Editor’s note: For now over 75 years, The Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. This November 1985 Classic article closes out this issue with a series of moments between two friends bound by fate.
It’s often hard for us to map out the interrelation of events in our lives; we’re usually too close to the action to perceive how one event fits with another. Yet occasionally we experience an episode which seems as clearly defined as a chapter in a book, with a definite beginning, middle, and ending.
Such was the case recently for Gordon Wilkerson, an ‘82 graduate of Baylor. For Gordon an episode in August completed a series of experiences over the last five years. Together these events form a story which challenges assumptions about college education and the importance of family ties — Gordon’s assumptions and our own as well.
Many of us learned the beginning of Gordon’s story in the November 1980 issue of The Baylor Line. There, in his article titled “Early Thanksgiving,” Gordon related an incident that made a great impact on his view of world politics and, on a more intimate scale, on his view of life as a college student.
The story began in mid-November of 1979, during the crush of preholiday exams that can make even the most enthusiastic student feel jaded. Rubbery dorm food, four major tests in one week, and homesickness had taken their toll on Gordon; the one week left before Thanksgiving break seemed to stretch out interminably for him.
Then one evening at a meeting of Gordon’s weekly Bible study group, a foreign student whom Gordon had never met rose and asked the group to remember in prayer his home country of Iran. The quiet young man caught Gordon’s interest, and after the meeting Gordon paused to ask him a few questions about the political turmoil in his native country. Television broadcasts had been filled in recent months with news of Americans held hostage by Iranian extremists in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran; yet in ten minutes of talking with Reza Emam, Gordon said, he “learned more about Iran than I had learned from listening to hours upon hours of news broadcasts.”
The tyranny of the Shah, the overthrow by religious extremists led by the Ayatollah Khomeini, the current state of anarchy in Iran — all became clear as Gordon and Reza talked on into the evening. What really hit Gordon hard was Reza’s telling him how much he, too, was missing his family. “I can’t even call them,” he said, explaining that the operators were not letting any Iranian students call Iran.
Gordon asked if he might try to ring a call through for Reza. “Sure,” Reza said, laughing hopelessly and handing him the phone number. Using his most “official” voice, Gordon gave the information to the Iranian operator. “Is it an emergency?” she queried suspiciously.
“Yes, more or less,” he replied. “As far as I was concerned,” Gordon recalls, “the call was an emergency call. It was an emergency for Reza anyway.”
After several minutes of silence, Gordon heard a phone ringing at the far end of the line. “Aaah-lo?” a voice answered.
“Hang-on!” Gordon yelled, jamming the phone on Reza’s car.
As Reza began speaking excitedly to his family, Gordon and other students who had wandered into the room went wild — they had beat the system! Up and down the hallways they spread the news: “Reza got through! Reza got through!” And though he couldn’t understand a word being said in Reza’s native language, Gordon needed no translation. The tone of the young man’s voice as he spoke with family members he had feared dead and the tears trailing down his cheeks said it all.
When the call was over, Reza thanked Gordon over and over for helping him contact his family. Gordon returned to his own room feeling good, he recalls, “but almost criminally lucky. … I had not been home all semester, but Reza probably had not seen his family in several years.
“I had been complaining about studying, reading, going to class, and taking tests. After talking to Reza I realized that I was lucky to be in such a position. I realized that I should have been grateful for the freedom to read books, for the chance to go to class, and for the opportunity to study whatever I wanted to study. … I went to bed that night looking forward to the next day.”
It was at that point that Gordon’s article, “Early Thanksgiving,” ended. But that was not the end of the story.
After their graduation from college, Gordon and Reza kept in touch. Reza went on to the Baylor Dental School in Dallas; Gordon, to SMU graduate school to work on an MBA degree. Though they talked every few months by phone, their hectic schedules rarely permitted them to spend time together.
An exception came last July, when Gordon married Lori Reid in a ceremony at Park Cities Baptist Church in Dallas. Reza came to the wedding. For a few brief moments the friends were able to chat and catch up on each other’s news. “He had just completed his second year of dental school,” remembers Gordon, “and he seemed to be enjoying a break from studies for a while.”
A month later Gordon’s family gathered again, this time in Amarillo for his brother David’s wedding on August tenth. Two weddings during one summer can make family life pretty hectic in the interim; so while Gordon and Lori returned home to Lubbock the next day, his parents, his brother Ray, and his sister Sarah headed west to Colorado for a well-deserved rest.
About an hour after leaving Amarillo, the Wilkersons noticed that the car traveling in front of them bore a Baylor decal on the rear windshield.
