Association. The Baylor Alumni Association. And, now, the Baylor Line Foundation. Today, we proudly call ourselves the “voice of alumni since 1859.” Some of you can tell me stories for days about what this organization means to you. An NewAll Adventure by Jonathon Platt (’16, M.A. ’19) The Baylor
Line
Editor’s Note
When I discussed the notion of these changes with team members we reached the conclusion that any true expression of what we wanted you to feel as you read would have to be both reflective and innovative, and would require the services of some of Baylor’s bravest and best creative minds. My first step was to immerse myself in our archives, in order to understand the evolution of our look, style, and content across the years. My second step was to propose bold changes to what we can deliver.this redesign of our print magazine is but a single step in reimagining what we can do and how we can deliver this new feel across all of our journalism — you may already be seeing our new initiatives manifesting themselves on your screens, for instance.
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The crucial goal of The Line’s renovation is to help readers better engage our work, through simplicity in typeface and design, and through investing in superior storytelling. I find what we’ve created is a melding of the wonderful history in our deepest archives with the magnificently beautiful changes made in recent years. For instance, we’re back to using Baskerville, the typeface used for decades by previous Line editors, and pairing it with Stolzl Bold, the striking typeface present across our website, logo, and publications for the past few years. This is a small detail but the goal of this and our entire effort is to make The Line visually striking, staunchly narrative-driven, and radically unique, all at the same time. It was truly an adventure to bring this all about but I think we have found the exact feel we were searching for. I hope you will agree and, what’s more, I hope you’ll join me on the adventure still ahead of us.
And so, here, after all that legacy and all the history and all the stories is little ol me. The new editor. These are big shoes to fill. Honestly, I wasn’t sure where to start and it was all so overwhelming. During some of the afternoons I found myself flipping through old magazines, though, I slowly came across the footing I needed. Another source of relief was through all the friends, mentors, and family I’ve gained throughout my time as a Baylor journalism undergraduate and graduate student. Our annual Hall of Fame Awards Banquet, my first, gave me another sense of just what my work — this important work of continuing the legacy so many have left for me — is truly about. We have been many, many things under many, many names to many, many people. Still though — through the storms, through the night — we have remained a foundation of, by, and for the Baylor Family. So, here we are together — me writing, you reading — on what can only be described as a new adventure. That’s not only what it felt like to bring this issue into being but also what this issue is about at its core. The Baylor Line team and I poured our hearts and souls into a new design, a new format, and many new ways for you to experience our content. I think this issue achieves that and my immodest hope for it, with 161 years of legacy paving the way, is to encourage you on your own Certainadventures.features of The Baylor Line have remained consistent over our history, such as our commitment to connecting the Baylor Family through narratives and profiles. Some things have changed drastically, though, including our design. This print marks the beginning of a new era for The Line’s design. After much reflection, conversation, and experimentation we have decided to simplify and reimagine our publication. This dramatic new look is matched by a reimagining of our content, too. As you make your way through these pages, you’ll find it not only looks different than ever before but it also feels different. We took that word seriously with each decision. I’ve asked the writers to lean into gripping storytelling and raw emotion. I’ve asked our publication designer to allow for more white space, more emphasis on So, the words in each story, and more simplicity. I’ve even asked our printer to alter the types of paper we use to make it, very literally, feel different.
Letters & Ideas We left this page blank to showneedmuchhowweyou. 6 The Baylor Line
All letters and ideas can be sent to Springletters@baylorline.com2020 Without letters and ideas from you, we don’t feel like this magazine is an accurate representation of our mission to be the voice of alumni since 1859. As you read this issue, see our content in your social media feeds, or come across our coverage online (baylorline. com), we want to know what you think or what questions arise. Add your voice here with a letter to the editor. Or, have an idea you think the Baylor Family should consider? (Did someone say #stadiumreentry?) Use your voice to start the conversation here. Behind the Cover When Bob pitched this story to me back in December, the first thing I imagined was the cover. An Elliot Ness-esque Abner McCall was immediately in my mind. Unfortunately, after hours of digging in the Texas Collection, it became clear no such stylish photo of McCall the G-man exists in our archives. We got creative and with the talent and creative eye of our publication designer, Haley Gandy, chose to combine a well-known image of McCall in his final years next to one of his much younger self in a dapperyet-mythical FBI uniform. The resulting cover casts the mystique and playfulness of a McCall many have never known . . . until now. –Jonathon Platt, editor-in-chief
Spring 2020 9 Someone, somewhere that you know has fought an eating disorder. What does it look like to fight back? by Jennifer Wagner (M.S. ‘19) Not [Blank ] Enough Opening Essay
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our minds run away from us. I like to think of it as the “rabbit-hole.” It’s the endless “what-ifs,” “if only’s,” and “am I [blank] enough” that run loops in your mind at the end of the day or upon closure of an important event. Some people do not have the ability to fight those thoughts because they were never taught how. Or maybe they were, they just weren’t in the place to hear it. This is sad, but it is true everywhere. In gymnastics, it was brought to my attention that the less a person weighs, the better gymnast and athlete that person could be. I remember waiting in line for our yearly Body Mass Index assessments in the auditorium and being so sad whenever my fellow classmates weighed less than me — wasn’t I doing the right thing? I was in gymnastics, athletic, and didn’t eat much — wasn’t that Myenough?family said to suck in my stomach and not push out because it was “unlady like” and unattractive. I was told I would gain a lot of weight when my period started, so I would have to eat less then. I was a lacking late bloomer and quickly became known as the small and skinny kid. I can clearly remember my mom saying that I didn’t have curves and some said my freckles were unattractive, but I quickly realized I was great at being skinny and being thin got me compliments from friends and family. My eating disorder began during a time in my life that was hectic and overwhelming. My father was struggling with the loss of his parents. He took it really hard and it led to a rough patch between my parents as my father struggled with alcoholism and his parents’ passing catalyzed a rock-bottom event for him. Though my parents never separated, this period of time was very tough. Many transitions occurred and it was painful to see what both my mother and father were going through as I was only 13 and didn’t really understand it all. I knew that we were stressed for money, dad was really upset, and I needed to help mom as much as I could.ecause this was such a tough time for me, it makes sense that my eating disorder originated when it did. My eating disorder, like all eating disorders, serves as a form of control and a coping mechanism. My eating disorder became and still is my safety blanket. Though it was helpful temporarily, the cost benefit ratio changes quite a bit in the longrun. It kept me thin and made me feel powerful for a long time, but now I’m starting to see the negative side effects and what a true burden it has been all of these years. My eating disorder’s voice created unhealthy and unrealistic black-and-white thinking, increased my anxiety, caused multiple health issues, and prevented me from living a life that I, Jenn, want to live. Life is supposed to be about honoring our values and contributing to society, but there is so much focus on being validated by others that I worry we are losing the ability to validate ourselves; I definitely had. As I look back, I can see the patterns and how my eating disorder has gradually evolved and grown with me. Throughout high school, it was on full blast, but I was extremely secretive about it. Once it decided to stay, it nestled itself in and made a home. From age 14 to 26, I purged at least three times a day. It got to where if I ate anything I wanted to purge it. It became a habit that I desired to do. I was never a fan of eating a lot of food because I had always received subtle cues from my mom that eating a lot of food was bad and it was better to not finish a full plate. I would occasionally go on binges, but it was difficult to get away with and I felt a lot of shame from it. Shame became both the origin and a result of my eating disorder. During my undergraduate years at the University of Central Arkansas, my eating disorder found new ways to control my life. I found myself replacing my meals with alcohol to numb the negative thoughts and put something in my stomach that I wouldn’t have the desire to purge. My eating disorder absolutely LOVED the rotating diet trends during my time as an undergraduate. I spent so many mornings obsessively working out and only rewarding myself with food when I worked hard Wheneverenough.Iwasin middle school, a really close childhood friend would act out on behaviors with me and we would binge massive amounts of food then purge it all in the woods down the road from our houses. We did this regularly from ages 13 to 16 and caregivers thought nothing of it because they weren’t paying attention and we were very secretive about it. Unfortunately, that childhood friend is now dead due to her alcohol addiction and life-long struggle with an eating disorder; she was buried in spring 2016, a few months before I moved to Waco to begin my Master of Science degree in the department of Geosciences at Baylor. “
My disordereatingbecameandstillismysafetyblanket.”
