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Alumni 150
 Charles C. Pixley
He only served in the position for four years, but Dr. Charles C. Pixley made a huge impact during his time as U.S. Army Surgeon General. When President Jimmy Carter appointed him to the post in 1977, Pixley immediately had to grapple with a severe shortage of doctors and the impending closure of three Army medical centers. But Pixley, who earned the MHA degree from Baylor in 1953, met the problems head-on. He personally traveled across the country to recruit doctors out of private practice, and he went before Congress to ask that the hospital closures be overturned. Dr. Frank Ledford, a
former Army surgeon general, said that Pixley "was one of the best-prepared and most effective surgeon generals we ever had."
A native of Oregon, Pixley earned the MD degree from the University of Oregon and specialized in orthopedic surgery before his assignment to San Antonio's Brooke Army Medical Center in 1950. During his three-year term there, he advanced from senior resident to chief resident in general surgery, all while pursuing his Baylor degree.
During the next two decades, Pixley moved often, serving at Fort Benning, Fort Sam Houston, and Fort Rucker. After his promotion to lieutenant colonel in 1961, he served as chief of the Medical Corps Branch in the Office of the Surgeon General and studied at the Air War College. From 1966 to 1967, he commanded the Sixty-eighth Medical Group in Vietnam.
Following a return from Asia, Pixley continued to advance. He was promoted to brigadier general in 1972 and major general in 1976, when he acted as superintendent of the Army Academy of Health Sciences. But it was his tenure as Army surgeon general that would define his military career. The surgeon general of the Army directs the six branches of the Army Medical Department: Medical Corps, Army Nurse Corps, Army Medical Specialist Corps, Medical Service Corps, Dental Corps, and Veterinary Corps.
The already overwhelming job was made particularly difficult in the aftermath of a divisive war. According to Ledford, Pixley reversed the damage Vietnam caused the Army Medical Department. He stopped the closure of the three medical centers, including his old home base at Brooke Army Medical Center. And his hands-on doctor recruitment efforts paid major dividends. "He gave the Army the largest graduate medical program in the United States," Ledford said.
Pixley retired from the Army in 1981 to become medical director of the Whittaker Corporation in Los Angeles. He died in January 2005.--Lisa Asher
David Hillis
In recent years, Dr. David Hillis has received a number of prestigious honors recognizing his groundbreaking work as an evolutionary biologist. Perhaps the most publicized came in 1999 when he was named a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow--commonly referred to as the MacArthur "genius" grant--and was subsequently profiled in a Texas Monthly feature story.
It's not too simple to say that Hillis's rise to scientific stardom began with a love for frogs and other slimy creatures when he was a boy. His curiosity and knowledge about the nature of life grew through his adolescence and the years he spent at Baylor, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1980.
He subsequently studied at the University of Kansas, earning two master's degrees and a PhD. "Ever since I was an undergraduate, I've been fascinated by the relationships and shared evolutionary history among all living organisms," Hillis told the Line in 2000. "I went into this field because I found it intellectually exciting."
Hillis's field, in turn, has benefited from his remarkable intellect. "Hillis has developed new molecular genetic analyses that contribute to our understanding of the history of life on earth," the MacArthur Foundation noted in designating him as a fellow. "He has shown that the relationships among species can be inferred from small differences in their DNA sequences, revealing both the order and timing of evolutionary processes." Hillis, whom colleagues describe as unassuming, is quick to credit his success to his parents, Dr. William D. Hillis '53 and Dr. Argye Briggs Hillis.
Today, the younger Hillis serves as the Alfred W. Roark Centennial Professor in the Section of Integrative Biology and directs the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at the University of Texas at Austin. His pioneering work in the study of the evolution of biotic diversity has also led to his serving as a principle investigator in the Assembling the Tree of Life project--an attempt by researchers across the country to develop an evolutionary tree for all life on Earth. This field of phylogenetics has become critical for identifying new diseases and their origins. Through its findings, scientists have made such breakthroughs as the more accurate prediction of the future evolution of such viruses as influenza and HIV, allowing appropriate vaccines to be developed in advance.
