Written by Michael Claxton
For the past 15 years, I have had two standing appointments on Thursdays. One is at Mi Pueblito for lunch, and the other — at least during basketball season — is at my spot beside the water cooler in the Rhodes-Reaves Fieldhouse. While I grew up as a fan of neither sports nor salsa, I have come to love them both. Partly because the other thing they had in common was a chance to hang out with Dr. Gary Elliott.
Elliott started teaching English at Harding five years before I was born — a fact I enjoyed pointing out to him. By the time I joined the faculty, he only had four years left to go before he retired. He spent two of those years as my boss. Gary had been the department chair back in the 1970s, then left to serve as dean and later president of Columbia Christian College in Portland, Oregon. He eventually returned to Harding and to his first love of English. In 2005 he resumed the position of chair for his last two years. I called him the Grover Cleveland of the department since he was the only chair to serve two non-consecutive terms.
Elliott died on Sept. 13 at the age of 81, and neither Thursday lunches nor basketball games will be quite the same.
Week after week, Gary held court at the Mexican restaurant with several of us from the English Department. As an extension of his engaging classroom persona, the master storyteller knew how to hold an audience. He told us about his childhood in Chickasha, Oklahoma, and his adventures fishing and raising livestock. He told us about his days at Harding College in the late `50s and early `60s (Just as some recent students can do an affectionate impression of Dr. David Burks, Gary could imitate his predecessor, Dr. George Benson.) We would hear about his deer hunts, his golf games and his cattle farming. If he ever came to lunch fresh from delivering a newborn calf, he’d make a point to tell us, “You don’t want to shake my hand today.”
Still, that hand dove right into the communal chips. Gary was also famous for ordering toxic hot sauce. One time, the waitress brought out this bubbling green liquid. It looked like a combination of raw jalapenos and battery acid. The chefs were peeking out of the kitchen, waiting to see what would happen. Halfway through one of his anecdotes, Dr. Elliott dipped a handful of chips into the sauce and took a huge bite. His eyes watered, his face turned a few different hues and he hit the table one time with his fist. But all he said was, “That lit my fire,” and went right on with his story. He never understood why we wouldn’t try his sauce.
I’ll never forget our last lunch together before Gary and his wife moved to Fayetteville. He regaled us with stories about the old days of the department a half-century ago, sharing some of his favorite classroom experiences. He loved to talk about the time he was teaching Alexander Pope’s mock epic poem “The Rape of the Lock.” Dr. Elliott dropped his pencil during the class, and when he bent over to pick it up, his pants split. A bit red-faced, he backed up to the chalkboard and carried on bravely with class. Two days later, a student presented him with a poem in rhyming couplets in the style of Pope. It was called “The Gape of the Doc.”
Basketball games won’t be the same, either. Gary was scandalized when I told him I had attended University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and had never once gone to a Tarheels game. So, he insisted I come to watch the Bisons and Lady Bisons with him. We ended up sitting next to each other for over a decade. Nobody could heckle a referee like Gary. A master of superlatives, he frequently declared a call the worst he’d seen in 50 years. I once heard him say that three times in the same quarter. When I asked how three calls could equally be the worst in half a century, he told me not to bother him while he was working.
We teased each other as only close friends can do. When I wrote a column making fun of his big Southern truck, he put a typed letter on department stationery in my office box, assigning me a new — and particularly miserable — teaching schedule. He signed it, “Sincerely, Bubba.”
Married for 59 years to Cheryl, father to Douglas and Heather, grandfather four times over and friend to everyone in town, Gary was a true Renaissance man. A farmer and a preacher, a cattleman who could quote Shakespeare and the Psalms, an administrator who loved all Harding sports, he was a witty and gracious mentor to generations of students and colleagues, including me. We will not see his like again.