While at Baylor, I battled the same two demons: my relationship with alcohol and my eating disorder. The alcohol numbed the pain and kept me from isolating because it reduced the overthinking and stopped my thoughts from running wild. Whenever I lost my friend, I felt helpless and guilty. Afterall, we both battled similar demons — it wasn’t and isn’t fair, to me, that she is gone and I am still here. The guilt, pain, and shame were too much and I didn’t want to deal with it anymore, so I would restrict and drink to push through. I withdrew from graduate classes during my first semester at Baylor. My therapist and doctors strongly encouraged me to seek professional treatment for my eating disorder and drinking. I entered treatment and took the spring semester off, focusing on outpatient recovery and creating a support system for myself in Waco. Luckily for me, the Baylor mental health community was immediately on top of my declining situation and stepped in to help whenever I didn’t know what was right for me. When I returned to Baylor in the fall of 2017, I was newly sober and determined to conquer my eating disorder, maintain sobriety, conduct my own research, and write a thesis. It was not easy and it took a lot of effort. There were many days, at times weeks, where I felt as if I would never recover. I went regularly to therapy, group sessions, and doctors’ appointments at the Student Health Center to keep myself accountable and on track. Shaking the black-and-white mentality born from my eating disorder is a daily struggle and I’ve come to learn it requires persistence, not perfection.
The negative stigma surrounding mental health has made discussing important, crucial issues very difficult in today’s society. We grow up hearing phrases like ‘tough it up’, ‘don’t be a cry baby’, ‘stop being dramatic’. These statements are often directed toward us with a preconceived idea that we, as humans, experience emotions and feelings in a black-and-white way — it’s either painful or it isn’t. The devastating truth is that our emotions and feelings, the way we truly feel and express them, is a result of our genetics and environment. As a result, all humans create a “reality filter” that is constructed from ideas and notions we eagerly gather as we learn how to navigate life. Talking about these stigmas breaks down this black-and-white worldview, making us see the role shame plays in our lives, and, hopefully, diminishing its power. This is as much a public conversation as it is an internal one. inding support has made a world of difference and keeps me moving forward in recovery. I know I am not alone and hearing the true, raw, often messy struggles from other people is a powerful tool because we learn and grow from each other as much as on our own. I try to comfort the isolated little girl in me who feels unworthy, undeserving, and pointless — the girl who lets shame rule her — rather than tearing her apart whenever I make a mistake. I still struggle with this, but I am hopeful that with practice and time the negative voice of my eating disorder will subside.
Jennifer Wagner (M.S. ‘19) is a Ph.D. candidate in Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley.
F
“I know I am not alone.”
12 The Baylor Line
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Most know of the man behind the near-mythic tales of his time leading Baylor through expansion and change. Few, though, know of the man who had shoot outs with criminals, trekked through mountains, caught bank robbers, and trained with a Tommy gun. by Robert F. Darden (’76) Judge McCall was president when I arrived at Baylor in 1972. I never spoke to him, though the door to his office in Pat Neff Hall was always open. I never attended one of his weekly “open” lunches at the old snack bar in the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum. But like every other Baylor student, I saw him regularly walk across the campus with that unusual rolling gait of his. By then he was slightly stooped and unassuming, invariably wearing a shapeless dark suit with a battered black hat, his pockets always bulging from the pecans he harvested along the route from the Albritton House to Pat Neff Hall. I particularly remember one fall day, however, when several of us watched as President Abner V. McCall walked slowly past us to his office. “That old guy,” one of us said, “he don’t even know he’s Somebody.”
J Spring 2020 15
Abner McCall . . . G-man?
But for all of the near-mythic qualities of McCall’s life, he rarely talked about one of his most intriguing chapters — his time as a G-man. Yes, Abner McCall worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation during World War II. As war was breaking out, McCall was on a one-year scholarship, completing his LL.M. at the University of Michigan Law School. Baylor President Pat Neff invited him to re-join the Baylor law school faculty, but most of the students had already volunteered for the armed services.
McCall tried to enlist and was rejected three times. His vision was bad, he needed extensive dental work, and he was significantly underweight. At 6’2”, McCall weighed less than 120 pounds. Later in life, he told interviewer Tom Charlton (ably assisted by McCall’s long-time friend and aide Thomas Turner) that he tried repeatedly to gain the weight but with disastrous results. Ultimately, through the mechanisms of a friendly doctor, he was accepted into the FBI. By the time the bureau sent him for a physical, he was already well into his intensive 16-week training program, a full-time blitz that covered 120 different types of mostly criminal investigations.
In addition what he called “Marine-styled” strenuous physical training, McCall received instruction with the infamous Thompson submachine gun (or “Tommy gun”), as well as various shotguns, rifles, and even what he called the “gas gun.” “The .38 revolver was your main weapon,” he recalled. “You had to have that with you whenever you needed it, which meant at all times.
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* McCall said that legendary Baylor grad and Baptist leader Dewey Presley (’39) was also an FBI agent and was part of the second, non-lawyer category — titled, “special agents (a), accounting.”
ew people have ever risen from more humble beginnings and ascended to greater heights than Abner Vernon McCall. The story of his journey from orphan at the Masonic Home in Fort Worth to President of the world’s largest Baptist school is one of the foundational narratives of today’s Baylor. In the process, he oversaw the physical transformation of campus and Baylor’s elevation from small denominational college to national academic powerhouse. He was a confidant of the powerful (including President Lyndon B. Johnson) and champion of the dispossessed (as when he oversaw the desegregation of the Baylor campus).
The FBI in 1942 was in a difficult position. Despite the bureau’s wellpublicized heroics fighting gangsters of the 1930s, much of its intelligencegathering duties during the war were now assumed by the army and navy into the Joint Intelligence Committee and the Bureau was severely understaffed. McCall, with his new eyeglasses and sporting two law degrees (90 percent of recruits were lawyers, with the remaining 10 percent accountants) was put to work immediately, joining nearly forty other Baylor law grads working for the bureau across the country.* The FBI was assigned domestic internal security — saboteurs and espionage, tracking deserters and chasing draft dodgers, ferreting out corruption in war-related industries, investigating bankruptcy fraud, and, occasionally, catching bank-robbers.
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He also studied jujitsu with trained instructors. “You did a lot of practicing in how to handle people,” McCall said, “how to disarm people and how to subdue a rebellious person and get him, throw him down, and handcuff him.”
“Another phase of it [that] didn’t particularly impress me was the almost, you might say, worship of J. Edgar Hoover in the educational division of the bureau in Washington.”
The officer glared at McCall. “You’ve got to put in more time. That seventy-eight hours, that thirty hours volunteer overtime, is a minimum for old, tired agents like me. You young fellows all ought to be putting in forty or fifty hours a week volunteer overtime. I expect to see you put a little energy in your work.”
At one point, he was called back to Washington D.C. where he joined a surveillance team investigating a suspected spy ring of 30-35 people.
“Everybody was just running day and night trying to keep up,” McCall said. “The FBI handled 600,000 draft-dodging cases. I don’t know how many deserters we chased down and prisoners of war that got away.”
On Friday, the head of the San Diego office called McCall into his office. “You’re delinquent on all your cases,” the man said. McCall replied, “I put in that full 78 hours and I just haven’t been able to find any of the people yet.”
The instructions were: Whenever you need it, you’d better have it on and don’t come in here and say, ‘I didn’t have my revolver with me.’”
Other training included lectures on the history of the FBI. Some of the instruction, which McCall termed “a lot of yell-leader-type” motivational speeches, didn’t sit as well.