A member of the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology and the science board chair of the All Species Foundation, Hillis was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001. In 2008, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences--one of the highest honors given to a scientist or engineer in the United States. In addition, Hillis has published more than 150 scholarly articles and two technical books, and he has served as editor or associate editor of a dozen scientific journals.--Todd Copeland
 Jim Love
His body of work included birds, bears, flowers, and belly buttons. But Jim Love's artistic creations were more than whimsical bits of kitsch. The steel, bronze, and cloth sculptures--which are exhibited in major museums all over the world--were also reflections of the human condition. Love, said one art critic, "makes visible both our most egregious foibles and our most human aspirations."
Love was the first to admit that he came to art "sort of sideways." The Amarillo native served in occupied Japan with the U.S. Army in the aftermath of World War II and was discharged in 1948. He ended up at Baylor, he said, because his high school friends put his name down on their residence hall forms.
While at Baylor, he majored in business, but it wasn't until his last quarter that he signed up for an elective that would change his life. The class was theater professor Paul Baker's "Integration of Abilities," and Love was captivated by Baker's philosophies about both life and art. After graduating from Baylor in 1952, Love stayed in Waco to work with Baker, doing everything from construction work on the new theater building to scenic design for various plays.
Through Baker's many connections in the art world, Love got a job as a museum technician at Houston's Contemporary Arts Museum. There, he started creating his own designs, using as source material things he found in a Waco junkyard. While he didn't know it at the time, Love was on the cutting edge of a new artistic movement, known as "found art."
But it wasn't until a 1961 showing at New York's Museum of Modern Art that Love really made a splash. The exhibit was titled "Art of Assemblage," and Love's sixteen-inch piece Figure consisted of three rusty iron rods and a circular polishing brush. It seemed like an inauspicious New York debut, but that one sculpture was enough to get Love noticed and, eventually, embraced by the East Coast art world.
Love continued to show in both New York and Europe, but he remained a Texan to the end. He made his home in Houston, where he created large sculptures for Hobby Airport, Hermann Park, and the Alley Theatre. Many of his more than two hundred creations reside in permanent collections in Paris, New York, and galleries throughout Texas.
Love died unexpectedly in 2005, leaving a rich body of work behind. "The work of Jim Love," said a Houston museum director, "is an example of the power of contemporary art to change our perception of the world."--Lisa Asher
Virginia Beall Ball
In the 1940 Round-Up, the listing of activities for Virginia Beall is one of the longest of any senior. She was named to Who's Who, was the sophomore class secretary, played cornet in the Baylor orchestra, worked at both the Lariat (as women's sports editor) and the Round-Up, was an Alpha Omega, studied English under Dr. A. J. Armstrong, and was curator of the Browning Room. After graduation, she was, according to a Dallas News clipping, "possibly the only girl band director of a high school in Texas." She also worked in the Baylor public relations office for two years and later, according to the Baylor Century, in the personnel department for "Uncle Sam."
In 1952, already a widow, she married Ed Ball, who was the son of an industrialist and one of the original benefactors of Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Both with her husband and on her own, Virginia Beall Ball became a well-known and beloved philanthropist at two major universities, Baylor and Ball State. She received honorary doctorates from both as well as from two other colleges.
At Baylor, Ball endowed the Beall-Russell Lectures in the Humanities in 1982 to honor her mother, DeLouise McClelland Beall, and former dean of women Lily Russell. In 1994, to honor her parents, she established the Beall Poetry Festival, which brings poetic luminaries to Baylor to read from their work and present lectures. Establishing a poetry festival was completely Ball's idea, a former Baylor administrator said, and Baylor's festival has one of the largest endowments of any such event in the country.
At Ball State, the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry was created in 1999 through a gift from Ball. It provides professors and students a unique program for exploring connections among the arts, humanities, sciences, and technology. She served on the Ball State University Foundation and was involved with telecommunications students. Ball also served on the board of the National Wildlife Foundation and on the Indiana Commission on the Humanities, in addition to several other national and university-related boards. A pilot, she often flew her own plane and was a member of the Ninety-Nines, an international organization of women pilots.
When she died in 2003 at the age of eighty-four, friends at Baylor said she had "a brilliant mind and generosity of spirit." Those at Ball State extolled her "zest for life and sense of adventure," calling her a "ball of energy."--Meg Cullar
 Cliff Stricklin
Cliff Stricklin's desire for justice has always run strong. It guided him toward a career in law and prompted him to run for state district judge after learning that the presiding judge had reduced bail for a wealthy murder defendant. And for the last four years, that determination for justice to be served has established him as one of the nation’s top federal prosecutors in high-profile jury trials.
