|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Alumni 150
 Bill Logue
Judge Bill Logue spent forty-seven years as a judge in the McLennan
County Courthouse, and, when he retired in 1999, he was the
longest-serving state judge in Texas history. During his impressive
judicial career, Logue touched uncountable lives with a calm, reasoned,
and kind approach to justice. After his retirement, he continued to
fill the bench when called upon.
A graduate of Waco High School, Logue entered Baylor University in the
fall of 1941, just months before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Like
many of his classmates, he joined a military reserve unit. He was
called into action during his sophomore year and fought in the Battle
of the Bulge, where he was captured on December 17, 1944, by German
forces. He spent five months in a German prison camp, where he lost
forty pounds. After his liberation, he was hospitalized for pneumonia
and other ailments.
"I won't ever forget those months, if for nothing else than the deep
appreciation they gave me for the things I lost," Logue told the Baylor Line
in 1994, when he received the Distinguished Alumni Award. "Once you've
been deprived and denied your rights and freedom, it gives a real
insight when you're working behind the bench."
Logue returned to Baylor, graduating in 1947, and then graduated from
law school in 1949. He ran immediately for justice of the peace,
decided he liked the judiciary, and a few years later was elected as
McLennan County's youngest ever county judge. He successfully ran for
district judge in 1960 and became juvenile judge for the county in
1961.
In 1989, Logue was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and underwent
surgery at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. "An experience like
that keeps your priorities straight," he said.
Logue's list of accolades and awards—including Baylor Law School Lawyer
of the Year and Public Citizen of the Year from the National
Association of Social Workers—is too long for any publication. In 1992,
Waco's juvenile detention facility was renamed the Bill Logue Juvenile
Center. He held high-ranking positions on the Baptist General
Convention of Texas Executive Board and other Baptist organizations and
took on leadership posts with virtually every local and regional
service organization. He was also famous for his devotion to Baylor and
Baylor athletics and kept his judicial chambers decorated in green and
gold. Logue died in 2005.—Meg Cullar
Bentley Glass
Dr. Bentley Glass's work as a geneticist led to his becoming an
influential shaper of American public life in the decades after World
War II. Bold in exploring the relationship between science and ethics,
Glass was described in a 2005 New York Times
obituary as having "led a ubiquitous career as writer, scientific
policy maker, and theorizer, with provocative and often prescient
predictions about still-burning issues like genetics and nuclear war."
Glass studied science at Baylor University—earning bachelor's and
master's degrees in 1926 and 1929, respectively—and at the University
of Texas, where he completed a PhD in 1932. He served on the biology
faculty at Johns Hopkins University from 1947 to 1965, and it was there
that he made his name as a geneticist. He first studied Drosophila
(commonly called fruit flies) and then focused on human genetics,
including blood group polymorphisms, genetic drift among human
populations, and the effects of genetic mutation.
Glass wrote several books, including Genes and the Man in 1943 and Science and Ethical Values in 1965, along with hundreds of scientific articles and commentaries. He also served as the editor of the Quarterly Review of Biology
from 1958 to 1986. But his interests were too broad to keep him within
the bounds of academia. He frequently spoke out on issues of public
concern, ranging from the genetic effects of atomic radiation to the
genetic nature of race and the sexual revolution of the late 1960s.
During his career, Glass was president of several national
organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement
of Science (AAAS), the American Association of University Professors
(AAUP), and Phi Beta Kappa. He also served as chair of the Atomic
Energy Commission’s advisory committee for biology and medicine. As
chair of the AAUP's Special Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure
during the McCarthy era, he opposed loyalty oaths—driven in equal parts
by his long-held Baptist views and a commitment to academic freedom. As
pragmatic as he was ideological, from 1959 to 1965 Glass chaired the
Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, which revitalized the teaching of
high school biology in the U.S. and worldwide by producing a series of
new biology textbooks.
In 1965, Glass became academic vice president and distinguished
professor of biology at the State University of New York at Stony
Brook, where he remained until his retirement in 1976. Glass's awards
include several honorary doctorates—including one from Baylor—and the
Philip Hauge Abelson Award from the AAAS, which praised him for his
efforts "to improve the teaching of biology, increase the public's
understanding of science, and vigorously defend scientific freedom."—Todd Copeland
 Lori Elmore Baker
The picture on her website says it all—the brown-haired young woman
sporting a white lab coat is surrounded by human skulls. Yes, it's a
grizzly scene, but it's the work of Lori Elmore Baker, a forensic
anthropology professor at Baylor. And it's also her mission as she
painstakingly fits together forensic evidence to provide some final
answers to grieving families.