Hoover showed up in person twice during McCall’s D.C. training sessions, standing at the back. Agents, McCall said, were under strict orders to never look at the man. On Hoover’s second visit, he was accompanied by the Prince of Wales, Edward VII. McCall’s first assignment was San Diego. When he arrived in town on Monday with his wife Frances and daughter Anne, he was immediately assigned 40 cases, mostly for men who had not reported to their draft offices. The standard workweek, he said, was 48 hours, though all agents were expected to “volunteer” for another 30 hours of overtime.
McCall’s next assignment was as the FBI’s liaison with the Office of Naval Intelligence, the G-2 section of the War Department, the San Diego police, and the sheriff’s departments, sharing information on organizations sympathetic to the Nazis, the Klanrelated Knights of the White Camellia, or even the American Communist Party. These assignment also involved some surveillance work.
“And they meet a lot of people and they move around. Some of them move around a lot, so it’s a very dreary, monotonous thing to follow a fellow: he goes in and has a cup of coffee, he sits down and you go down to the end of the counter and you get a cup of coffee and when he gets picked up and leaves, you’ve got to leave your cup of coffee right then and try to pay the thing and get out about the same time he gets out. You can’t hang right there on his neck ’cause he’ll see who you are. So you’ve got to stay away. It’s hard; it’s really boring.”
“The FBI put about, oh, four to eight agents on every person and followed him day and night under instructions not to let them know that you were following them,” McCall said. “And to follow a person, we’d have eight hours on and eight hours off, eight hours on and eight hours off. Spies don’t spy every day. They may do something of espionage maybe once every six months or every month, but you [had] to follow [these men] all the time.
McCall said that most of his 40 cases involved tracking Mexican American men who held dual citizenship. When they received their draft notices, many of the young men simply walked back across the border to Tijuana where agents couldn’t arrest them.
The following day McCall arrived at 6:30 a.m. and did so every day thereafter. He didn’t take his first half-day off until he’d been there six months.
Over the next few years, as was bureau custom, McCall was reassigned multiple times, from Salt Lake City to Phoenix, back to Washington, then Oklahoma City. The constant moves — as well as his 80-hour weeks — placed increasing stress on McCall’s growing family. Finding an appropriate apartment grew increasingly difficult as the war wore on. In San Diego, with its giant naval facilities, the McCalls struggled unsuccessfully for weeks to find suitable housing.
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JamesAll“thisBondthing,that’sabunchofbaloney.”
hile in Washington, McCall was assigned to a man who lived on the edge of the District and daily walked 40 blocks to work in the foulest, most freezing weather imaginable. McCall called him a “fresh-air fiend.” Despite the man’s epic walks, he never appeared to meet anyone — much to McCall’s increasing frustration. “Several times I was tempted to pull out my gun and shoot him right there in the middle of the park and leave him in a snowbank.”
At the time, McCall was working on a case involving the theft of government property at a defense plant. A young man had stolen some electric tools and McCall found both them and the man at his apartment. It was common in such cases for a judge to offer an offender the chance to enlist rather than face charges. The young man eagerly agreed to the deal. McCall said he immediately drove back to the man’s apartment complex and found the landlord. “I said, ‘I would like to have this apartment.’ She said, ‘It’s occupied.’ I said, ‘It won’t be occupied long’ and told her why. She said, ‘Well, if he gives it up, you can have it.’” With the blessing of the judge, the hapless young man was inducted into the military on the spot — and the McCalls had their apartment. Not all cases ended peacefully. While in Salt Lake City, McCall tracked a violent bank robber who had escaped from prison and fled to the mountains of southern Utah. The man was a survivalist familiar with the mountains, armed and dangerous. McCall joined a task force that included other agents, members of the Utah Highway Patrol and even an experienced mountain guide. After days of hiking in the rugged terrain of the Pine Valley Mountains, the two agents and the guide tracked the man to an isolated peak. McCall was exhausted, cut and bruised from the thick underbrush, and extremely thirsty. Eventually, they heard what their guide said was the sound a small waterfall nearby. McCall was armed both with his service revolver and his favorite shotgun. Painfully, he picked his way down another steep ravine towards the sound of the water. To support himself, he hung by a thick vine along the ravine wall. When the underbrush suddenly cleared, he saw, just ten yards away, the“Andfugitive.like a good FBI agent,” McCall said, “I identified myself: ‘I’m with the FBI! Give up!’ And he didn’t give up.”
During the oral history interview, there is a slight pause at this point and the listener can imagine McCall snorting in disgust.
“All this, you know, James Bond thing, that’s a bunch of baloney.”
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Still other Nisei, angered and hurt over their loss of rights as Americans, wouldn’t register and the United States duly filed draft-dodging charges against them. It was the FBI’s job, McCall said, to arrest these young men and bring them back. Once apprehended, many contested their arrests and bail bondsmen charged exorbitant sums. The young men, returning to their relocation camps with their parents, who had been forced to sell their businesses and property for pennies on the dollar, were often bitterly resentful. Then, when their parents urged their sons not to respond to draft summons, the government charged the parents with sedition. “This was the only thing I did in the FBI I thought was just wrong,” McCall said. “And many agents thought that. This was bad.” McCall met repeatedly with the parents who had urged their sons not to register. “I’d tell them, ‘You don’t have to talk to me at all. I’m with the FBI. If you do talk to me and tell me that you urged your son not to respond to the draft, I’ll have to arrest you for sedition. But if you just tell me you don’t want to talk to me about the subject and you want to keep your silence, then as far as I’m concerned, that’s it.’ And I never had any of them want to talk to me about the subject. I never made a case against them.“I think that that’s one of the sorriest chapters in the history of the United States. We called them ‘relocation centers’ but they were concentration camps.”
Some of them went on in and fought. One of our Baylor graduates in the law school, Takashi Kitoaka (LL.B. ’40), was wounded several times in Italy and was one of many [Nisei] who made a tremendous record for themselves. They probably had a higher rate of casualties than any military body the United States.”
“They were, in effect, prisoners there,” McCall said, “with military guards around them. Still, the U.S. government would draft the young men when they got to be 18. They had to register for the draft, then [the U.S. would] call them up.
McCall later told Turner that he actually felt sorry for the robber and hated to see him killed — mainly, though, because of the arduous task of dragging the dead body back down the mountain. In Abner McCall: One Man’s Journey, McCall told his friend Angus McSwain that he spent months writing reports on the incident — mostly trying to justify why he had not also recovered the robber’s pistol at the same time in the cold, deep stream. “Apparently,” Dawson noted wryly, “the bureau was worried less about the fact that McCall had been in danger of being killed by the bank robber than it was about the loss of the robber’s pistol.”**
While McCall later said that his experience in the FBI was mostly positive, one aspect of his job clearly troubled him ... to the point that it helped hasten his departure from the bureau at war’s end. Like many agents, he was assigned to work cases related to the Nisei, a term used to describe Japanese Americans, some of whom who had been in the United States for several generations. From Salt Lake City, he dealt with the massive “relocation center” in the desert near Delta, Utah. These featured hastily constructed, badly built barracks, un-airconditioned and often dangerous, where thousands of these American citizens were cosigned.
The robber darted back into the heavy brush. McCall, still desperately holding on to the vine, dropped his shotgun and pulled his .38 revolver. The bank robber ducked behind a small ridge and opened fire. McCall was literally dangling by one arm and dangerously exposed — but managed to return fire. “If he’d have known how to shoot, he’d have shot me off the side of the mountain,” McCall said. “But he’d ‘pluck,’ which you don’t do when you’re shooting. That’s what the cowboys do in the movies — they pluck down. If you’re going to shoot a pistol or a revolver, you level it up and squeeze it; you don’t pluck it. He was hitting all around me, but he wasn’t hitting me. “The guide was forty or fifty yards behind me. He found a place where he could lean against a tree, level his rifle, and shoot. About the third or fourth time that fellow stuck his head up, [the guide] shot him in the head and knocked him back into the stream. “It was a pretty good-sized mountain stream, swift and deep. I jumped in and got [the body] and pulled him against the bank and we finally got him out of the water. It took us quite a while to get him back down the mountain.”
