Wednesday, July 11, 2007
By Tim Woods
Tribune-Herald staff writer
Friends and colleagues of retired Baylor University history professor and longtime Tribune-Herald columnist Ralph Lynn, who died early Tuesday morning, spent the day urging others to do Lynn a favor and not mourn his passing.
Not because they didn’t love the man — they did — but because they say it would be a disservice to all that Lynn strove to accomplish in his 97 years on earth.
“It is indeed a loss, but we gained so much from his long and productive life that it seems an act of ingratitude to mourn too deeply his passing,” said former student and close friend Stacy Cole, a retired history professor who frequently returned to Waco from California to visit Lynn.
Lynn was not feeling well and checked into the hospital Monday, said former Baylor history professor Jim Vardaman, a longtime friend. His doctor told him to go home and come back every day until he felt better, but Lynn asked to remain in the hospital, Vardaman said. He died about 1 a.m. Tuesday.
Cole said Lynn, who wrote a Tribune-Herald column as recently as June 13, was frequently misunderstood. Often, because his words were colored by exasperation with the human condition. However, Cole says, “It was only a prelude to a reaffirmation of the possibility for redemption and change that would elevate and inspire the best that was in us all.”
Vardaman knew Lynn since the late-1940s— Lynn was Vardaman’s Sunday School teacher at First Baptist Church in Waco— and agreed that Lynn was sometimes mislabeled a cynic.
“His eternal mantra was ‘I give up,’” Vardaman recalled Tuesday. “He would say it as though the world was all bad and we couldn’t do anything about it, but he fought against it with all he had. He smote ignorance, laziness and incompetence. Let me just say the world was a much better place because of Ralph... He was an idealist.”
Lynn was a sometimes controversial and polarizing figure in the community. Vardaman said Lynn was forbidden to teach Sunday school classes at First Baptist Curch of Waco for a short time until former Baylor president Herbert Reynolds, who agreed on very little with Lynn but shared a mutual respect, stepped in on Lynn’s behalf and insisted he be allowed to continue. Vardaman said that Lynn’s contrarian nature also earned him his share of foes, something the two frequently joked about.
“I was with him last week, taking food to Ralph and (his wife) Dorothy,” Vardaman said. “I asked him, ‘Ralph, have you had any rocks thrown through your windows lately?’ and he just laughed.”
Many who might have disagreed with Lynn, politically, religiously, or otherwise, nonetheless had great respect for him and his virtues. Cole recalled a meeting with former Waco mayor, state senator and Baylor regent David Sibley— with whom Cole says Lynn would likely have disagreed on any number of issues— and Sibley asked why Cole was in Waco.
“I responded that I was visiting Dr. Lynn,” Cole said. “‘Oh,’ he said, ‘he is a state treasure.’”
Lynn’s knowing laugh was familiar to his students who grew to love the history professor. Baylor journalism professor Bob Darden, editor of Lynn’s book “What a World!,” said Lynn was known to bang his head on the chalkboard and utter the catch-phrase, ‘what a world’ before laughing and encouraging his students to think for themselves and examine all angles in a given situation.
“He was a cold-eyed realist,” Darden said. “Every now and then he would draw a circle on the chalkboard and that’s where he would go to bang his head. You could tell how good the lecture was by how much chalk he had on his forehead after class.”
Waco native Robert Fulghum, author of the best-seller “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” wrote a foreword for Lynn’s book. His words show the esteem in which Lynn’s former students, now spread across the globe, hold their history professor.
“Whenever I meet fellow graduates of Baylor University in my travels, the same question always arises: Did you have a history course under Ralph Lynn?” Fulghum wrote. “If the answer is an enthusiastic yes, I know I am in for the exuberant kind of conversation that legendary teachers always inspire. He is an example of the educator who changes lives: a paradigm of the once-in-a-lifetime teacher.”
Students in Lynn’s classes became well-versed in “Lynn’s Laws,” a set of “isms” Lynn developed over the years through the course of his reading, experience and reflection. “Lynn’s Laws” urged his students not to blindly accept what they were told and what they read without challenging the merits.
“To believe greatly, it’s necessary to have doubted greatly” is how Darden says he interprets “Lynn’s Laws.” “Don’t make assumptions.”
“He just refused to look at things on the surface and accept the easy answers,” Darden added.
Born Sept. 20, 1909, in Oglesby, Texas, Lynn came to Waco as a child and worked at the Von Blon Book Store on Waco’s Franklin Avenue as a 14-year-old. He graduated from Waco High School in 1927 and from Baylor University with honors in 1932 with a religion degree.
