The Baylor Line Foundation (BLF) is proud to announce the winners of its Hall of Fame Awards, which returned after a three-year absence on Jan. 28, 2017, in the Barfield Drawing Room at the Baylor Student Union Building.
We will have more on the event in the Spring issue, but here are the winners with profiles on two of our Distinguished Alumni Award win-ners. Each were nominated by other Baylor alumni.
Emily George Tinsley ’61 and Gracie Hatfield Hilton ’67 planned the gala event, which benefited the BLF Legacy Scholarship Fund.
DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI AWARD
Jimmy ’72 and Janet Dorrell ’93, the founders and leaders of Mission Waco, 29 full-time and 46 part-time employees and oversee the efforts of 3,000 people (including hundreds of Baylor student volunteers) donating 36,000 hours per year.
Brett James Cornelius ’91, a successful Grammy-award winning songwriter known professionally as Brett James, who has written 25 No. 1 hits, including Jesus Take the Wheel.
Trey Gowdy ‘86, a third-term U.S. congressman from South Caroline and widely praised former federal prosecutor who served six years in the 1990s on cases ranging from narcotics trafficking and bank robberies to child pornography and the murder of a federal witness.
OUTSTANDING YOUNG ALUMNI AWARD
Breyana Segura ’07, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Frio-Nueves Current and the South Texas Press Association’s Journalist of the Year in 2016.
Jimmy Walker ’02, a professional golfer who, after playing in 187 events without a win on the PGA Tour, won three times in the first eight events of the 2014 season and won the 2016 PGA Championship.
W.R. WHITE MERITORIOUS SERVICE AWARD
Walter Abercrombie ’86, who was a first-round draft pick (12th selection overall) by the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1982 and played for the Steelers from 1982-87 before spending his final two seasons with the Philadelphia Eagles from 1988-89. He serves as the executive director of the Baylor “B” Association, the founders and leaders of Mission Waco, the 700-member organization of former a non-profit that has grown to employ a congressman from South Carolina letterwinners.
FIRST FAMILIES OF BAYLOR AWARD
The Russell Dilday Family, led by Russell ’52 and Betty Doyen Dilday ’52, who are their class president and secretary respectively. Russell served as a Regent from 1966-69, as special assistant to the president from 1994-2000, and won the BAA Distinguished Alumni Award in 1983.
GEORGE W. TRUETT DISTINGUISHED CHURCH SERVICE AWARD
Dr. Bill Skaar ’81, who joined First Baptist Church in Grand Prairie, Texas as its pastor in June 1999 after serving for nine and a half years with Central Baptist Church, Livingston, Texas.
HERBERT H. REYNOLDS RETIRED FACULTY MEMBERS AND ADMINISTRATORS AWARD
Dr. Alan Cook ’59, M.S. ’63, who taught a variety of courses, including International Finance and Latin American Economic Development, and served as Director of Special Projects for the Hankamer School of Business, and was responsible for developing relationships with many different constituencies in business and social service organizations. He was also Baylor’s representative to the Association of Colleges and Universities for International-Intercultural Studies (ACUIIS) which arranged student study-abroad programs in Europe and Asia.
ABNER V. MCCALL HUMANITARIAN AWARD
Ervin Randle ’85, who spent eight years in the National Football League as a middle linebacker for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (1985-90) and the Kansas City Chiefs (1991-92) and now owns Classic Lawton Chevrolet in Oklahoma and is an active contributor to the community.
Just Jimmy
When you meet Jimmy Dorrell for an interview, you’re most likely going to find yourself at World Cup Café on North 15th Street in Waco. For many Baylor alumni, that’s within an area once known as No Man’s Land.
For Jimmy Dorrell, this neighborhood he’s working hard to revitalize is home. The work he and his wife Janet ’80, MS 92 have done in the community has earned them the Baylor Line Foundation’s 2017 Distinguished Alumni Award.
It can take a while for an interview at the retro diner to get started. Dorrell stops and greets every person he passes by, knows their first and last name, and can tell you everything going on in their life.
“She was in one of the children’s programs,” he says referencing the adult waitress who took his drink order.
And as you sit down, he asks if you’ve ever eaten here, before pointing out that World Cup has been recognized as one of Waco’s top restaurants.
Ready to start the interview? Not yet.
“First, tell me about you! Turn it off and tell me about you. I want to know who you are!”
I had never been interviewed by somebody I was sent to interview; but then again, I had never met Jimmy Dorrell.
Dorrell, a 1972 Baylor grad who received his Master’s in Environmental Studies in 1993, is the co-founder and executive director of Mission Waco, the pastor of Church Under the Bridge, and a teacher at Baylor University and Truett Seminary.
He describes himself as “a recovering Baptist,” adding that “I appreciate my Baptist background, but am now living and working among those who could care less what label I am. They want legitimacy. I am privileged to get work among numerous churches from various denominations and pastor an ecumenical church.”