That was about all they had time to notice, for the ‘83 model Honda suddenly veered left into the center median. The car bounced off the median and shot back across the lanes of traffic, then flipped two and a half times before coming to rest by the side of the highway.
“My brother Ray, who was driving, slammed on his brakes to avoid becoming involved in the accident,” Gordon explains. “The dust cleared and other vehicles stopped at the sight. My dad went immediately to the Honda. He cut the driver’s seat belt and pulled her out of the car. Two other men attended the male passenger, who had been thrown from the vehicle.”
The young man appeared to have been killed on impact. When a volunteer ambulance arrived fourteen minutes later — an exceptionally quick response, given the wreck’s location — the medics immediately loaded the injured man into the vehicle and rushed him to the hospital. The young driver, who was the man’s sister, had luckily sustained only bruises and cuts, so she waited for a second ambulance to arrive and take her back to Amarillo.
After her departure, the winds began to pick up, stirring a whirl of papers from the silent wreckage. Mrs. Wilkerson began gathering up the scattered papers, reasoning that they might be important to the accident victims. As she reached down to pick up a sheet skittering along the shoulder of the road, she saw a name: Reza Emam.
It was only then that Mrs. Wilkerson put it all together: the young man traveling with his sister, the Baylor sticker on the rear window, the name of her son’s friend from Iran. Shaken, the family realized they had just witnessed the death of their son’s friend Reza.
Gordon recounts their reaction: “After discovering that Reza was involved in the accident, my dad knew he needed to do more, but he was not sure how to do so. He called several people he knew in the Amarillo area but got no answer. Finally he called Winfred Moore, pastor of First Baptist Church, Amarillo. Dr. Moore went immediately to the hospital to see Reza’s sister, Roshal. I think Dr. Moore helped Roshal more than anyone else could have at that time.”
Later that evening Gordon answered the phone and was surprised to hear his dad on the other end of the line. He could tell from his father’s tone that whatever the news might be, it was not good.
“Your friend from Baylor — Reza — the one who is from Iran — how do you spell his last name?” his father asked.
“My immediate response,” says Gordon, “was, ‘Why in the world is he calling to ask me that?’ Not knowing what to expect next, I answered his question.”
Gordon’s father relayed the tragic news and asked his son to call anyone he knew that would need to be notified about the accident. Once again an important, unexpected phone call brought tears to the eyes of the family members on each end of the line. But this time they were not tears of joy.
“I don’t remember much about what happened after that,” says Gordon, “except that I hung up the phone and cried. I cried because of what my family had just been through. I cried because I wished I had taken more time to talk to Reza and do things with him when it seemed that we were both ‘too busy.’ I cried because I had lost a good friend.”
On August fourteenth Reza was buried in Redwood City, California, the city where his sister Roshal now lives and attends school. A few friends and relatives attended the funeral. His parents could not obtain clearance to leave Iran in time to attend their son’s funeral.
Thus this episode drew to a close. Yet many unanswered questions remain.
“Why,” Gordon asks, “is a life with such great potential suddenly taken away in an instant? Someday, perhaps, we shall all understand why.
“Somehow I have always felt that God planned the events which led to the story I wrote several years ago about Reza. For similar reasons, I am convinced that He had a purpose for my family and Dr. Moore to be in positions to help Reza and Roshal after the accident. Sometimes, even when it is hard to understand the why of a situation, it is possible to see God’s hand in it.”
When we read a chapter in a book, we cannot know in detail what is to come in following chapters — only what we have read so far. Certainly, in the case of Gordon Wilkerson, his family, and the family of Reza Emam, the book is not finished. But this chapter of friendship between Gordon and Reza has developed the plot in a way which cannot help but color the rest of the story.
Reza’s mother, grandmother, and little brother were f inally able to join Roshal in California in late August. They hope to be joined soon by Reza’s father, who has been working to obtain permission for a brief visit to America. Ironically, it has been through Reza’s death that his family has finally reached the freedom he prayed they would obtain.
For Gordon the effects are more subtle, yet just as real. “Reza was a unique individual,” he says. “Many students in America go through our country’s educational system expecting to go to college. In fact, many people consider a degree from a university ‘about average’ today.
“Reza, more than any person I have ever met, truly appreciated the opportunity for education Baylor presented him. He had a deeper appreciation for America than many of us who all of our lives have enjoyed the privileges this country affords its citizens. His feelings and attitudes made me more keenly aware of how truly fortunate I am.”