After toiling through the Great Depression, Lynn returned to Baylor and earned his master’s degree in education in 1946, the same year he began teaching at the university. He left for a short time to get his doctorate in European History from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay in 1951 before coming back to teach at Baylor until his retirement in 1975.
And is the Baylor family ever thankful that he did.
The late Ann Miller, a Baylor English professor also beloved by students, wrote a piece about the impact Lynn had on his students over the years.
“Ralph Lynn demanded that students think for themselves, insisted they see religion as a lived experience, challenged them to give more than they had (and) dared them to be better than they were,” Miller wrote. “Scattered across the world are students ... who love him for the trial by fire to which he exposed them, for the vision he proffered, but mostly for himself alone.”
Realizing the futility of attempting to characterize Lynn with words, Miller concluded, “OK, Ralph Lynn can’t be put on paper! In his immortal words, I GIVE UP!”
Lynn is survived by his wife Dorothy and was preceded in death by wives Bessie Mae in 1992 and Barbara in 2000.
Funeral services will be held Friday at 11 a.m. at First Baptist Church of Waco, 500 Webster Ave.
twoods@wacotrib.com
757-5721
Comments
By Paige Ramsey-Palmer
Jul 18, 2007 2:03 PM | Link to this
It was 1965 ý I was a sophomore at Baylor. Ralph Lynn challenged everything I believed ý and treated serious subjects seemingly as a joke. I was quietly outraged. He would chuckle, lean down over his desk-edge perch, clap his big hands, and say, ýSister Ramsey, you just havta laugh ý otherwise youýll cry.ý Years later I understood. I now laugh at situations that arenýt really funny ý sometimes ridiculous and sad or just ironic. And so many times my response is the only possible one ý one that he used so often, ýWhat a world!ý I think fondly of Dr. Lynn ý and appreciate the understanding he gave me of my life.
What a world!
By Tommy Jacks
Jul 14, 2007 9:53 PM | Link to this
Like so many others -- young, white, Texan, Baptist -- I first encountered Dr. Lynn as a Baylor Freshman in History 103. He taught us much more than the rote history of the nations and periods we covered. He helped us to understand that knowing how to question is more important that learning how to answer. He streteched our minds. "Gather around mentally," he would implore us. And we did.
Not only did Dr. Lynn demand that we think our own thoughts, he insisted that we express them with clarity. He chided us for the overuse of such lame modifiers as "very," suggesting that we substitute "damn" for each "very" and then "censor" our papers before submitting them. (One contemporary of mine -- I beleive it was "Sister Torn" -- turned in a research paper sprinkled with "damns" and appended a note: "Dear Dr. Lynn: I'm damn sorry I didn't have time to censor this paper, but I've been damn busy lately.")
He was a reader all his life, and he introduced us to works we'd never otherwise have encountered. Invariably, the reading list was carefully chosen -- books that, like Dr. Lynn himself, made us look at their subjects from a fresh perspective.
"What a world!" he would exclaim, usually as a preface to the ritual banging of his head upon the chalkboard. What a world, indeed: a world that we were trained by Dr. Lynn to view with curious, questioning and, always, open minds. Even now, forty-odd years later, I have tried never to forget his many lessons.
Tommy Jacks
1968
By Conrad
Jul 14, 2007 6:34 PM | Link to this
Check this out:
www.baptistcovenantinfo.blogspot.com
By Sally Kilgore
Jul 13, 2007 11:34 PM | Link to this
How can I best honor dear Ralph Lynn? He introduced me to historical novels...an approach to our past that remains my favorite leisure reading.
But then, I would be remiss if I failed to honor his willingness to indulge in/with/for the great laughter in life. Those who had Ralph for a class will recall that he evaluated our knowledge/understanding of an historical novel he assigned with five questions. In one case, he had the definition of a word from the novel as a question worth twenty points. Not being a person with great curiosity about a given word, but rather one that attempted to go "with the flow" of the context, I was totally without ability to respond....Sooooo, I just invented a response....defining the word as follows (this was the 60s): "this term refers to a ratfink who would have the audacity to think that one word would provide some indication of my knowledge/learning from a text."....ok I can never be sure of what exactly I said...
The important thing was that Ralph thought my response was hilarious and gave me full credit. Years later he was always laughing at the fact that I had called him a "ratfink"....
Years later I can only thank him for having introduced me to historical novels, for having given me the ability to laugh at human failures, and for having given some modest hope that we can do better than those great men and women of the past.
Sally Kilgore
By Robert Heard
Jul 13, 2007 6:24 PM | Link to this
Another way to avoid accountability besides the passive voice is to adopt a fake name like Sinbad. Only an idiot would oppose planned parenthood, however he feels about abortion.