** Anne, Bette, and Kathleen, McCall’s three daughters, are convinced that the missing item from the deceased bank robber was not his handgun but a hand-made camouflage survival vest with many pockets. Kathleen said she vividly remembers her father’s stories, saying that Hoover particularly wanted the blood and gore-damaged vest as an FBI “trophy.” They concede that it is possible that it may be that the pistol and the vest were lost together. Bette admits, however, that her father had an “steel-trap” memory. The oral history interviews at Baylor took place from 1972 to 1994.
It was in Phoenix that one of McCall’s most frustrating experiences in the FBI occurred. As the officer on duty, he received a call from nearby Glendale. The voice was barely a whisper: “I’m in the back of the bank. There is a fellow up front robbing the bank. Can you get out here?”
McCall sprang into action. He ran to the vault at the bureau’s office, grabbed a shotgun (“I always liked to carry a shotgun. I didn’t have much faith in a machine-gun or a rifle, but a shotgun intimidates people and you can’t hardly miss people with it.”) and a box of .00 shells and headed to the door. But before he could leave, the man assigned to the vault — McCall described him a “super-janitor” — grabbed McCall by the arm. “Wait a minute,” the super-janitor said. “Sign“There’sout.” a guy in there robbing the bank!” McCall shouted. “I can’t let any firearm out of here without you signing for it.”
*** Their father also told Anne, Bette, Dick, and Kathleen a story about another German POW camp in Arizona where the prisoners quietly circulated a forbidden map of the state, showing the course of the Gila River. “They assumed that if they escaped, they could reach the river, find wood to build a raft, and float into Mexico — from whose coast they could be picked up by a German submarine. Imagine their chagrin in discovering that the Gila River was only a dry riverbed most of the time and totally devoid of any raft-building material. After several days in the blazing Arizona sun without drinking water, they were happy to be found and returned to the POW camp.”
After McCall scribbled down his name and turned to leave, the super-janitor stopped him again. “Put the serial number down on that thing.”
hile in Phoenix, one of McCall’s duties was to track escaped German prisoners of war from the massive camps in southern Arizona, including the famed Papago Park POW camp. In one particularly spectacular escape, nearly thirty German officers slipped out of Papago Park on Christmas night. McCall, whose family was back in Longview for the holidays, was the only officer on duty. It took the bureau forty days to eventually recapture all 30 of the escapees.***
It took McCall, whose eyesight was never good, “three or four minutes” to locate, read and write down the serial number. He again started for the door, but the super-janitor stopped him yet a third time. “Wait a minute, you got that box of shells,” the man said. “Sign out for that box of shells.” “And so by the time I get to Glendale,” McCall recalled, “the guy’s already robbed the bank and Fortunately,gone.”McCall and his fellow agents managed to catch the bank robber just a few miles out of town. Once the man was secured, McCall stormed into his supervisor’s office. “You need to have somebody in an emergency,” he shouted. “If somebody’s in the front door kicking the door down going to kill us all, he wouldn’t let us have a gun until we signed out and found the serial number and signed it out on that gun!”
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“I always liked to carry a shotgun. I didn’t have much faith in a machine-gun”
But after three and a half years, McCall had had enough. While he said he believed that the FBI’s efforts had been “essential” during World War II, he told his Baylor interviewers what he thought of Hoover’s “excessive zeal” and lamented how the bureau had ignored the civil rights of its citizens during the war, especially Japanese-Americans.“Ithinkmostofthe people in the FBI felt like that this job has got to be done,” McCall said. “But most of them, like me, when they got to looking back — and I had been going day and night, day and night, most of the time six and seven days a week — well, I was worn out.”
The FBI, however, had other ideas. The Oklahoma City bureau chief, who McCall said talked like the famously bombastic Gen. George Patton, called McCall into his office “The war’s not over,” the bureau chief raged. “We’re threatened just as much by Soviet Russia and the Communists today as we were with the Nazis when the war started. You need to stay in here. You are, in effect, deserting in battle.”
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t war’s end plus six months, McCall resigned from the bureau. “I found out I didn’t want to make a career out of the FBI,” McCall said. “My family hadn’t ever been with me in Oklahoma City, so I decided I was going home. I told them that I was going to go home and sit down for a while. I’d lived two out of every three weeks out of a suitcase somewhere.”
After the FBI, McCall eventually returned to Waco, became Dean of the Baylor School of Law and, eventually, President of the university. Interestingly, a quick scan through his published speeches and writings reveals scant few references to his tumultuous time as G-man. A
T
oward the end of 2019, three of McCall’s children, Bette Miller, Richard “Dick” McCall, and Kathleen Sigtenhorst gathered and, as they often do during family gatherings, memories and stories of their largerthan-life father came up. The fourth sibling, Anne Chroman, called in with her recollections as well. Bette said they all agreed their father virtually never spoke about his experiences in the FBI, save for his account of the shoot-out in the Pine Valley Mountains.
22 The Baylor Line
While McCall loved to tell stories of his days at the Masonic Home, he rarely mentioned the FBI. Perhaps it was because, Bette said, like many veterans, he “pretty much came home and wanted to get on with life and forget about it.” They wanted, she said, to “put it behind them.” It was, after all, an exceedingly tumultuous, sometimes dangerous, and always unpleasant life. Perhaps McCall’s reticence to speak about his activities may have been because the bureau had a code of confidentiality for former agents. But Bette said she thinks there may have been yet another reason. “He saw it as a detour from what he really wanted do,” she said. “He saw it as not the main track of his life. It was off on the side-rail somewhere that he had to do, because he wanted to do his duty to his country.”
The McCall children say their father kept in close contact with every child at the Masonic Home — most of whom went on to have extraordinary lives and careers of their own — and told countless stories about his days with his brothers in Fort Worth. But according to Bette, the family never met a single FBI agent who their father had worked with. “That old guy,” one of us said, “he don’t even know he’s Somebody.” And he truly Robertwas.
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“This story, with lots of colorful details and animated recounting, was a frequent bedtime story request from us children in later years,” Bette said. “My father invented a ‘bad guy’ named Low Louie Low Crouch and a sheriff named Sure-Shot Sam Shamburger to populate many of his tales. Shamburger’s name, by the way, was taken from a friend of his, Dr. William Shamburger, pastor of First Baptist Church of Tyler.”
F. Darden (’76) is a professor of journalism, public relations, and new media at Baylor. Obtaining housing in Salt Lake City was just as difficult for the young G-man and his family as San Diego had been. So in his few hours off, McCall once again went in search of a suitable apartment: “[My father] encountered a landlady who refused to rent to a couple with a baby. He began talking with her about the war, and at one point he quoted some lines from Lord Byron’s The Destruction of Sennacherib: The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea When the blue wave rolls nightly o’er deep Galilee. ‘I like a man who knows his Scripture!’ exclaimed the landlady and rented him the apartment.”
— Bette McCall Miller
Photos by Rebecca Chapman The Annual55thHall of Fame Awards Special O n February 15, 2020, the Baylor Family gathered to honor alumni who are continuing the legacy of exceptional performance through their life, work, and passions. The 55th Annual Hall of Fame Awards Banquet provided an opportunity to congratulate 10 individuals and a family who were nominated by Baylor Line Foundation supporters like you. These awards span a variety of disciplines and achievements. Proceeds from the evening went towards our Legacy Scholarship program that helps fifty students achieve their dreams of attending Baylor through over $100,000 of support. Join us in celebrating these deserving honorees. 24 The Baylor Line
J ohn Garland is the pastor of the San Antonio Mennonite Church in downtown San Antonio, which runs run a hospitality house that has hosted thousands of asylum-seekers from Central America and Central Africa over the past few years. He is the director of the Semillas, which does trauma-healing work on a small ranch outside of town with asylum-seeking families who have fled extreme violence. He is the recipient of Duke Divinity School’s Traditioned Innovation Award for the way the church community has expressed its Anabaptist theology into healing hospitality. His church is also the recipient of the Impact San Antonio award allowing its history building to be renovated into an Incubator space for peace and reconciliation non-profits. After graduating from Baylor in 2003, Garland became an Americorps volunteer on the Texas-Mexico border doing community development in Colonias near the river. He became the pastor of a small, Spanish-speaking Anabaptist church. Always as a bivocational pastor, Garland, over the last decade, started a vegetable farm, directed a public school nutrition program, and taught middle school science on the border. While at Baylor, Garland lived on the World Hunger Relief Farm. He married Abigail Morton (‘03), who is a high school principal in downtown San Antonio. They have two daughters, ages 7 and 9.