The son of Baptist minister Gil Stricklin '57 and Ann March Stricklin '58, Cliff grew up in a home where the boundary between right and wrong was clear. But, he has said, "There was never a time when I was taught about justice and sin when I wasn't also taught about grace, mercy, and forgiveness." He graduated from Baylor University in 1986 before earning a law degree from Washington and Lee University School of Law in 1991. He then served eight years as an assistant U.S. attorney with the Eastern District of Texas, where he initially handled drug-related cases before developing an aptitude for prosecuting public corruption and white-collar cases.
In 2000, Stricklin was elected as a state district judge in Dallas, where during four years he presided over more than 130 felony trials for crimes ranging from fraud and narcotics to capital murder. Though he lost his seat on the bench in 2004, that disappointment became the turning point toward what has become a remarkable, ascendant career as a federal prosecutor. He joined the U.S. Justice Department’s Enron Task Force, initially serving on the prosecution team for the Enron Broadband Services trial in Houston before becoming one of four federal prosecutors in the fraud and conspiracy trial of former Enron executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling in 2006. Stricklin took the lead role in jury selection and cross-examined a number of defense witnesses. Despite an army of attorneys for the defendants, who reportedly spent $70 million on their defense, the trial ended after four months with convictions on multiple counts.
Stricklin then jumped from one spotlight to another. Appointed first assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Colorado in August 2006, Stricklin was put in charge of a team of five prosecutors in the government's case--described as the largest insider trading criminal case in U.S. history--against former Qwest Communications CEO Joseph Nacchio. Employing a plan to keep things simple and boil jury-numbing accounting details down to their essence, Stricklin's team saw the trial end with success in April 2007, when Nacchio was found guilty on nineteen counts. "Once again, we have seen the best plan of a corporate bandit foiled by the dedication of investigators, prosecutors, and knowledgeable American juries," said Chip Burrus, FBI Assistant Director for the Criminal Investigative Division.
In 2006, Stricklin received the U.S. Attorney General's Award for Exceptional Service, the U.S. Department of Justice's highest award given by the Attorney General. The following year, he received the FBI Director's Award for Outstanding Criminal Investigation, the FBI’s highest investigative award given by the director. He has also been honored by the Texas Department of Public Safety, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the U.S. Customs Service, and IBM.--Todd Copeland
B. H. Carroll
Benajah Harvey Carroll, born in 1843, became one of the most influential men in Texas Baptist history. He entered Baylor at Independence in 1859, studied philosophy, and became a champion debater. Although he left weeks before graduation to fight for the Confederacy with the Texas Rangers, Baylor awarded him a BA degree. He later fought in the Confederate Army until he was wounded in 1864.
As a young person, Carroll was skeptical about religion. In a well-known presentation that was widely published, he said, "I doubted that [the Bible] was God's Book, that it was an inspired revelation of His will to man. I doubted miracles." But during a time of difficulty in his family and professional life, his mother convinced him to go to a Methodist camp meeting, where he was converted in 1865. A year later, he was ordained and licensed to preach. In 1870, he became pastor of the First Baptist Church of Waco, following Rufus Burleson. He was described as a "giant" of a preacher and a "man of heroic mold." He stood six-foot-four, weighed 250 pounds, and had a flowing white beard that extended nearly to his waist.
George W. Truett said of him, "As a preacher, he seemed to be in a class all to himself. The pulpit was his throne, and he occupied it like a king. . . . His preaching, often, was so irresistible that the stoutest sinners were convicted of their sins and were made to cry out to God for mercy."
Carroll was also a leading denominational leader, preaching at almost every meeting of the Southern Baptists for thirty years. He served on the Foreign Mission Board for many years and led the effort to consolidate regional Texas Baptist organizations into the Baptist General Convention of Texas. He also became famous in public debates and through columns he published in Baptist papers. Carroll was the author of thirty-three books, with his most influential work being the seventeen-volume An Interpretation of the English Bible. His collected sermons alone filled eighteen volumes.
Another large part of Carroll's legacy was as an educator. He began teaching at Baylor in 1872 and was on the Board of Trustees for fifteen years. In 1905, he convinced the board to begin the Baylor Seminary. Within a few years, leaders saw the wisdom of separating the two institutions, and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary was born, with Carroll as its first president. He served in that role until his death in 1914.--Meg Cullar
 Pat Neff
Around Waco, Pat Neff is principally remembered as the stern leader who, as Baylor's eighth president, doggedly led the university through the trials of the Great Depression and World War II. But before his fifteen-year tenure as president, Neff built a remarkable career in law and Texas politics that culminated in his serving as the state's governor.
