Monday, November 26, 2007 | by nathan

How My Dad Went to College

My dad and my grandmother, Clara Mae, in the late 1970’s.

My dad was born and raised in Hackett, Arkansas, a small burg twenty miles south of Ft. Smith, in 1935. His family were hard-working farmers. He graduated high school in 1953 and late that summer was hanging out in town with his best friend. Bereft of anything better to do, they decided they’d sneak in the back of the high school gymnasium and hear the principal’s yearly address to the student body. They had, after all, heard it every year for over a decade. "Why don’t we see if it’s changed at all?" they asked themselves.

It hadn’t, of course, and the two found themselves almost able to recite the thing verbatim. As the speech wound down, the principal pointed at the two of them in the back of the gymnasium and said, "I want to see you two in my office right now."

Thinking themselves caught and in trouble, they proceeded to the principal’s office, where they expected a lecture on finding better things to do with their time than intrude on the assemblies of a school they no longer attended.

Instead, the principal looked at them and said, "If I could get the two of you into college, all expenses paid except your own personal spending money, would you go?"

They looked at one another and thought, "Ah, what the hell?" So they said yes.

"Okay," said the principal. "Go home and pack. You need to be back here by 5 p.m."

Dad and his friend raced to their own homes. Dad started to tell his mother, Clara, about the proposition. She handed him a cardboard suitcase packed with all his best clothes and all the money she had. She already knew of the plan; the principal had been to see her.

The principal, it turned out, had a contact at the College of the Ozarks, and was able to wrangle a spot in the freshman class for the two of them. Clara waved goodbye to her son and dad and his friend were back in town by 5 p.m., as per their principal’s orders.

So that was how my dad got to go to college. He didn’t wake up that morning expecting anything of the sort.

He went on to study chemistry, and to earn a master’s degree in nuclear physics at Vanderbilt and his Ph.D. at Arkansas. He taught at a small college in southwestern Oklahoma for 30 years, which is where he met my mother, which is how I came to be.

He was one of the greatest lecturers ever there was. His voice could be heard echoing down the halls, and he engaged people with the subject matter in a way that few people could. He advised pre-pharmacy freshmen, of which there were many, and I was often told by his students how much they enjoyed his class.

There’s currently a scholarship in his name for freshman chemistry students at that university. One of my long-term financial goals is to permanently endow that fund, so that the legacy of his teaching can remain there for as long as that institution stands.

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