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John Garland (‘03)
Outstanding Young Alumni
Mason is the host of the Good God Project, a weekly audio and video conversation sponsored by Faith Commons. He is a frequent op-ed contributor to the Dallas Morning News on subjects of public interest that intersect religion, such as public education, race relations and predatory lending. He writes a monthly column on public theology for the Lakewood/East Dallas and Lake Highlands editions of the community news magazine The Advocate
George Mason Abner V. McCall Religious Liberty Award
He is the founder and president of Faith Commons, a multi-faith, multiethnic nonprofit organization committed to promoting the common good from a faith perspective.
At Wilshire, George birthed and directs a pastoral residency program that has become a model for other congregations nationwide since 2002. His book, Preparing the Pastors We Need: Reclaiming the Congregation’s Role in Training Clergy, was published in 2012. One of his passions is encouraging those whom God has called into vocational ministry.
Mason earned a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in 1978 from the University of Miami (Florida), where he was a quarterback on the football team. He holds both the Master of Divinity (‘82) and Doctor of Philosophy (‘87) degrees from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. His doctoral field of study was systematic theology, with a minor in philosophy of religion. His dissertation was “God’s Freedom as Faithfulness: A Critique of Juergen Moltmann’s Social Trinitarianism.”
Rev. Dr. George A. Mason has been senior pastor at Wilshire Baptist Church since August 1989. His three decades as pastor follow the pattern of his predecessor, Bruce McIver, who was pastor at Wilshire for 30 years.
A native of New York City, Mason has been married to his wife, Kim, since 1979. They have three children and six grandchildren. He enjoys all sports, including politics, but especially golf.
Mason is a nationally recognized faith leader, rooted in congregational life. He combines the prophetic and pastoral voices within and beyond the church. He has served in leadership roles with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Fellowship Southwest, New Baptist Covenant, Duke Divinity School, Perkins School of Theology, Faith Forward Dallas at Thanks-Giving Square and other local and global ecumenical and interfaith endeavors.
26 The Baylor Line
George W. Truett Distinguished Service Award
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T he Honorable Lyndon L. Olson, Jr., was appointed by President William J. Clinton as U.S. Ambassador to the Kingdom of Sweden and served from 1997-2001.
From 1979-87, Olson was Chairman and Member of the Texas State Board of Insurance. In 1982-83, he served as President of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. He is Vice Chairman of the Board of the Lyndon B. Johnson Foundation in Austin, a member of the Bernard & Audre Rapoport Foundation in Waco. From 1990-98, he was President and CEO of Travelers Insurance Holdings in New York. He presently serves as Chairman of the Board of the Scott & White Health Plan and is on the Board of the Baylor Scott & White Health Care System in Dallas. He has served as Chairman of the Meadows Foundation Mental Health Policy Institute, Texas Mental Health Association, the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association, the Texas Lyceum Association, the Texas Opera Theatre, and the Texas Arts Alliance. He presently serves as Secretary and a member of the Philosophical Society of Texas. Both the Texas Municipal League and the Texas Medical Association have conferred on Olson their Distinguished Public Official awards. He is an active member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Council of American Ambassadors. He is a recipient of the Gates of Jerusalem Award from the State of Israel, serves on the Board of the Jerusalem Foundation, and he was on the International Board of Advisors for the Institute for Social and Economic Policy in the Middle East at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is a Trustee of the American Scandinavian Foundation in New York City. In addition, Olson was named Swedish American of the Year in 2002 by His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. He has served as a member of the Presidential Commission on Public Diplomacy, appointed as a Democrat by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. A native of Waco and a former member of the Texas House of Representatives, Olson is a graduate of Baylor University and attended Baylor Law School. He is a past president of the University’s Alumni Association, has served on the Board of Visitors of its School of Business and School of Music, and was on the Board of Visitors of Yale University’s Music School. In 1999, he received Baylor University’s Distinguished Alumni Award and in 2002 its Price Daniel Distinguished Public Service Award. He currently serves as Trustee Emeritus of the Baylor College of Medicine. A cattle rancher and banker, Olson resides with his wife, Kay Woodward Olson, in Waco, where he serves as an Elder in the Central Presbyterian Church.
Lyndon L. Olson, Jr. (‘69)
Leslie has provided medical care to medicallyunderserved populations for over 30 years and is currently a Family Nurse Practitioner for the Family Health Center South 18th Street Clinic, where she has served for 18 years. Leslie and Sam Smith, are the parents of Porter Smith and Whitney Smith Luce. Whitney, a fifth generation Baylor Bear (’03 and MSW ’04) worked in adoption, medical social work, and bereavement services prior to teaching. She now serves as the Director of Field Education on the faculty of the Diana R. Garland School of Social Work at Baylor. Whitney is married to Brandon Luce (’02). They have three future Bears, Hayden, Hallie, and Durham.
Nathan Johnson Porter graduated from Baylor in 1953 and married Mary Francis (Fran) Booth, and the couple had three children, Becca, Leslie, and Joel. Fran attended Baylor but graduated from Georgia State and then graduated from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and was ordained to the ministry at Calvary Baptist Church in Waco. She was one of the first women in Texas to serve as a deacon and minister. Nathan earned masters and doctoral degrees from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and served the Home Mission Board, overseeing social ministries and leading efforts to address racism, hunger, and capital punishment. In addition, he was pastor of First Baptist Church Arkadelphia, Arkansas from 1973-1980.
T he Johnson-Porter-Smith-Luce family legacy at Baylor began with Jesse Breland Johnson, a Baylor graduate of the class of 1891. Dr. Jesse Breland Johnson married Jessie Clara Brown, whom he met at Baylor. Jessie Brown wrote dozens of letters to family and friends during her time at Baylor, most of which have been preserved in the Texas Collection. The Johnsons returned to Waco in 1899 where Jesse served as head of the Math Department for 30 years and Jessie chartered the Baylor Round Table. Dr. and Mrs. Johnson passed away in 1929, six weeks apart. The couple had 10 children, so it is no surprise they are a Baylor legacy family. Paul C. Porter graduated Baylor in 1915 and became a professor of Mathematics and dean of what was known as Baylor College. Porter was a math major and met his future wife Margaret as he visited the home of Dr. Johnson to study and learn from him. Margaret graduated in 1922 from Baylor and was the youngest child of Dr. Johnson. The couple married and had five children, Lillian, Margarita, Celeste, Paul, and Nathan. The Porters served as missionaries to Brazil for over 20 years. Dr. and Mrs. Porter’s youngest child, Nathan, continued the family legacy by attending Baylor after coming to the United States from Brazil by boat and hitchhiking through the United States to Waco.
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Leslie Porter Smith graduated from Baylor in 1978 and earned a Masters in Nursing from University of Texas at Arlington in 1986.
Dr. Joel Porter (’87) is a Baylor football legend, having played lineman and served as senior captain. He was drafted to play professional football, but pursued further education instead, earning his masters from Baylor’s School of Education in 1990 and his doctorate in 1997. He is currently Assistant Dean and Director of Undergraduate Advising for the School of Education at Baylor. He has offered leadership in the school for 21 years. He and his wife, Janet Tindall Porter (’86) have a daughter Josie, currently a Sophomore at Baylor, and a fifth generation Baylor Bear. Janet is a two-time recipient of the First Families Award, having been part of the 1992 Gilder/ Jackson/ Nesbitt First Family Award.
Herbert H. Reynolds Retired Faculty Award
E lizabeth Vardaman was a senior lecturer in business communications in the Hankamer School of Business in the 1980s and early 1990s. She became assistant director of the Honors Program in 1993 and was appointed an associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences in 1996.