Baker grew up thinking she would be a missionary, but once she arrived
at Baylor University, her talents led her elsewhere. She earned a BA
from Baylor in 1993 and stayed to complete her master's degree in 1994.
It was the field and lab research she did with Baylor professors, she
has said, that kept her engaged in the study of anthropology and
ultimately led to her work in the field of mitochondrial DNA, which is
used in determining genetic material within bone fragments.
While working on her PhD at the University of Tennessee, Baker did
volunteer work in Central and South America, where she learned more
about the plight of illegal immigrants who die trying to cross the
Mexican border into the United States and who often go unidentified
because of their undocumented status. "This is a group of people who
are not receiving the type of attention that they deserve," she told a
reporter. At last, she was able to put together her past missionary
aspirations with her career as a forensic scientist.
After joining the Baylor faculty in 2002, Baker began to help identify
the bodies of migrant workers on a volunteer basis. Her husband, Erich
Baker—an assistant professor of computer science at Baylor—created a
database, dubbed Reuniting Families, that allows families of missing
immigrants to search the characteristics of bodies that have been
found. During the early stages of the program, Baker and her husband
funded most of the efforts themselves.
In 2005, Baker was awarded a contract with the Mexican government to
identify bodies of Mexican nationals found in Arizona. The opportunity
brought much-needed funding as well as media attention. She has been
featured on the National Geographic Channel and National Public Radio,
as well as in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and other national media outlets.
Baker's work has led to pioneering methods in DNA extraction, which she
hopes will mean gleaning more definitive information from even smaller
bone fragments. And while she tries to stay out of the politics of the
immigration debate, Baker is definite about her work. "Though they are
here illegally, they are still grieving and hurting," she says of the
families. "They shouldn't be deprived of knowing what happened to their
loved ones."—Lisa Asher
John Kane
Col. John R. Kane enrolled in Baylor University in 1924 with the
aspiration of becoming a doctor. But he almost didn't live to complete
his studies. On January 22, 1927, he was one of twelve survivors of the
"Immortal Ten" tragedy in Round Rock in which a train hit the
basketball team's bus and killed ten fellow students.
Kane joined the U. S. Army Air Corps four years after graduating from Baylor in 1928. Described in the book Low Level Mission
as a "rough, bruising, hulk of mustached Southerner with a square jaw
and icelike eyes," Kane earned a lasting place in military history on
August 1, 1943—the day of Operation Tidal Wave, a massive bombardment
of a complex of oil refineries at Ploesti, Romania, that supplied much
of Nazi Germany's oil.
The 2,700-mile mission began with almost two hundred B-24 Liberators
taking off from a base in Libya. Kane was commander of the
Ninety-eighth Bombardment Group, known as the Pyramidiers, which flew
as the third of five bomber groups that were to sweep over Ploesti's
refineries like a tidal wave. However, problems soon arose. The first
two groups became separated from the others in thick clouds and created
a sixty-mile gap within the formation. And when the first bomber group
arrived at Ploesti, it mistakenly struck the target assigned to Kane's
group—the Astra Romana refinery.
Kane's men approached their target in mid-afternoon, skimming the
treetops. Despite burning debris, exploding oil storage tanks and
delayed-action bombs, and a fully alerted enemy, the Pyramidiers never
wavered. Anti-aircraft fire and wing-destroying barrage-balloon cables
took down many planes. Kane's plane, the Hail Columbia, was struck repeatedly by anti-aircraft and machine gun fire but made it through the inferno.
In the end, the bombing raid inflicted a 50 percent destruction of the
Astra Romana refinery and heavy damage to three others, though those
achievements came at a great price. Of the forty-seven B-24s that Kane
led, eighteen were shot down in the attack, and only nine of the
Pyramidiers' planes returned safely to their base. In total, fifty-four
of the 178 planes that left on the raid were lost during what proved to
be the deadliest air battle in U.S. history.
Kane crash-landed in Cyprus after almost fourteen hours in the air. A
week later, for "conspicuous gallantry in action and intrepidity at the
risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty," he was awarded the
Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military honor. He also received
the Legion of Merit.
After the war, Kane held several stateside commands and, in 1947, was
assigned to the National War College at Washington, D.C., where he
served until his retirement in 1956. Late in life, Kane told historian
Michael Hill, "I still recall the smoke, fire, and B-24s going down
like it was yesterday. Even now, I get a lump in my throat when I think
about what we went through. I didn’t get the Medal of Honor. The
Ninety-eighth did." Kane died in 1996 and was buried at Arlington
National Cemetery.—Todd Copeland
 Lee Rutland Scarborough
After wandering into a Texas courtroom at the age of seventeen, Lee
Rutland Scarborough was determined to become a lawyer. He graduated
from Baylor University in 1892 and then studied law at Yale. But during
his time in New Haven, he decided instead to become a minister—much to
the relief of his mother, who had believed since his infancy that he
was called to the ministry.
