My Millsaps Story
They’re collecting individual histories at Millsaps. While I’ve written about it often, I have never tried to create a comprehensive story about my history there. Let’s see how this goes.
“Hey, Buddy? Do you want to see a ball game?”
My Millsaps story started earlier than most. Standing on the top of the hill in front of the old swimming pool, eating peanuts with my Father, Grandfather, and Eddie Collins, watching the purple and white take on somebody new, I was initiated into the world of Millsaps.
“When are they gonna fire the cannon, Daddy?”
“We gotta score first, Buddy. Calm down.”
“Are we gonna play Ole Miss?”
“Not this year, but we used to.” My grandfather answered.
Hungry people often don’t stop to consider whether they earned the destruction wrought upon them. Sherman’s army saved some of its most pronounced rancor for Mississippi. Jackson, our capitol, was left with few stones left atop one another. Mississippi burned like Jerusalem before Titus.
Although he had been a Confederate officer, Ruben Webster Millsaps regained his US citizenship. Considering the task of tearing down what was ruined in Mississippi and building something new, Millsaps realized part of the solution was a matter of business. Still a young man, his career became a matter of connecting what few sources of money there were with the people who had the vision, the hope, and the drive to rebuild Mississippi. Despite the many forces working against him, he was remarkably successful.
Twenty-five years after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, Millsaps had the idea to build an institution of higher learning in a state that was still deeply depressed and had few educational outlets. In a profoundly depressed state dominated by Baptists and Presbyterians, building a college by temperate Methodists seemed unlikely. Still, a person’s dream can be among the most powerful forces in the universe. A Depaw and Harvard Law graduate, Millsaps had a clear vision of what he wanted to accomplish.
Escaping the poverty and destruction brought on Scotland by the English, the Boyds, and the Campbells came to America just in time to endure the destruction of the Civil War. Arriving in Attala County, Mississippi, they began scratching at the earth in hopes of making a better future as small farmers.
Today, they call Hesterville, Mississippi, an “unincorporated community,” but at the turn of the last century, they just called it a town. Hesterville didn’t have a city hall or a courthouse, but it did have a store and a sawmill, both operated by my great-grandfather, a bearded man with one arm and a tremendous drive. He had no education but loved to read and expressed an abiding love of the Lord as a temperate Methodist. William Alexander “Cap” Campbell was determined that his progeny would be people of letters, a goal met at Millsaps College.
The most promising of the Campbell boys, Robert, succumbed to German mustard gas, driving an ambulance for the YMCA during World War I. The remaining boys, Alexander Boyd and James William, and the girls, Carolyn and Annie, left the bosom of their family for far off Jackson to become educated at Millsaps. At Millsaps, Annie met Ney Wingate, who became the parents of my cousin Robert, who was named after his uncle, who was buried in France.
Boyd Campbell left Millsaps to pursue a career in education in a still impoverished Mississippi. My grandfather used to say that Mississippi was so poor that, when the depression hit, nobody really noticed. First, a teacher, then a principal, then a superintendent; Boyd noticed that whenever schools in Mississippi needed supplies or furniture, they had to order it from Chicago and wait for it to arrive by train. Using money borrowed from his state-backed life insurance policy, Boyd and his brother Jim started Mississippi School Supply Company in Jackson, Mississippi, determined to provide schools in Mississippi with the goods they had been getting from other states.
As Missco grew, Boyd remained faithful to Millsaps. In those days, all of the powerful positions on the Board of Trustees were held by Methodist Ministers, by the college by-laws. Owing to his business experience and his connection with Mississippi banking, Boyd was named Treasurer of the Millsaps Board of Trustees, the highest position a layperson could attain.
Boyd died months before I was born, and my father was asked to take the open seat on the Millsaps Board of Trustees. By the time I was eight, the bylaws had changed, and he had been elected Chairman of the Board of Trustees at Millsaps, a position he held until the day he died, almost thirty years later.
My father wasn’t the type to be an absentee anything. As there were only so many hours in the day, that meant that he often combined time with his sons with time at Millsaps, and that’s how I was invited along for football games, basketball games, concerts, and lectures.
One of my closest childhood friends was the son of Ed Collins, the president of Millsaps. When Collins and Millsaps decided to go their separate ways, my mother pulled me aside to explain the situation to me and make sure I was okay with it and sensitive to the changes in my friend’s life.
Most of the Millsaps board felt like the school wasn’t living up to its potential. Dad, Bill Goodman, and Mike Sturdivant believed they should look for somebody with very different ideas about college to replace Collins.
One candidate was a young man from Memphis with curious social habits and the preposterous idea that a small school like Millsaps could copy the Harvard School of Business and be very successful. Some of the students and faculty didn’t take George Harmon's appointment and his idea for a business school very well. A cartoon in the Purple and White campus paper featured classics, arts, and letters students leaving the gates in tears while suit-and-tie MBA students entered to take their place.
