World War II - A New Struggle

During the fall term in 1941, the SFA Ex-Students Association (Ex-SA), as the alumni organization was called at the time, organized the most successful homecoming to date. That fall to commemorate the career and contributions of retiring president Alton Birdwell, the Association launched a new initiative, a scholarship fund; this fund and later ones would make the organization in the future an even more forceful contributor to the SFA experience. The scholarship fund was the brainchild of S. A. Kerr who was in charge of collecting funds for a gift to give Dr. Birdwell on the occasion of his retirement. Before any real definition of the scholarship regulations or its potential could be worked out, world events intervened.

“When we walked out, our lives were changed forever.” - Joyce Swearingen

December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, Birdwell assembled the entire student body to hear President Roosevelt speak to the nation. When we walked out, our lives were changed forever,” said Joyce Swearingen. The immediate onset of World War II changed everything at SFA. For the Ex-SA, the whole concept of keeping in touch with exes took on a new and more urgent meaning as current and former students began to enter the armed services. Even the meetings of the Association almost immediately took on a different tone. The featured speaker at the spring banquet, Harry R. Bolster (a student from Houston who played football SFA in 1937-38) reported about his experiences serving with the Flying Tigers in China. The usual plans for the fall Homecoming stopped when the demands of the war forced the cancellation of intercollegiate sports activities. The composition of the student body changed also; it went from sixty percent to ninety percent female during the war years. The Stone Fort annuals shifted from honoring the men in military service in 1942 to memorializing in following years the SFA alumni who had died in action.

Unrelated to the war effort, SFA was undergoing a major internal change: the selection of a new president to replace Birdwell. The State Board of Regents appointed Col. W.B. Bates of Houston and Nacogdoches to head the subcommittee searching for the new president. Bates asked the Ex-SA to participate in the selection process. John Lynn Bailey, president since November, organized a meeting of the former presidents of the Association in January to discuss their opinions of the college’s needs and desires. On May 14, 1942, the State Board of Regents appointed Dr. Paul Boynton the second president of SFA. Birdwell immediately asked him to speak at the spring commencement. To protect the newly named president, Birdwell had Coach Bob Shelton make the announcement that intercollegiate sports activities would be suspended for the duration of the war. A Pine Log’s headline summarized the new era: “NEW PRESIDENT, WAR, NO FOOTBALL, ’42 TREND.”

“NEW PRESIDENT, WAR, NO FOOTBALL, ’42 TREND.”

What about the fall Homecoming? While intramural games were planned, the Ex-SA threw itself into helping host an inauguration for the new president. The ceremonies were modest. The barbeque luncheon in the Women’s Recreation Center and the spirit rally was as much about the war as about Boynton and SFA. In their fall 1942 committee meetings, the EX-SA worked to finalize the purpose, requirements, and procedures for awarding the new Birdwell scholarship. They decided to make the scholarship permanent; only the interest from invested funds was to be available to assist "needy freshmen students with high moral, religious, and scholastic standings.”

Keeping in touch with SFA GIs

One of the vital operations of the SFA Home Front was keeping in touch with exes now in the war effort. Through letters, Christmas cards, questionnaires to parents, and word of mouth, the Ex-SA and others on campus forged a vital link between those away and those on campus. The Christmas card for 1944, for instance, was a drawing of the Rusk Building on the outside and on the inside, “Greetings from the Stephen F. Austin Faculty and Student Body, Christmas, 1944.” One soldier responded immediately: “Just a line to let you know I’m still thinking of old SFA. Was sure glad to get the Christmas card from school. It’s nice to be remembered.”

As news on service personnel came in, the Pine Log printed information on various exes, where they were serving, and any honors they had received. In almost every letter they wrote, the exes responded that they were missing the Piney Woods. Many reported meeting other exes oversees in such strange places as India, China, Europe, and the Pacific Islands. The University Archives has a sizable collection of letters from exes during the war and after.

Dr. Boynton created a new position, Director of Public Relations, and moved J. T. Richardson of the Sociology Department into the job of organizing the campus effort to write to the exes in the service. Working with the Ex-SA, Richardson sent out repeated inquiries to servicemen and their parents requesting addresses so that the school could send them the Pine Log and other information.