Eventually, Scarborough was considered the leading Southern Baptist
evangelist and statesman of his time—a significant achievement since
his contemporaries included such denominational luminaries as George W.
Truett and Dr. B. H. Carroll. He was chair of evangelism at
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, leading the first department
of evangelism ever started at a seminary. Then he succeeded Carroll as
president of the seminary, serving from 1914 until 1942.
When Scarborough came to Baylor, his father required him to attend
First Baptist Church every Sunday to hear Carroll preach. Following his
father's instructions, Scarborough took no notes during the sermon but
afterward wrote a letter to his father recounting the sermon's
contents. "The first letters I wrote him were brief," Scarborough said
in a biography about Carroll. "I had to learn to learn." Eventually
Scarborough could virtually reproduce the sermons and considered the
exercise to be pivotal in his theological education.
After studying at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville,
Kentucky, he became the pastor of First Baptist Church of Cameron and
then of First Baptist Church of Abilene, where he served for seven
years. By that time, Carroll had founded Southwestern Baptist
Theological Seminary. In seeking a leader for the department of
evangelism, Carroll turned to Scarborough, who was well known for his
evangelistic skills. In 1908, Scarborough took over the so-called
"Chair of Fire" at the seminary. "Nothing could . . . have more
intimately designated and described the Christian activities of Dr.
Scarborough," said Truett. Scarborough also developed his own
curriculum, eventually authoring fourteen books—nine on evangelism.
Between Scarborough's thirtieth and sixtieth birthdays, he averaged
preaching more than five hundred times a year. And although his calling
was to convince people to open their hearts to Jesus, he was equally
successful in persuading them to open their wallets. He raised millions
of dollars for Baptist causes and established a strong financial base
for Southwestern Seminary. From 1919 to 1924 he directed the $75
Million Campaign for Southern Baptists and acquired pledges of more
than $90 million. In addition, he typically served in two or more
denominational leadership roles at a time, with stints as president of
the Baptist General Convention of Texas and the Southern Baptist
Convention and vice president of the Baptist World Alliance.
Scarborough died in 1945.—Meg Cullar
Faith Willard
Wyeth and Grace Willard certainly knew what they were doing when they
named their little girl Faith all those years ago. A 1954 Baylor
University graduate, Faith Willard has spent her life putting her faith
in God into practice, both at home and abroad. "We grew up in a
pastor's home and learned about helping others and trusting God,"
Willard told the Baylor Line in 1994.
The Willard family activism started with Wyeth, the founder of the
non-denominational Camp Good News in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, whose
mission is to teach children to be more accepting of differences. What
started as a $500, twenty-five-acre plot of land has grown into a
214-acre facility with a staff of ninety and a regular slate of summer
campers.
During the 1970s, Willard taught and ministered in Lebanon, where she
distributed ten thousand copies of scripture to Syrian soldiers. When
she moved into the camp administrator's role once occupied by her
father, she decided to add an international component to the curriculum
and give the campers a practical mission experience beyond their normal
frame of reference. She chose as her mission country Bangladesh, one of
the poorest nations in the world—and a predominantly Muslim country,
too. "That adds other problems when people realize we are Christians,
but God has always been able to work out the problems to his
satisfaction," Willard has explained.
In a little more than twenty years in Bangladesh, she has established a
ministry called the Widows Friend, an orphanage called Home of Joy, two
health-care clinics, a Home of Joy high school, the nation's first
school for the deaf, a hostel for unmarried working women, and a
mission/school/job skills training center called the Tongi Widow
Center. She has also become an advocate against the region's burgeoning
slavery rings involving children and women—two constituencies that are
particularly oppressed.
Willard continues to divide her time between the Middle East and Cape
Cod—where her campers help raise money and supplies for the missions in
Bangladesh. And, typically, she is happy to talk about her ministries
but reluctant to talk about herself. "I'm nothing special," she has
said. "I'm just an average Christian getting ready to meet my Lord."—Lisa Asher
 Al Stricklin
As a student at Baylor University, Al Stricklin played piano in a
dining hall in exchange for meals, taught private lessons, and joined a
jazz band called Unholy Three that played at weekly Knights of Columbus
dances in Waco. However, when the Great Depression deepened, the
Grandview native found himself unable to pay for college and left
Baylor in 1930. He taught school, played in some bands, and gave
lessons for the next few years to make ends meet.
