Selected Reminiscences

I was one of the very earliest employees of UT Dallas, nee The Southwest Center for Advanced Studies (SCAS). In my time, we moved from the 3rd Floor of Fondren Library on the SMU Campus to the large, wonderful, new quarters that are today called the Founders Building. The Founders Building was not "one of the earliest structures," it was THE earliest and stood for quite some time alone under the sun, the rain and sometimes snow, surrounded by swaying fields of corn and other grains along with horses and cows ... lots of cows. Coming out from SMU to what is now UTD seemed almost like a day trip to Oklahoma! During my two-year stay there, I worked under David Canham who worked, in turn, under Dr. [Lloyd] Berkner. Those were exciting times with scientists and grad students assembling measurement packets that went into space and deep under the sea. My job as a grant property accountability person was awful ... my expensive property and parts inventory kept disappearing into the aforementioned depths and heights! There may well be others whose time with SCAS and UTD goes further back than my own. If not and there is some interest in hearing from an aging early denizen of the UT Dallas campus, please feel free to contact me. Some of my early memories of the first days that science was being pursued there and Texas' production of students with higher learning degrees was being stimulated might prove interesting ... or not!

Bob Horton
Southwest Center for Advanced Studies employee

[When we arrived] there wasn't even a hint of a campus here at that time. [Berkner] was barely finished by that time. I was the first one to move into it. The construction people weren't out of the building yet when I moved in.  Dr. Berkner had the idea that [me moving in] would hurry them along to see that we were starting to occupy the building. I don't think it made any difference, but still, it was the thought behind that...It's a pleasure...and astounding to see the beautiful campus that's emerging.

Dr. Francis S. "Frank" Johnson
Interim president of UT Dallas when the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies was donated to the State of Texas in 1969

I came to UTD with Dr. Jordan in July 1971. [The logo came about]...shortly after we got there, before fall. We were in Bryce Jordan's office...He doodles and was doodling a UTD combination. He did UT/D with a box around it. For colors, he said orange (not burnt) and white. I said green. He said why, I said because I liked it. Thus it is!

Donna Beth McCormick
Assistant to former president Dr. Bryce Jordan
Dr. Jordan was the first president of UT Dallas (1971 to 1981)

And UTD has seen me grow from a 19 year old recent high school graduate to a wife, mother, and proud UTD alumnae (Class of 1994, 3 hours at a time) with almost 40 years of service, most of it in the McDermott Library. I have been privileged to have met all of our presidents and to have worked with some very dedicated people.

In the early 70s we were so small that when the administration decided we needed a bookstore to provide for our 12 students, they put a bookcase in the Supply Room (now Central Stores) and we sold books and school supplies in the basement of Founders. My job in the Library has allowed me personal contact with many of our faculty, staff and students over the years and I am constantly amazed at how serious and committed they are. Only at UTD would a student name a fossil after you!!

When people used to ask me where I worked the usual response was "what's that?" now it's "wow, how cool" . . . how cool indeed. Congratulations UTD on 40 years of excellence.

Vicki Bullock
Head of Interlibrary Loan Services, McDermott Library

BJ [Dr. Bryce Jordan, former president] had to survey the land - in the car - over the field.  At that time, Founders was in the middle of a field, and the field was plowed and farmed.  I looked out one day and he was bouncing across the field - in the new car.  Well, we had a little undercarriage problem, but I never told the Ford place what happened!

Donna Beth McCormick
Assistant to former president Dr. Bryce Jordan

When UTD opened its doors to undergraduates in the mid-seventies, I transferred my credits from Eastfield Community College and became one of the charter members of the first undergraduate class.  I was married and had four children in school.  So, trying to balance home life and obtaining a degree was no easy feat to say the least. One of the memories that stands out to me, is being part of the small group that lobbied to have a space where students could come together and call it "ours."  It took a while, but we ended up getting a tiny little corner on the 2nd or 3rd floor of Green.  There was a sofa and a few chairs and a small table.  That was it! When I came back to the campus in January 2000 to apply for a job, I was in shock when I was told that the building to the west of the library was the "Student Union." Hooray for the students! I feel very proud that I was part of that small group of students back in the seventies lobbying for space for students to mix.

Carole Thomas
Class of 1978

I was in one of the first graduating classes for undergrads. There wasn't a hall so the school erected a large tent for graduation services.  A typical May storm blew through the night before and the tent went down.  The school scrambled around and managed to get a local high school to hold our graduation ceremony in their auditorium.  It was hot and crowded, but we got our diplomas.

Betty Boyd Meis
Business School Class of 1977

It was unusually cold and windy, even for Philadelphia, on that gray February day in 1979. I had finished my lecture to my MBA students at Wharton, and took the short, icy walk across the campus of the University of Pennsylvania to my office in College Hall. There, I had a message from Dr. Bryce Jordan, president of the University of Texas at Dallas. He was at a conference in Washington, D.C., and wanted to visit me the next day to talk about his university's new management school.

I returned Bryce's call, told him he was most welcome to visit our campus, but that I could not recommend tomorrow because the weather forecast was ominous. He replied that he needed to hold to his trip schedule, and looked forward to seeing me on the morrow.

The next day dawned darker, colder, and icier, and moreover with a loud shrieking wind. My usual twenty minute morning commute from the Main Line to the campus on this occasion required two hours. At the office, Bryce phoned in, said his train was running an hour late. I invited him to join me for lunch at the venerable Union League Club in downtown Philadelphia, because our deserted campus was almost inaccessible. Then I found a ride down to the Club with our campus security force in one of their rugged, all-weather vehicles.