An exchange professor in China and assistant director on various Baylor summer abroad programs in England in the 1980s and 90s, she traveled extensively with her husband, Dr. James Vardaman. She taught in the first Baylor in Maastricht program in The Netherlands. In 1999 she was given responsibility for building a national scholarship program to serve the University. One year later, she joined 20 faculty and staff from across the U.S. to charter the National Association of Fellowship Advisors (NAFA). She directed the first NAFA summer tour to universities across the British Isles and published articles in numerous NAFA and Baylor journals throughout her academic career. It was her privilege and honor to mentor students who wanted to maximize their education, discern their calling, and become change agents for good within their personal and professional communities. She also loved seeing Baylor students prevail in competitions for the Marshall, Fulbright, Goldwater, Truman, Schwarzman, and other national awards.
Elizabeth Vardaman (‘65)
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After 11 years on the trial court, Governor Rick Perry appointed her as justice on the Fifth District Court of Appeals sitting in Dallas. For 18 years, Justice Francis authored and participated in the writing of opinions in all types of cases appealed from trial courts in Texas. “Retiring” in January 2019, Justice Francis now sits as a visiting judge in trial courts throughout Texas. And, thanks to Governor Greg Abbott, she is one of 9 members of the Texas Board of Criminal Justice to oversee the operations of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and its 104 prison facilities, 122 probation departments, and the Windham School District that educates Texas prisoners. During her career, Justice Francis was elected by all Texas judges to chair the Judicial Section of the State Bar of Texas and the Texas Center for the Judiciary, an organization that provides all judicial education throughout the state for Texas’s 1400-plus judges. Justice Francis is board certified by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization in criminal law and criminal appellate law and has served on both the Criminal Appellate and Criminal Law Advisory Committees of the TBLS. She is a 1978 graduate of Baylor University and 1981 graduate of Baylor School of Law. While at Baylor, she was a Vice President and Pledge Trainer of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority and Vice President of Student Foundation. Justice Francis was voted Baylor’s Outstanding Senior Woman in 1978. Justice Francis has two daughters, Meredith and Morgan. Meredith, 32, is a New York University Stern Business School graduate and lives in New York City. Morgan, 30, a University of Alabama graduate, recently received her master’s degree from Southern Methodist University and teaches 4th grade math and science at Wallace Elementary School in Dallas.
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Molly FrancisMeredith(‘78,J.D. ’81)
Price Daniel Distinguished Public Service Award J ustice Molly Meredith Francis has been a Texas judge for 29 years and licensed Texas attorney for 39 years. Justice Francis was first elected to a Dallas County misdemeanor court, then appointed by Governor George W. Bush to a felony court.
After attending Baylor University for three years, Babs graduated from the University of Maryland with a Bachelor of Music Education in 1965. She owned and operated a travel agency from 1971 to 2008, specializing in group travel. Her first relative to become a graduate of Baylor University was Ralph Tharp, her maternal grandfather, in 1917. Other family members followed: Jackie ‘86, Kim ‘81, Julie ‘89, Sterling ‘13, Jenni ‘13, Katie ‘15, Jake ‘18, and Alayna ‘18. From 1985 to 2018, Baugh directed the SonShine Singers, a 120-voice choir with mission to nursing homes, as well as directing a group of 10 singers and dancers in Made-to-Order. She also has sung in the Woodland Baptist Church Sanctuary Choir, where she has served as a deacon and past chair of the Church Council and the Missions Committee. Baugh was a founding member, past chairman and Lifetime Board Member of Baptist Child & Family Services. Kevin Dinnin claims she is the “matriarch of BCFS”. She was past president of the Baylor University Development Council and of the Baylor University Alumni Association. Baugh has served on the boards of Visitors of Baylor University School of Music, the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, Coordinating Council of Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, New Baptist Covenant Steering Committee, Baptist Center for Ethics, B. H. Carroll Theological Seminary, and trustee of Mercer University. Baugh has been honored with some of the following awards: Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, Central Baptist Theological Seminary; Dr. Herbert H. Reynolds, James Huckins, Pat Neff; Burleson, Cane, Brooks, McCall President’s Medal; San Antonio Business Journal Volunteer Leadership and Woman of the Year; and Mercer Meritorious Service in 2019. Baugh is married to John Jarrett and has two daughters, Jackie Baugh Moore and Julie Baugh Cloud. She is “Honey” to six grandchildren — Sterling, Katie, Jake, Breck, Alexa Mae, and Clara; and one great grandchild, Asher.
Barbara “Babs” Baugh W.R. White Meritorious Service Award
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Alexander and Sandy’s son, Greg, is a NASA computer scientist, and his wife, Cathy, is a music teacher and therapist. They have two daughters, Caitlin Vincent, mother of Alexander’s great-grandson, Zeke, and Megan, University of North Texas student, and a son, Jesse, David Alexander’s-namesake. Alexander and his wonderful second wife, Virginia, were married in 2003, and Alexander inherited two very special children, Ron and Julie, their spouses, four grandchildren, and eventually ten great-grandchildren.
David Alexander (‘62) Distinguished Alumni Award
Alexander grew up on an oil field lease in White Oak. Following a highly-decorated four-sport career at White Oak High School, he attended Baylor on a football and track scholarship. He was part of Baylor’s first ever conference championship track teams in 1960 and 1962 while earning a Bachelor of Science in Alexandermath-physics.was selected to the Baylor Letterwinners’ Wall of Honor in 2005 due to “extraordinary recognition and honor brought to Baylor because of his space career and other lifetime achievements.”
As a NASA rocket scientist, Alexander was directly involved in the detailed planning and controlling of Apollo 11, which landed the first men on the moon and is still considered to be one of the top technical feats in history. His expertise was orbital rendezvous, the bringing together of space vehicles in space, and he was known as “Mr. Rendezvous” to coworkers and managers. He helped develop algorithms and plans for rendezvous around the moon and the earth. Most notably, he worked with the Apollo 11 crew, particularly Buzz Aldrin, to define the rendezvous plan to return from the lunar surface back to the orbiting Command-Service Module.He also supported the other Apollo missions from the Mission Control Center in Houston and was involved in the design and management of the Space Shuttle and Space Station. He ended his highly-awarded 32year NASA career in higher management. Shortly before retirement he was honored as Outstanding Citizen in the Johnson Space Center Community.
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In addition to his space and sports endeavors, he has been an amateur gospel quartet singer, a composer, and a poet. He is also an ordained Baptist deacon and was a Bible teacher and youth sports coach in earlier years. Because of advanced heart disease, Alexander was told in his mid-30s that he would be fortunate to live to age 50, but thanks to God’s grace, great doctors, and incredible advancements in technology, he turned 80 on November 22.
Sandy, Alexander’s first wife, was also a White Oak and Baylor graduate. She lost her battle with cancer in 2000. Their daughter, Milli Jacks, is a Baylor University and Baylor Law School graduate. Milli’s husband, David, is a Baptist pastor. Their son, David II, is a third generation Bear, as a current freshman, and their daughter, Laura, is a senior in high school.
D r. Leslie Appiah is an Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at The University of Colorado School of Medicine and Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology at Children’s Hospital Colorado. She serves as Division Chief of General Obstetrics and Gynecology in the department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Director of the Fertility Preservation and Reproductive Late Effects program at the University of Colorado Cancer Center and Children’s Hospital Colorado Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders. Dr. Appiah attended medical school at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and completed residency at Sinai Medical Center in Baltimore. She subsequently completed a research fellowship in reproductive genetics and clinical fellowship in pediatric and adolescent gynecology at Texas Children’s Hospital, Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Appiah is a recent Clinical Reproductive Scientist Training Scholar through the National Institutes of Child Health and Disease and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. Dr. Appiah is well-published and speaks across the nation. She holds several national committee chairs in reproductive medicine and is co-founder of the Pediatric Initiative Network of the Oncofertility Consortium serving as chair for five years and is currently co-chair of the Adolescent and Young Adult Reproductive Late Effects Committee of the Oncofertility Consortium. Dr. Appiah’s clinical and research interests include fertility preservation in pediatric, adolescent and young adult patients with cancer, reproductive late effects in cancer survivorship, and hormone replacement therapy in the medically complex patient.