One of Harmon’s most common critics was an absolutely fearless Political Science professor named Howard Bavender. Dr. Harmon never quite knew how to take Professor Bavender. Neither of them possessed what you could call “normal” social skills. Upon his retirement, Howard Bavender wrote that, in the long history of Millsaps, no one had ever made the lasting and beneficial impact George Harmon had on the college.
I have a cousin who won the Founders Medal at Millsaps, but I was no great scholar. Plagued with multiple learning disabilities, I dreamed of going to California and studying screenwriting and maybe working with some of the effects people I’d been corresponding with through the network left by Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. My mother entreated me to be reasonable. I was still struggling to read normally, and suffered through long periods of depression and isolation.
“Take some classes at Hinds.” She said. “Then let’s see how it goes at Millsaps.”
Part of having ADHD means that you’re anxious about EVERYTHING. It didn’t take much for my parents to make me afraid to go to California and comfortable about staying home and going to Millsaps. It’d be easy. I already knew where everything was. Much of the staff went to church with us at Galloway, and I could work, almost full time, for my dad to make walkin’ around money.
“Momma, there’s a building there named for Uncle Boyd. The letters are like three feet tall.”
“People loved your uncle Boyd.” She said, trying to assure me.
“Maybe, but I didn’t know him, and it’s gonna be weird. He’s been dead forever, and everybody gonna think it’s named for me.” I said, and it was weird. It’s still weird, but I’ve grown accustomed to it.
During my first week at Millsaps, I was determined that whatever partying I accomplished in high school, now that I was in college, I would be somebody different. I wore a coat and tie at work, so I wore them to class.
In those days, fraternity rush was the first week of school. So much of my family had gone to Millsaps that I was a legacy at all four houses. Pike and KA had the most people I knew from high school, so those were my choices.
One night Beau Butler asked me to commit to Pi Kappa Alpha. I told him they were one of my top choices, but I had one reservation. “There are guys here who I’ve done a lot of crazy shit with. I mean, a LOT of stuff. I’m trying to change how I lead my life. If I become a Pike, I’m afraid I’ll fall into those destructive habits again.”
Friday night, I stopped by my grandfather’s house. “I think I’m gonna be a KA.” I said. My grandfather had worn a KA Signet ring since 1930. He began to cry.
Saturday morning, I opened mail and drank coffee with my father and grandfather at six-thirty.
“What time do you pick up your bid, Buddy?” Daddy asked.
“Nine-thirty in the Dean’s office,” I said. Dean of Students Stuart Good would become one of my closest confidants and most reliable allies.
“Why don’t you put on some normal clothes?” my father said, referring to blue jeans and a T-shirt. I didn’t realize it, but he encouraged me to present myself more like a normal kid than the young businessman I was trying to be.
Sauntering down the sidewalk to the boy’s side of campus with my KA bid in hand, I was expecting the button-up types I met during rush. Instead, I met the great wazoo, a character played by Carter Stamm, a legendary creature in his own right. After consuming an obscene number of beers, smashing the cans on my head, and throwing up, mostly out of the window of Alan Overby’s car, I ended up asleep in the nook of an ancient live oak by the Chi Omega house, with the president of KA’s pet boa constrictor around my neck. Whatever behaviors I was trying to avoid by not joining Pi Kappa Alpha, I found them in Kappa Alpha Order.
There have been five great loves in my life, all five of whom graduated from Millsaps. They all married someone else, including the one who married me first. To everyone's surprise, one ended up crossing to the other realm before me.
Though I cut the lawns of all three sororities and did their heavy lifting and light carpentry, Chi Omega adopted me as one of the last “Owl Men.” That position ended up being a lifelong one. Even today, I watch over them and send them my love, even though the active members haven’t a clue who I am.
With his retirement in mind, George Harmon began his last furious push for new construction at Millsaps. It included a new administration complex, a bell tower, a new science building, remodeling of the student center, and the physical activities complex. Looking at the drawing and mock-up of his plans for a new campus, I said, “This is a lot of stuff, George.”
“Aint it, though?” He said.
My father died months before the opening of the Olin Science building. George’s envisioned projects rose out of the ground one by one. On the night that I won the Jim Livesay Service Award, we had the awards dinner in the newly opened student union. Delivering my acceptance remarks, I said, “I’m sure a lot of you are wondering what my late father would say about seeing me up here. I’m wondering what my late father would say if he saw a three-story tall marble water fountain in the middle of the student union.” Everybody laughed but George Harmon. I don’t think he was offended. I think he just didn’t get it. A natural athlete, George Harmon was one of the healthiest men I ever knew. His sudden illness and death shocked everyone.
It’s been forty-five years. We’re on our third president after George Harmon. A school the size of Millsaps, in a place like Mississippi, is constantly rediscovering and redefining itself. The process drives some people crazy because they think we’re constantly on the cusp of disaster. I’m sure it seems so. We’ve been on the cusp of disaster before, though. Millsaps was born in the disaster of the Civil War and an impoverished reconstruction in Mississippi. I’ve never let it bother me.