Neff earned a bachelor's degree from Baylor in 1894 and continued his studies at the University of Texas, where he took a law degree in 1897. After earning a master's degree from Baylor in 1898, he began his law practice in Waco and was elected to the Texas House of Representatives. He served as speaker during the last two years of his three terms in the House (1899-1905)--the youngest in Texas history at that time.
Returning to McLennan County, he was elected county attorney in 1906 and held that position until 1912. Neff's remarkable oratorical and prosecutorial skills resulted in convictions of all but sixteen of the 422 defendants he faced.
In 1920, Neff launched an unlikely campaign for governor, lacking a manager and a headquarters. After visiting all 254 Texas counties to meet voters, he won the Democratic primary in a runoff against a former U.S. senator and then took the general election. During two terms in office, from 1921 to 1925, Neff pursued a reform agenda and, among other achievements, oversaw the creation of the state park system and the reorganization of the State Highway Department, laying the foundation for an extensive road-building program.
Neff championed the importance of education. "American civilization is the product of college culture," he said at a ceremony marking the establishment of Texas Tech University during his second term. "From scholastic halls came the leaders of thought who made this Republic possible."
Neff practiced what he preached. Alongside and following his political career, Neff served as chair of Baylor's Board of Trustees from 1903 until 1932, when he accepted an offer to become Baylor's president. Neff gradually brought his alma mater out of debt, increased enrollment from twelve hundred to four thousand, and doubled the size of Baylor's Waco and Dallas campuses. In 1940, Pat Neff Hall, Baylor's main administrative building, was dedicated in his honor.
Notoriously severe as a disciplinarian, especially concerning the "no smoking" policy, Neff fell out of step with the times when soldiers fresh from the war began attending Baylor on the G.I. Bill. After a series of controversial actions created tension with Baylor's trustees, the seventy-six-year-old Neff stepped down as president. In a farewell speech on December 18, 1947, Neff told Baylor students he "recognized the need for a new voice" and asked them to "remember me at my best."
In addition to serving Texas and Baylor, Neff also was president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas and the Southern Baptist Convention and grand master of the Masonic Grand Lodge of Texas. Neff died in 1952 at the age of eighty and was buried in Waco's Oakwood Cemetery.--Todd Copeland
Tom Smith
A national leader in the healthcare industry, C. Thomas Smith is often described as being ahead of his time. Best known for his twelve years (1991-2003) at the helm of Voluntary Hospitals of America (VHA), he led that alliance of nonprofit hospitals from the brink of irrelevancy to a thriving organization by emphasizing the improvement of patient safety--much earlier than when it became a national issue.
"The bottom line was, this was about saving lives. Tom really took the initiative to start a program where our members could go out and show measurable results," said Curt Nonomaque, Smith's successor at VHA, in Modern Healthcare magazine. "That's the way the country was going, and he was ahead of his time."
Smith's commitment to excellence revitalized VHA. During his tenure, the organization's membership grew from 700 to 2,200. When he began, the alliance was annually handling $4 billion in procurement, a number that he grew to $22 billion, according to Modern Healthcare. The healthcare business magazine ran a profile of Smith in 2006 when he was named to its prestigious Health Care Hall of Fame, selected by a panel of eminent hospital leaders. At the time, he was only the second Baylor graduate to be inducted.
A 1960 Baylor graduate, Smith said that he entered the healthcare industry--after two summers working at a hospital in his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas--because the profession offered a way to serve. "To me, this seemed the best of both worlds," Smith said. "It was a way of helping serve the community, but it also combined it with business, the intrigue of how to make organizations work."
Prior to his term at VHA, Smith was president and chief executive officer from 1977 to 1991 of Yale-New Haven Hospital and of Yale-New Haven Health Services Corporation, which are affiliated with the Yale University Schools of Medicine and Nursing. There he introduced one of the first diversity training programs in the country.