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Leslie Coker Appiah (‘96) Distinguished Alumni Award
Distinguished Alumni Award
R obert F. Darden is the author of two dozen books, including Nothing But Love in God’s Water, Volumes I & II and People Get Ready! A New History of Black Gospel Music. He is currently working on the definitive biography of gospel legend Andrae Crouch. He is the founder of Baylor’s Black Gospel Music Restoration Project, the world’s largest initiative to identify, acquire, and digitize the fast-vanishing vinyl of gospel music from gospel’s Golden Age. This project provides the gospel music for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture and the new PBS series The Black Church in America with Dr. Henry Louis Gates. At Baylor, Darden has been honored with the Cornelia Marschall Smith Award as Outstanding Professor (2011); Baylor University Diversity Award (2010); the Outstanding Research Professor, College of Arts & Sciences (2008); Outstanding Teaching Professor, College of Arts & Sciences (2018); and the Baylor Centennial Award (2008).
Darden’s articles and essays have appeared in publications ranging from the New York Times to the Oxford American. He has been featured in hundreds of radio and television programs, including Fresh Air with Terri Gross (NPR), 1A with Joshua Johnson, All Things Considered (NPR), CSPAN, BBC World Service, and others. Additionally, Darden spent 20 years as the Senior Editor for the Wittenburg Door and another 15 years as Gospel Music Editor for Billboard Magazine. In 2016, he created Shout! Black Gospel Music Moments for KWBU-FM Waco.
Darden is married to Dr. Mary Landon Darden, president of the education consulting firm Higher Education Innovation, Inc. The couple live in Waco and have three children (Daniel, Rachel and Van) and four grandchildren.
Robert F. Darden (’76)
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A native of Freeport, Texas, Lindsey earned his bachelor’s degree from Baylor University in 1992 and a graduate degree in sports management from the U.S. Sports Academy in 1994. Lindsey played guard on the Baylor basketball team for four seasons (1988-92), teaming with future NBA players David Wesley and Michael Williams to lead the Bears to the 1988 NCAA Tournament. He and his wife, Becky, have four children, Jacob, Matthew, Meredith and Jessica Claire.
D ennis Lindsey is entering his first season as executive vice president of basketball operations for the Utah Jazz, after serving seven seasons as the team’s general manager. In his new role he will oversee all of Jazz basketball operations. During his tenure as general manager, Lindsey added support staff to the team’s basketball operations department, implemented enhanced performance and analytics tracking systems, oversaw a remodel of Zions Bank Basketball Campus and led six drafts as the primary day-to-day contact for Jazz basketball operations while assembling a team that reached the Western Conference Semifinals in 2017. Lindsey also helped return NBA summer league basketball to Salt Lake City for the first time since 2008 by organizing and overseeing the Utah Jazz Summer League, a four-team, six-game event which has drawn more than 120,000 fans over the past six summers.
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Dennis D. Lindsey (‘92) Distinguished Alumni Award
Lindsey came to Salt Lake City after spending five seasons with San Antonio as the Spurs’ vice president and assistant general manager. During his tenure with San Antonio he was responsible for directing all of the team’s player personnel matters, leading all draft-related efforts, managing the Spurs’ professional, college and international scouting aspects and overseeing the team’s analytical department, as well as handling the day-to-day management of basketball operations including salary cap management and interfacing with the NBA, coaches, and player agents. Over his five seasons with San Antonio, the Spurs compiled a 271-123 (.688) regular season record, third-best in the NBA during that span. The Spurs won 50-plus games and advanced to the NBA Playoffs all five seasons, winning three Southwest Division titles, twice finishing with the best record in the Western Conference, and reaching two Western Conference Finals (2008,Prior2012).tojoining the Spurs, Lindsey spent 11 seasons with the Houston Rockets, serving as the team’s vice president of basketball operations and player personnel from 2002-2007. Lindsey originally joined the Rockets as video coordinator and scout in 1996, later serving as director of basketball development and then director of player personnel. Before joining the Rockets, Lindsey worked as an assistant coach at Fort Worth Southwest High School and Pensacola (FL) Junior College.
Spring 2020 37 We want to hear from you! Do you know outstanding alumni who should be honored at the Hall of Fame banquet in 2021? Nominations are now open at baylorline.com/nominate
Not everyone got on board with Coach Ryan arehowChampionsthethearound.however,oftheiractivitiesbevolleyballSometheSomededication.fordemandsMcGuyre’sgreaterdidn’tlikeintensity.wantedtooneofmanyinlife.Mosttheholdovers,cameJustaskplayerson2019Big12teamhismethodsworkingout.Family The StandardNew by Shehan Jeyarajah (’16) The Baylor Line
Spring 2020 39
“It was the firm belief that this is a program that could win a national championship — not just that it could, but it’s something that was expected,” said Katie Staiger, who was a redshirt sophomore when McGuyre arrived on campus. “That wasn’t even something that was being talked about. He came in right away and had that belief.”
D
Dream big.
ream big. This was Ryan McGuyre’s first and most important task when he took over as head coach of Baylor volleyball in 2015. McGuyre was thriving as an assistant coach at Florida State and helped the Seminoles become a Sweet 16 program. The 13-year head coach at Biola and California Baptist was fine being a career Division-I assistant. But when the Baylor job opened, he felt like GodThiscalled.housed a program that went 8-24 over the previous two years of Big 12 play and only had a handful of NCAA Tournament appearances to its name. This place was where home to 11-year head coach Jim Barnes, a universally beloved figure and the winningest coach in Baylor volleyball history, whom McGuyre would replace. This place didn’t provide the proper resources for practice. But as soon as McGuyre walked through the door of his new office in this place, he set expectation at the highest level.
But to understand how Baylor volleyball became the No. 1 program in America, how it reached a Final Four, how McGuyre’s prayers became premonitions, one must dig into the foundation. The concrete was poured with McGuyre’s first three months on campus. Right from the start, he was honest. Maybe too honest at times.
40 The Baylor Line
After evaluating his roster, he had one-on-one meetings with players. He admitted to several players that he wouldn’t have recruited them, but pointed to God’s sovereignty as why they both held responsibilities to make the most of it. “It was almost more exciting to me because I know it’s less about me and more about Him,” McGuyre said. His reassurance didn’t help much. Many of the meetings ended in tears. On the court, the transition was even more intense. Staiger deeply remembers how impossible the first few practices felt. She started 16 matches and finished second on the team in kills in 2014; still, nothing prepared her for this.
Student-athletes were limited to two hours of on-court instruction a week during the offseason. To try and install a new system and culture, McGuyre broke up the first weeks of practices into 20-minute increments to get everyone in the gym six days a week. He got the most out of those twenty minutes. On day one, McGuyre strolled into the gym and posted new benchmarks on the whiteboard, which he compiled by analyzing the top teams in America. Hit this many kills. Meet this side out percentage. Avoid this many errors. To be a nationally competitive program, McGuyre declared this the new standard. The first obstacle: serving speed. McGuyre brought out a radar gun for the first time to track it, and set expectations at 38 miles per hour. Players came up one by one, served as hard as possible and were dismayed to see speeds that barely even reached the lower 30s. “I mean it’s not funny, but it’s funny to laugh about it now — some of them were crying because it was so hard and so impossible to serve a ball at 38 miles per hour,” said assistant coach Sam Erger, who was director of operations under Barnes. “I mean, literal tears, ‘We can’t do McGuyre’sthis!’”most jarring change was to the pace of play. He pushed the setters to set a vastly faster ball for outside hitters — with often hilarious results. “I was genuinely like, well, I’m never going to get a kill again,” Staiger said. “People were whiffing, they were missing left and right. I remember at first being like, this is fun that we’re trying this, but there’s no chance that we’re ever going to be able to hit the ball at this speed.”
