Bill Thomas, Director of Furman Chamber Choir
John Beckford, Professor of Music
Changing the Guard Furman will have lost almost two centuries’ worth of teaching experience when department giants Beckford, Thomas and Hicken retire this spring. BY RON WAGNER ’93
J
ohn Beckford was ready to accept a position as Furman’s first fulltime percussion instructor in 1976, but there was a problem. He solved it by playing some good old-fashioned hardball. “The salary seemed a little on the low side, and I tried to negotiate it up,” Beckford remembers with a laugh. “And they met me halfway.” Fresh off earning a Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of Iowa and facing a job market with a grand total of eight open positions for full-time college percussion instructors nationwide, Beckford was blissfully unaware of just how spectacularly he may have been overplaying his hand. But Furman agreed to an extra $250 – a year – to secure his move south, and that investment has paid off handsomely in the form of someone who played a huge role in building the top-notch music department Gordon Blackwell ’60 envisioned when he returned
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to lead his alma mater after six years as the president of Florida State University. Now, 43 years later, Beckford is retiring at the end of the academic year. So are fellow music faculty members Bill Thomas and Les Hicken, 12 months after Ruby Morgan and Bruce Schoonmaker also departed, taking with them 190 years of combined teaching experience in the Furman music department. That’s quite a hit. Chair Mark Britt knows the Daniel Music Building halls will never be the same. “In many ways we’ll feel the impact for years to come,” he says. “I don’t know if you could look at any single thing that’s most difficult to replace, but they’ve helped shape the department. We owe it to them to do our best to keep it moving in the right direction.” Legendary Professor of Piano Morgan was at Furman for 50 years, while Schoonmaker taught voice for 41. Thomas,
the department chair for 17 years, is in his 30th year, while Hicken’s 26 years qualifies him as the greenhorn of the bunch. Beckford’s tenure included a stint as vice president for Academic Affairs and dean. That’s quite a long way from starting out as the assistant marching band director and overseeing record collection, among many other things, but he returned to the classroom in 2016 after eight years as dean. A story about how he prepared for a job in administration explains why. One of his former students, David Belcher ’79, had risen to the ranks of provost at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and Beckford reached out for advice. Belcher was “so generous with how he reviewed my application materials, helped me strategize, warned me of the pros and cons of what administration life was really all about,” Beckford remembers before his eyes fill with tears as he recounts Belcher’s death from brain cancer in June.