Prior to his time at New Haven, Smith served in administrative posts at several other health centers, including Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital and Memphis's Baptist Memorial Health Care Center. Smith has been president of the American Hospital Association, and he received that group's highest honor, the Distinguished Service Award, in 2003. In 2001, Modern Healthcare named him one of the twenty-five most influential healthcare leaders of the past twenty-five years.--Meg Cullar
 Hallie Earle
The grave of Dr. Harriet "Hallie”"Earle in Waco's Oakwood Cemetery is adorned with something simple but profound--a historical marker. Before her death in 1963, Earle would make history in many ways: she was the first woman to earn a medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine, she was the first licensed female physician in McLennan County, and for years she was the only official weather observer in Central Texas.
Hallie Earle was a rancher's daughter, but it was soon obvious that she would follow in the footsteps of both of her grandfathers, who were physicians. The Hewitt native chose to stay close to her Central Texas home. She graduated from Baylor in 1901, one of seven women in a class of seventeen. The next year, she earned the master of science degree from Baylor, which honored her by placing her master's thesis in the cornerstone of the new Carroll Science Hall.
After teaching school in Gainesville, Earle entered Baylor College of Medicine, where she earned the highest grade-point average in her class of six. After earning the MD degree in 1907, she did an obstetrics and gynecology internship at New York's Bellevue Hospital.
Following postgraduate work in Chicago and New Orleans, Earle returned to Texas to practice at the Torbett Sanitarium in Marlin. In 1915, Earle opened a private obstetrics and internal medicine practice in Waco, becoming the city's first female physician. True to her pioneering spirit, she opened her office in the Amicable Building, Waco's heralded "skyscraper." After more than thirty years in medicine, Earle retired to her family's ranch in 1948.
Soon after retiring, Earle pursued her second career in earnest. She had always been interested in her father's hobby of keeping weather records, something he had done since 1879. With more time on her hands, Earle continued her father's daily weather observations, eventually becoming the only official weather observer in the area. In 1960, the U.S. Weather Bureau presented her with the John Campanius Holm Award in recognition of her efforts.
Earle died in 1963 at the age of eighty-three.--Lisa Asher
Bob Simpson
For the last four years, Barron's magazine has included Bob Simpson in its annual list of the world's top-thirty corporate leaders. Standing side by side with the likes of Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs is an honor that Simpson, chair and chief executive officer of XTO Energy in Fort Worth, has come by honestly, working his way up through the oil and gas industry over the past three decades.
A Texas native who grew up in Cisco, Simpson earned a BS degree in accounting in 1970 and an MBA in 1971, both from Baylor University. After working in the bank auditing and tax departments of Arthur Andersen, he joined the Southland Royalty Company, a publicly held oil and gas company in Fort Worth. After first serving as tax manager, he held the position of vice president of finance and corporate development from 1979 to 1986.
Venturing out on his own after Southland was taken over in a hostile bid, Simpson co-founded Fort Worth-based Cross Timbers Oil Company in 1986, immediately taking on the duties of CEO and, since 1996, serving as chair. By the end of 1997, Simpson had guided Cross Timbers to an asset value in excess of $788 million.
When Cross Timbers became XTO Energy, Simpson simply found a bigger stage on which to perform. "We established the company with a vision of acquiring oil and gas production and hiring good people," he has said. "The vision is simple, and we have not changed it."
Still based in Fort Worth, XTO now stands as one of the nation's largest independent oil and natural gas companies. With natural gas forming more than 80 percent of its production, XTO has become a major producer in the Barnett Shale and Bakken Shale natural gas fields, located in north Texas and the Montana-North Dakota region, respectively, in addition to its holdings in New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and other states.
In its list of corporate leaders, Barron's praised Simpson for "outsmarting the majors." Indeed, savvy acquisitions and production techniques reflecting XTO's low-risk, high-return strategy for growth have been Simpson's signature in the industry. XTO has excelled at economically acquiring new reserves and extending the lives of declining gas and oil fields through smart drilling.
In one of its annual reports, the company summarized its business model: "Acquire the best long-lived producing properties. Make them better through increasing recovery and finding new reserves. Repeat."
Since going public in 1993, XTO has enjoyed a compound annual growth rate of about 30 percent, and its stock price has increased more than 6,800 percent. In September 2007, Fortune magazine ranked XTO twenty-fourth in its list of the "100 Fastest Growing Companies." And Simpson expects his company to continue succeeding, its growth fueled by more than $11 billion in assets acquired during the past three years.--Todd Copeland
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