No matter how much Staiger tried, she just could not do it. One by one, her teammates hit the ball into the ring. Five minutes turned into 10 minutes turned into 20 turned into 40. Still, Staiger was the only one out there who couldn’t seem to hit the dang ball into the ring. She expected McGuyre to eventually just let her leave but he didn’t. “
I andaboutit’sknowlessmemoreaboutHim.”
42 The Baylor Line
The changes didn’t stop there. Baylor’s team was used to repeating many of the same drills working on fundamentals. McGuyre brought in a variety of new techniques to consistently challenge players. There was one drill that was especially odious for Staiger. McGuyre wanted the team to practice receiving serves. The players had to put a bean bag on their back to get low, receive a serve, and then bump it into a hoop to practice passing to a very specific spot. “The actual size of the hoop was maybe a few feet,” said Staiger, who now works in the Baylor athletic department and serves as color commentator during volleyball matches. “But if you asked me, it was two inches by two inches. The ball [felt] bigger than the hoop.”
Spring 2020 43 trust
All would say that volleyball was their top priority, but McGuyre laid it out: this is what prioritizing volleyball looks like in yourThelife.new standards were put to the test right away. During the spring, he learned that one of the new team rules was broken. It wasn’t just one player. It wasn’t two. Six players broke the rule. Most were upperclassmen. Many were starters. The broken rule was a relatively minor one that likely could have been handled in practice, or maybe even ignored. McGuyre held the team to a higher standard than that. Baylor was set to play in a four-match spring tournament in Dallas. McGuyre suspended all six players, much to the shock of his team. All six players traveled to Dallas, but stood on the sidelines as underclassmen played all four matches. “I was like, this could backfire,” McGuyre said. “This could really crash and burn. But there were six girls that had bought in and six who hadn’t. With those six players, we ended up beating good teams, some that we hadn’t beaten before. That was one of those phew moments.”
McGuyre’s first months were unquestionably intense. But while he broke them down on the court, he invested just as hard in his players off the court. “If you were to map out Ryan’s day, he would put all of his time into his team and his family,” Erger said. “He does not have a huge presence on social media. He’s probably not traveling as much as other schools do to recruit. He’s not showing as much ‘love’ to recruits. He’s spending time with the [players] he has here.”
S
taiger had to keep doing it. “A lot of us struggled with why he wanted us to do things, without seeing the big picture and seeing the end result,” said former middle blocker Shelly Stafford, who enrolled in the spring of 2015. “A lot of us were skeptical about why he cared so much about the little things but he knew they would make big things happen.”
After practice, McGuyre asked players to go around and describe three specific pieces from the session —their hero, their hardship, and their highlights — which encouraged them to open up in front of their sisters. He was intentional about the team spending time with each other and getting to know each other as people, not just as players. McGuyre was also intentional about building individual relationships with the players on the team, even when it was rocky. He spoke to girls about their faith and prioritized involvement in their personal lives. He constantly tried to remind players that in reality, God was their coach and the one in control. They could accomplish great things if they trusted the Lord. Several players got strong, specific encouragement from McGuyre. Staiger was told that he saw her as a potential AllAmerican player if she worked on specific things, which was not a way she ever thought of herself. Those tangible gestures helped. “I think at Baylor, so much of it is the faith aspect,” Staiger said. “These girls are bought into playing for something that is bigger than themselves. I always hear that people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. This whole coaching staff — led by [McGuyre] — really was the biggest advocate of us being a family.” That investment did come with more new standards. McGuyre brought the team together and asked them to collaboratively create a new set of team rules around a variety of life topics, including dating, diet, and sleeping. “He gave us some ownership in that aspect, but it was still new stuff that we didn’t really have to follow before,” said Adrien Weeks, who played for McGuyre her senior season. Some of the new rules weren’t popular, especially for those accustomed to attending college under a more lenient staff. the Lord
Five years after McGuyre arrived in Waco, the program is coming into its own. Baylor never had a first team All-American. Pressley, Stafford, and Lockin all made it. Baylor never had an AVCA National Player of the Year. Pressley won it. Baylor never won the Big 12 or made a Final Four. Check both boxes off the list. By every measure imaginable, Baylor volleyball is one of the elite programs in America. “It was the easiest season to broadcast because it was always like, ‘This has never been done before!’” Staiger said. “But [McGuyre] and his whole coaching staff, their mindset isn’t that we’ll be good for four to five years. Their mindset is always one degree better. I think okay, now we’re at the Final Four; genuinely, they want to win the national championship. They believe they have what it takes, and I think that’s the coolest thing ever.”
Spring 2020 45 that Baylor was different. She knew this volleyball team was different. And really, these were the moments that McGuyre’s new culture was put to the test. Instead of a single host showing Pressley how big the gym was or how sparkling the weight room is, everyone played a part. “I know from high school and club volleyball that not every is nice, not every team is going to have that true sisterhood,” Pressley said. “There are a lot of cliques on teams. [This] was the first team I ever saw on any level that didn’t have cliques. They were all involved in getting me to go there. People might think that’s most schools, but it’s not. Everyone was always involved, everyone was trying to establish a relationship. That’s just truly awesome to me.”
Pressley came to Waco as part of an impressive class, along with setter Hannah Lockin. Both immediately pushed their way into the starting lineup. By season’s end, both were All-Americans. Erger credits this year’s graduating senior class with being the foundation that dreamed of working towards national contention with this new standard guiding their way. Yossiana Pressley’s class has never missed an NCAA Tournament. All they know is success. And now, that class will be the winningest in program history.
That continued with the coaches as well. The pitch wasn’t about having good facilities or great professors — though Baylor has both of those things. It was about whether Pressley was a good fit for what McGuyre was trying to build in Waco. Where Pressley would end up in the rotation as a freshman was far less important than what her favorite type of ice cream was. And when she returned to Cypress, her mind was set. “When she came back, she said that was the place,” Stephenson said. “She loved the girls, the atmosphere, the coach. She felt like that was where she was supposed to be. A lot of people kept telling her she should go other places; she just stuck to her guns.”
Years ago, the staff would ask coaches to speak to high school recruits and were told the athletes were “too good for Baylor.” Now, Baylor is turning girls away in search of the right fits. But far more importantly, the program is built on a rock. Like McGuyre preached when he arrived, God is at the center, with interpersonal relationships second and volleyball third. The team isn’t obsessed with wins and losses. They’re focused on how to multiply the joy, replacing hype with substance. With that foundation in place, anything is possible at Baylor.
46 The Baylor Line
Shehan Jeyarajah (’16) is a staff writer at Dave Campbell’s Texas Football.
“W hat’s funny is I think that Baylor has seen a lot of success lately that are buying into that,” Erger said. “We’re not going to be on the phone all night, but if you come to Baylor, we’re family over everything, we’re going to develop you, you’re going to get better. I feel like a lot of coaches across the board are like that. Baylor is so unique, it’s such a niche, and Ryan almost leads the way in some of that.” Staiger eventually did successfully pass the ball into that pesky hoop by the way, many tears later. The next year, she became the first player in program history to make an All-American team, and finished her career No. 2 on the all-time kills list. All the players eventually hit 38 miles per hour on the radar gun; in fact, McGuyre had to encourage some of them to slow down their serves in 2019 after they exploded past the 50 mile per hour mark. “Coach was never someone who would say, ‘That’s good enough for today,’” Staiger said. “And I think a lot of coaches are not locked into their principles and what they need to be a championship. To me, it was always like, this guy is McGuyre’sserious.”principles turned Katie Staiger into an All-America. They made Yossiana Pressley the National Player of the Year. They turned Baylor from a Big 12 also-ran into a Final Four program. And now, five years later, McGuyre’s uncompromising faith and principles have Baylor volleyball on top of the volleyball world. “For him to have that mentality through thick and thin, it’s just awesome to me,” Pressley said. “I truly believe we can get there. As you can see from last year, we’re almost there. We learned that true dedication and true stewardship is going to be what makes this team. It’s going to help us get to places we’ve never been before — the next step is playing for a national championship.”
Spring 2020 47
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