The responses to these efforts were remarkable and heartwarming. Servicemen expressed gratitude for the college’s efforts to keep contact with them. One wrote: “I can assure you it [the Pine Log] reads just as well in Russia as under one of those pine trees on SFA’s campus.” The parents responded, too. One parent from Chireno wrote in July of 1944, “I thank you for the interest you are taking in the boys in the service. I have four sons overseas.” Many active members in the Ex-SA reported their whereabouts: Arlene V. Kilpatrick from the WAVES, Edwin Gaston from the Pacific, and E. H. Henning and Van Samford were “now riding the seas together.” James Laree, known as “Flash” when he was the Pine Log sports editor, wrote: “At present I am piloting a bomber over here and have been on several fire raids to Tokyo and various other missions to the Japanese mainland.” The saddest letters in the Archives are the ones from parents who reported losing their sons, and yet thanked the college for the interest it had shown their sons while at SFA and in the service.

After the war, the Ex-SA took a leading part in planning and opening a new football stadium and park. The dedication of Memorial Stadium and Park was the highlight of the first post-war homecoming at SFA in 1946. The City and college officials who technically were responsible for the project called on the Ex-SA to host the dedication. Ex-SA President Frank Singletary of Carlisle quickly called together the stalwarts who had carried the organization through the war: Sugene Spears, Myrtle Franks, Savanna Lockey, John Lynn Bailey, Edwin Gaston, Jr., Mrs. Carl Biggers, Earl Biggers, J. W. Summers, Wallace Phillips, and Andrew H. Smith. The dedication of the park and stadium to those from SFA and Nacogdoches who had given their lives in World War II came at the halftime of the game with East Texas State.

President Boynton and the Ex-Students Association

At the beginning of his tenure Boynton said he had “no phenomenal remedies” for SFA, but he did pledge “to carve a place for myself as the years go by.” He did this. The challenges of World War II, while different, were perhaps even greater than those of the Depression. Boynton met the demands of the war as if he had been trained for the task. But, with his every solution came more problems. For instance, his procurement of the WAAC school for SFA helped to save the college, but he had trouble collecting money from the government, and, while adding even more women to the already substantial female enrollment, the WAACs displaced almost every other program on campus. Boynton worked closely with the Ex-SA to search for ways to keep SFA alive by keeping the name of the college before the public and the Board of Regents. In 1944 he planned a special convocation held on the Vista to confer the honorary degree of Doctor of Law on Col. W. B. Bates; Bates was only the third Texan to receive such a distinction. When the GI Bill® passed congress, Boynton saw a new day for SFA and immediately sent out questionnaires to former students who were GIs. He asked T. E. Ferguson to write a pamphlet on the benefits the GI Bill® to all who responded requesting information. Boynton knew from these responses what was coming was more than just returning students. Many of these students would be married, all more mature than entering freshman from high school, and in general less likely to put up with an academic structure which was not modern and attentive to their needs. To serve this coming flood Boynton turned all his attention to the procurement of temporary housing for the returning veterans.

In 1946 Boynton also moved to strengthen the Ex-Students Association by creating the full-time position of Executive Secretary. He appointed the Carthage native Joe D. Lacy to the position. An ex-student with two degrees from SFA, Lacy had held jobs as a public school administrator in several East Texas towns. He immediately set out to visit former SFA exes now living or working in East Texas, especially in the Home Counties. He was beginning to revive the ex-student county clubs, but when the business manager's position became vacant at SFA, Lacy applied and Boynton appointed him to that position. To replace Lacy, Lawrence T. Franks, a former SFA "Lumberjack" basketball star then teaching in Pineland, stepped into the Executive Secretary’s position; the Franks had long been active in the Ex-SA. Lawrence Franks, in addition to the ExSA position became the college’s placement director and a part-time teacher in the education department. Franks carried forward Lacy's task of reconstituting the county chapters, especially those in Polk, Rusk, Shelby, Dallas, and Harris counties.