By Robert Heard
Jul 13, 2007 4:22 PM | Link to this
I already held two degrees from Baylor (a B,B,A,, 1951; JD -- LL.B. at the time ý 1955), when I left a lucrative practice of Admiralty Law in Houston, thinking I would become a college history professor. I took Lynn for five courses, as I remember, but may have monitored the last. Before that, I considered myself ahead of the game, 27 years old, two degrees, and having served as a Marine officer in Korea when the fighting still went on. Then, after reading into Sandburg's "Lincoln," I understood I didn't KNOW anything. I didnýt lead in my generation, I trailed in it. So I went back to school and found Lynn -- far and away the best teacher of my life.
To the poster above who said Lynn sounded to like a liberal to him, I proudly second that thought (the poster meant it derogatively). Lynn proved a humanist and an intellectual could be born and raised in one of the most backward and lip-strumming areas in America -- and could teach at Baylor, of all places.
Today, I am a professional writer (16 books) after 40 years working for four newspapers and 14 years with the Associated Press (in Los Angeles, Houston and Austin). Lynn started me down this road one day in 1958, when, in the Tidwell Bible Building, he turned to a green chalkboard and said, "Use the active voice," and he wrote on the board, "Men do things; events overwhelm men." He used "men" in the generic sense, meaning men and women.
Many writers think they follow that admonition (every writing teacher talks about it), but they don't. One can find numerous passive verbs (especially "was" and "were") in otherwise distinguished publications such as The New Yorker magazine.
I confess it took me several years to make Lynn's advice automatic in my writing. You think you're following it, then suddenly discover you have lapsed into bad habits. I liken it to a time in my early 50s (I'm 77 now) when I suffered back problems and learned with astonishment from a physical therapist that I failed to walk properly the first time (she did not embarrass me by saying that straight out but allowed me to figure it out on my own). Walking with my Dalmatian (my third now) along Austin's Town Lake trails (soon to be renamed Lady Bird Lake, I think) then and now is my main exercise. I learned to walk in an exaggerated military fashion: chin in, chest out, stomach in, hips forward, arms at 90 degree angles at the elbows. But it took me a long time to make that automatic, too. I'd do it correctly for a few hundred yards, then discover I slumped again. Now I have learned to do it automatically. No more back problems.
Editors commonly advise reporters to tell stories the way they would tell their mothers. That's some of the worst advice you can give a writer. When you tell your mother, you can use gestures, your eyes and voice modification. You can't do any of that on a sheet of paper. You'd better use active verbs, or the reader will quit you and watch TV. Some people do not use active verbs on purpose, because active verbs often assign responsibility, and that's the last thing they want to do. Ronald Reagan: "Mistakes were made." That leaves us wondering who made them. He didn't want to say, so he chose the passive voice to avoid assigning responsibility.
As you write, often you can feel a passive verb coming down the line before you get to it. You should stop right there and ask yourself, "Can I turn this sentence around and use an active verb? Usually, you can. Sometimes when you consult a thesaurus, you not only will find a really good active verb, it will make your sentence come closer to what you intended to convey.
I owe all this and more to Ralph Lynn.
Robert Heard
By Sinbad
Jul 13, 2007 8:07 AM | Link to this
To Mr. Ropoport:
Lynn, like you, funded Planned Parenthood. Sounds pretty liberal to me!
By Nan Jenkins, Class of 66
Jul 12, 2007 4:46 PM | Link to this
On the first day of class Dr. Lynn assigned a one page paper. The topic, in my words, was "Why did the Germans let Hitler do it?" I had no idea, had never thought about it, didn't have any idea where to find the answer. I wrote some blathering half-page nothingness that I'm sure he didn't read. But I never forgot the question, and have struggled with it ever since that day in 1962. I'm so glad that I got to a Baylor reunion and got to tell him what he had done to my life, and I got his answer to the question--finally! It only took 35 years! I'll miss knowing that he is there, but I'll always have his questions and curiosity living in me.
By Glenda Carley Foust
Jul 12, 2007 3:40 PM | Link to this
Dr. Lynn picked on me too in his fall 1958 European History class. Like Sisters Denham and Chafin, he poked fun at Sister Carley to make his point while entertaining the class. As a lifetime member of the Ralph Lynn Fan Club, I too will miss him.
He had a profound influence on my perspective regarding world events.
My husband and I will miss his annual Christmas letter he pecked out on his beat up old manual typewriter and signed, ýBear up nobly, Ralph Lynn.ý
Glenda Carley Foust
By Rick Hawks
Jul 12, 2007 2:36 PM | Link to this
What an giant in the world of thoughts. He taught me how to evaluate a book just by who published it. He also taught me not to take life too seriously. The world will miss his wit.
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