Fortune smiled on Stricklin in 1935, when he was living in Fort Worth
and playing piano for a dance band. That's when Bob Wills, whom he had
met a few years earlier, offered him a job. Wills had recently formed
Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, and his band would go on to become
famous as the kings of Western swing in the decades ahead. But
Stricklin, who had never played in a western band, had no ideas about
fame; he just wanted a better paycheck.
Following the jazz tradition, Wills gave his musicians liberty to
improvise as he added his own fiddle and vocals—a style perfectly
suited for Stricklin. The band's recording of Wills's "New San Antonio
Rose" in 1940 was a major hit. "The words, with the music, were a
winning combination," Stricklin wrote in his memoir, My Years with Bob Wills. "Once on the market, they spread like a huge net across the nation, catching the hearts of the people."
The Texas Playboys released song after song and also went to Hollywood,
where they were featured in several "western musical" movies. From 1935
to 1941, during the band's glory years, Stricklin performed on 224
Wills recordings, establishing the style followed by later Wills
pianists. "Take Me Back to Tulsa" features one of his best-known piano
solos. Pearl Harbor, however, put an end to the good times. Like many
of his bandmates, Stricklin joined the war effort, working as a foreman
in a defense plant in Grand Prairie. After the war, he became a
salesman and settled down to family life, largely giving up music for
the next three decades.
But the ballad of Bob Wills had not reached its final verse. In 1973,
the aging band leader reunited Stricklin and several other original
members to record a final album, For the Last Time,
which won a Grammy Award. Wills died in 1975, but the band played on.
Renamed Bob Wills's Original Texas Playboys, Stricklin and his
bandmates stayed together another ten years, performing around the
country and being named Instrumental Group of the Year in 1977 by the
Country Music Association. In 1985, the Playboys were in the movie Places In The Heart, performing all the music except hymns.
Bob Wills was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1968, and
Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, including Stricklin, were inducted
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999, with Stricklin also being
inducted into the Western Swing Hall of Fame in 1990, four years after
his death.—Todd Copeland
Paul Kruse
Paul Kruse can't really think of a downside to his job as president and
CEO of Blue Bell Creameries in Brenham. "If I get depressed, I just eat
some ice cream," he says. "If you had to pick the ideal job, this is
it." Kruse took over the reins of the famous ice cream company in 2004,
following his uncle, who had followed his own brother (Paul Kruse's
father), who had followed his father (Paul Kruse's grandfather). In
other words, it's a family business. Founded in 1907, the company has
been run by a Kruse since 1919.
Following his father's advice to "get your own business," Paul Kruse
never intended to work at Blue Bell. He earned a degree in accounting
at Texas A&M, graduated from Baylor University's law school in
1980, and then returned to Brenham to open a small law practice. But
then, in 1986, his father convinced him to join Blue Bell as general
counsel.
Blue Bell has adopted a growth strategy that's slow, but sure. The
distribution was limited to towns around Brenham until 1960, when it
expanded to Houston. Now Blue Bell enjoys a 60 percent market share in
Houston. It's the number-three best-selling ice cream in the country,
even though it's only available in about 20 percent of the nation's
supermarkets. The company didn't expand beyond Texas until 1989.
One reason for that slow expansion pattern, Kruse says, is the quality
control Blue Bell exerts over its storage and delivery system. The
company handles the entire process, from mixing ingredients—or actually
making some of them, like the signature cookies of Cookies 'n' Cream—to
the product's placement in the freezer at your local grocery store. As
a result, Blue Bell only expands when it's ready to build a storage and
distribution facility in a new area. Today, Blue Bell is available in
Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas,
Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico, North Carolina,
Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.
Kruse says Blue Bell has achieved its big success by continuing to
think small. "We make cartons of ice cream one at a time," he says.
"And whoever gets that one, we need to exceed their expectations when
they got it. So we pay attention to every little thing we do."—Meg Cullar
 Thomas Stewart
With calm, quiet assurance, Thomas Stewart was able to be a cast of
thousands all by himself. During a storied operatic career, he
personified everyone from Falstaff to the Norse god Wotan. But no
matter what the role, the voice—a commanding baritone called one of the
"most beautiful and communicative" in opera—distinguished Stewart from
all the rest.
Once described by a music critic as "Texas-born, German-experienced,"
Stewart grew up in San Saba and entered Baylor University to study
electrical engineering. But once under the tutelage of two legendary
Baylor professors—voice professor Robert "Pop" Hopkins and theater
professor Paul Baker—Stewart found his true calling.