In 1948 the college celebrated its 25th anniversary. The unstated theme of this celebration was survival. The Ex-SA went all out in preparing the October Homecoming. Perhaps because of the advanced publicity, but more likely because everyone was now in a more optimistic mood, the ex-students returned in large numbers and enjoyed a full weekend of carefully planned activities. They revived the parades in downtown Nacogdoches, celebrated the careers of the early leaders and graduates of the college, and even lobbied for a change in the name of the institution to Stephen F. Austin State College. The Daily Sentinel, led by their newly hired news editor, Ed Gaston, published a massive Anniversary Edition reviewing the accomplishments of the college’s first quarter century. Fifty years later, Gaston remembered, “Those were exciting times.” The Anniversary Edition of 1948–an invaluable source of information on the early history of the college–contains interviews and reflections on virtually every aspect of SFA life. SFA’s traditions and its appreciation of the past were becoming more concrete. The edition and the 25th celebrations were a joyous, reflective interlude between the era of Depression and World War II and that of the Cold War soon to become hot in Korea.

While the Ex-SA never forgot the pre-war idea of soliciting scholarship money, the collection of funds had not really receive the organization’s full attention during the war and immediately thereafter. By 1952, when planning Homecoming, the Ex-SA decided to once again celebrate the life and achievements of its first president Alton Birdwell. The festivities started with the Homecoming parade and ended with receptions where Birdwell visited with many of the exes. With help from Ed Gaston, Walter Todd of Dallas, president of the Ex-Student’s Association at the time, decided to use the momentum after Homecoming to reemphasize the Birdwell Scholarship Fund. Looking toward Birdwell’s birthday in the fall, they began a drive for $10, 000. On September 17, 1953, friends of Dr. Birdwell met to sing “Happy Birthday” and presented the grand old man (then 83) with a check for $5,500 to kickoff the renewed scholarship drive. (The faculty and staff at SFA later contributed an additional $3,000.) Boynton spoke, and Birdwell responded: “Nothing could make me happier; [the scholarship] gives me at least a little bit of immortality.” In May of 1954, the Board of Regents set aside its own rule against naming buildings for living individuals and named a new classroom building on the corner of North and College after Birdwell. Alton Birdwell died on October 25, 1954.

Ex-SA Presidents in the Boynton years included such names as John Lynn Bailey, Eugene Sanders, Frank Singletary, Ancil Hogan, James Ogg, Dana Williams, Coy Key, Ottis Lock, Walter Todd, M. M. Stripling, Jerry Sadler, and Bob Murphey. Some of the Vice Presidents were Preston Hendrick, Jack Garrett, Moss Crenshaw, Denton Kerr, Travis Price, Homer Bryce, D. L. Walker, and Savannah Cross Lockey. Loyalists like Sugene Spears, Myrtle Franks, and Ruth Williamson rotated in and out of serving as Secretary-Treasurer of the organization, but in 1952 Madge Stallings became the defacto permanent holder of this office. Continuity and history were a major factor in the ExSA. Madge instituted an archival system–her famous scrapbooks–that helped with the popular class reunions. For her own class of 1933, which had been forced by the Depression to forgo an annual, Madge put together a belated “annual” for their 25th anniversary. The material collected from the families and friends of the class was a pitiful little book as an annual; pictures from the present and the past were all mixed together in the work. As a work of love, it showed why the EX-SA treasured Madge Stallings. She cared. Presidents, Vice Presidents, and Executive Secretaries were to come and go, but Madge became as near as humanly possible a permanent fixture. In 1970 she was awarded life membership and in 1982 a scholarship in her name. Madge served the Ex-SA until her death in 1990.

In 1958 Dr. Paul Boynton suddenly died. In tribute to him the Board of Regents wrote the following: “With keen insight, unswerving devotion to duty, and resourcefulness uncommon to an amazing degree, he met and solved the problems one by one. After the war, when steadily increasing enrollment produced seemingly unending problems equally complex but of a different nature, Dr. Boynton continued to be more than equal to the challenge.” In working as closely as he did with the Ex-SA, Boynton laid the foundations for a much stronger future organization: membership was up, Christmas cards were being sent to over 4,382 exes, there were fifteen county SFA clubs, the Birdwell Scholarship Fund now received part of the annual membership dues, and the Association was beginning to solicit new scholarship endowments.