At lunch, I told Bryce that I didn't know much about UT Dallas, because Philadelphians disregarded the existence of institutions west of the Appalachians. He painted a clear picture of a very young university in Richardson, Texas without much present but with a convincing and predictably excellent future. He showed not a trace of the condescension, sometimes exhibited by traditional presidents, toward management schools as non-scholarly appendages to an otherwise great university.

After lunch, Bryce looked nervously at his watch, said he had to catch a train to New York. I replied that I doubted he could reach New York on that stormy day, and suggested that he might want to stay overnight in the comfortable accommodations of the Union League Club. He declined, so we ventured out on Broad Street to look for a cab, but cabs were not to be found.

My parting memory of Dr. Jordan on that occasion was the picture of him walking down the middle of Broad Street toward Penn Station, bundled up and carrying his valise, balancing himself on the icy surface, no vehicular traffic in sight. I thought of adjectives like indomitable and indefatigable, and Iknew then that Bryce Jordan would successfully lead UTD through the many problems of its adolescence.

So that is how I met Bryce, and how he persisted through the snow storm of February 19 and 20, 1979, certified by the U.S. Weather Service to have been the sixth worst winter storm to hit the east coast in the more than 150 years that records had been kept.

I learned later, not to my surprise, that Bryce had completed every scheduled meeting on that east coast itinerary. Also, I learned later, in 1981, that he was leaving UTD to take on the leadership of more mature institutions. I wished him well, but regretted his departure because I knew that without his wisdom the arduous goal of building an excellent management school in Richardson would be set back.

Paul O. Gaddis,
Franklin, TN

I graduated with a BS in Mathematics from Texas Tech in 1973.  Based on a Summa Cum Laude grade point and a pretty high GRE score, I applied to UTD for graduate school.  Given how highly I thought of UTD, I was very surprised to be quickly accepted.  Then I began to look at the situation a little more carefully.  It appeared I would be the third Math grad student and there were four Math professors, three of whom were either native German speakers or came from the tradition of the European education model. I must say I had second thoughts.  I enjoyed studying Math, but was daunted even then by the high standards and sheer brainpower of the university.  I ended up going back to Texas Tech where the air was not quite so thin.

Kurt Fischer

In 1975 the McDermott Library building was all new. We had so much space. The fourth floor had nothing on it but one small desk and a telephone. It was later removed when we discovered charges for numerous long distance calls being made by foreign students. I remember thinking we could roller skate up there. The basement had a grill where you could get hamburgers and sandwiches. Sometimes the entire building smelled like hamburgers and the grill often disturbed the electronic gates and the barcodes. There was also a post office in the basement where you could buy stamps and send packages. There was no card catalog! Robin Taylor was head of reference. She knew everybody. People checked out books with a card and they just used their first name because Robin knew who they were.

Nancy Whitt
McDermott Library 1974-2003

I had the honor of presenting UTD with the very first tree (or, for that matter, greenery) in 1976 in honor of my son, Selmin. (Note - The Selim live oak tree was planted in 1976 in the area now also occupied by the spirit rocks. Dr. Paksoy was a graduate student at the time).

Hasan B. Paksoy, M.A. (1976), Ph.D., UT Dallas, 1980 D. Phil. Oxford University

I recall, as if I heard it only yesterday, what Uri Dothan told me after we had lunch at the Kebab N Kurry restaurant in my first month in Dallas. We had just pulled out of the Classic BMW dealership and Uri Dothan turned to me and said "You see the blue sky here, you won't see that anywhere else in America, certainly not in Chicago." I had just moved from Chicago. Uri was headed to Minnesota in a couple of months, and he really was not so positive about UTD, but still he wanted me to know I had not chosen badly by moving to Dallas. Out of the window of my first office in Jonsson I got a clear view of downtown Dallas most days, and when Frank Bass and I took our walks after lunch at Founders North, I always marveled at the expansive skies. It often occurred to me that UTD was set in an open space not just physically but in the way things happened. A less kind way of saying that would be that not much happened; you could go for days not coming across any students!

All that has changed now, but for me it changed when Frank and I put out our first, and UTD's first marketing, doctoral student, who went to Auburn. This fall he accepted a full professor position at Northwestern University. I got busy and had Frank collaborating with me even as he cheered me on. That, too, has changed. He left us two years ago. Now when I take a walk after lunch it is so nice to see all these bright undergraduate students stepping in and out of our new management and engineering buildings, and the Activity Center. Still, what I miss is the even larger open spaces we had and especially the fireworks on July 4th just south of where the Alexander Clark Center is. My wife Kalpana and I would bring along our children for a delightful evening and a minor picnic she carefully assembled to go with the fireworks.

Ram Rao
Founders Professor and Professor of Marketing, School of Management

The most important memory was the professors I had that were mostly graduate professors teaching undergrads. They were hard and pushed us to perform. I believe this helped me to get a much better education. I enjoyed the commuter lifestyle of attending and the diversity of ages that attended. I am proud to call UTD my alma mater.

Sam W. Courtney
BSBA Marketing
December 1985

UTD was the most demanding University I attended; especially the economics and math teachers. I was in Texas last week and actually toured the campus. Can't believe the changes since the 1980's! Great Job University of Texas at Dallas!

Nancy R. (nee Dickey) Jackson
BSBA Marketing, 1984