After graduating from Baylor in 1953, Stewart studied at New York's
Juilliard School of Music, where he met and married Evelyn Lear, who
would become a world-renowned soprano. But the couple struggled to find
success in New York, so they traveled to Europe in 1956, where both of
their careers thrived. Germans dubbed him a Wagnerian virtuoso—quite an
accomplishment for a Texan.
He sang with the Paris Opera, Covent Garden, and most of Europe's major
opera companies before returning to the U.S. in 1966, when he made his
debut with the Metropolitan Opera. In a Baylor Line
article from that year, Hugh Waddy '55 wrote of his trip to see Stewart
sing at the Met. "As excellent as his singing and musicianship were,
the most impressive feature to me was his dignity and assurance," wrote
Waddy, who added that Stewart credited Baylor's Dean Daniel Sternberg
for teaching the importance of self-assurance.
Stewart would eventually sing nearly two hundred performances at the
Met, in addition to appearing with many of the leading U.S. opera
houses. He also recorded most of the major operatic works, bringing the
rarified art form to a whole new audience.
Although he retired from performing in 2000, he continued to play an
integral role in the operatic world through the Evelyn Lear and Thomas
Stewart Emerging Singers Program in Washington, D.C., where Stewart and
Lear mentored hundreds of students in their specialized master classes
before his death in 2006. One reviewer said, "Tom and Evelyn sought to
develop the total package, and singers who have had the benefit of
their collective wisdom can count themselves fortunate."—Lisa Asher
Jan "Denny" Eakle
These days, retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Jan "Denny" Eakle is leading
the Pentagon's Tenth Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation
(QRMC)—a massive, multi-year review of total military compensation.
It's her most recent stop in a series of high-level military
assignments that go back to Baylor University, where she enlisted as a
cadet in the U.S. Air Force ROTC program in 1971. "My father was
absolutely adamant that no daughter of his would join the Navy," she
has said, noting that her father, a Navy carrier pilot, had made the
family live a peripatetic life during her childhood. "So I signed up
for Air Force ROTC and never looked back."
Eakle's forward-oriented focus guided her through her Baylor years,
during which she was commissioned in 1975 and entered active duty in
1976. After earning the BS and MS degrees in mathematics in 1975 and
1976, respectively, from Baylor, she added a PhD in operations research
from the University of Texas in 1982.
Over the following two decades, Eakle held a wide variety of positions,
moving back and forth from the Air Force's headquarters in Washington,
D.C., to bases around the country. Such assignments included assistant
executive to the Air Force's Chief of Staff and executive assistant to
the Commander in Chief and Chief of Staff in the headquarters of the
U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. She also
commanded the 3541st Recruiting Squadron at Lackland Air Force Base in
Texas; the 62nd Support Group at McChord Air Force Base in Washington;
and the 377th Air Base Wing at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico.
In addition, she spent a year as a national defense fellow at the
National Foreign Affairs Training Center in Arlington, Virginia.
In 2002, Eakle became vice commander of the Ogden Air Logistics Center
at Hill Air Force Base in Utah, where she helped manage programs worth
more than $6.2 billion through a work force of more than twenty
thousand personnel that provided worldwide management and maintenance
for the F-16, A-10, KC-135, and C-130 fleets, as well as
intercontinental ballistic missiles.
When she was made a brigadier general in 2002, Eakle become one of only
thirty-four female generals in the Air Force's history. Soon afterward,
in 2003, she became the deputy director of the Defense Finance and
Accounting Service (DFAS), run by the Office of the Under Secretary of
Defense in Arlington, Virginia. The DFAS is the world's largest finance
and accounting operation with annual responsibilities, at the time of
Eakle's service, of paying six million people, processing more than
twelve million contractor invoices, disbursing $416 billion a year, and
managing $194 billion in military trust funds.
Eakle's honors include the Defense Superior Service Medal, Legion of
Merit with two oak leaf clusters, Defense Meritorious Service Medal,
Meritorious Service Medal with two oak leaf clusters, and a National
Defense Service Medal.
Eakle retired from active military service in 2005 and became director
of the QRMC, which began in April 2006. Operating within the Department
of Defense, the QRMC is evaluating everything from salary levels and
incentives to the retirement system and could eventually result in a
fundamental shift in thinking on how the uniformed services pay members
and retirees. "I am passionate about the truth and doing the right
thing for the American people," Eakle has said, "whether that means
spending their tax dollars wisely or ensuring that I do the best I can
for their sons and daughters that they have entrusted to me."—Todd Copeland
|
|
|