As you sit at a table in World Cup, you can’t miss looking out the window and seeing the brand-new grocery store across the street.
Later, as you walk around this growing community, you also see the attached Jubilee Theater, the Mediterranean diner across the street, and a nearby Family Health Center. Mission Waco’s 10-year-old Fair Trade Market is connected to the World Cup Café.
This is the heart and realization of Dorrell’s long-time goal to ignite economic development in North Waco, a mission for which he’s received significant recognition. Unsurprisingly, titles and acclaim don’t mean much to him.
“Though all those things shape me, my identity is not around what I’ve done; it is about my call,” said Dorrell, “I know who I am; I know what my life is about.”
The grocery store grew from Dorrell noticing that many of the people in the area had to walk 2,2 miles to get their groceries, and the closest H-E-B was miles away. For years, he had his eyes on a specific location in that part of town, and now thanks to donations and many volunteers the community has their own affordable, accessible grocery store nearby.
The store had been open only a week when this interview was conducted, but Dorrell was clearly excited about what it was going to bring to neighborhood residents.
“We need about $1,700 per day in revenue to break even and have already had a couple of $2,000 days,” he said with a broad smile. He was expecting approval within a few days of the interview to take food stamps, a process that he expected to increase sales by $1,000 per day.
Next on his loaded “To Do” list: Building an aquaponics system for growing organic fruits and vegetables with zero waste on a lot next to the grocery store.
“I thought that the ability to grow lettuce would be something we could do someday,” he says.
But for a guy like Jimmy Dorrell, someday is never a long period of time.
The project, which is expected to be functional by late spring, is being partially funded by a $234,000 grant from the Green Mountain Sun Club. When Dorrell originally applied for the funding, the organization encouraged him to request a larger sum than his original $135,000 ask. He worked with four Baylor professors to expand the grand request, which yielded an extra $100,000 that will fund solar, commercial and worm composting, water purification, and recycling.
“Urban areas have the worst pollution,” Dorrell says, quoting from Genesis to explain that the new project will enable him to teach good stewardship of the earth to neighborhood youngsters. It will also allow he and Janet to create a living memory of their son Seth, who passed away three years ago at age 32 while on a family mission trip to Mexico. Seth had served as director of the Mission World program, even as he battled cancer in his last few years.
Dorrell was born in Conroe, Texas, which he describes as a small town with a prejudicial culture that nobody questioned, because “it was just the way it is there.”
He describes Waco in a similar fashion, recalling that this part of Waco was not as abandoned as people assumed. Dorrell tells stories of entering buildings they had thought to be empty only to find struggling people living in economic blight.
“At 19 years old in another part of town, I saw and smelled poverty for the first time,” said Dorrell, “I began to see the world through a whole different lens than I thought.”
Self-described as “your classic white religious kid,” Dorrell recognized the barriers between himself as a student at Baylor and the understanding of poverty struggles. He says it is these barriers that help create a lack of empathy.
“The middle class tends to adopt various myths of poverty to defend their views. When the rich look at the poor, it is easy to think they’re poor because they’re lazy or have too many babies. People really don’t understand poverty is a much more complex issue and I understand how they can see that,” said Dorrell, “I wish I could challenge them to be as busy as the poor people I am around, because nobody is as busy as a single mom working two or three part time jobs, but they don’t know that.”
Dorrell believes that the only real way to understand poverty, and to really help them is to be among them. To be their friend, their neighbor, their brother or sister. To him, community involvement meant being intentionally planted in the community.
“I am privileged to see our formerly broken neighborhood become a healthy community,” he says when asked about his greatest source of pride. He adds that his biggest regret is the loss of Seth. “It never leaves us. Like all our kids, this has been a family affair and still is, so there is a deep hole that his death.”
Having moved into the neighborhood almost 40 years ago, Dorrell talks about how the dynamics of the area have changed over the years, mentioning the “white flight” of the 1960s when middle class families moved to the suburbs to escape the mostly black impoverished communities. When this happened, he said, the entire neighborhood became under-resourced.
“That building became a porno theatre, and the street corners became a venue for prostitutes and drug dealers” he said referencing the Jubilee theatre at the end of the street where local kids now put on productions and take classes. “So we bought a house about five blocks down and began building friendships across racial and economic barriers that often divide our cities. We’ve lived there for 40 years.”
However, their journey did not end in Waco. Eventually he and Janet began to explore their call to the world of need.
“During a three-year stint in Houston, we decided it was time to see the world,” said Dorrell, “so we used the funds from selling our house there and took off on a life-changing journey.”
For about five months, Jimmy, Janet, and 2-year-old Seth traveled the world. What sounds like a romantic adventure was actually eye-opening and impacting.
“Man, we had our hearts broken,” said Dorrell. “We saw poverty and pain in raw forms.”
Their adventures took them everywhere from the slums of Calcutta working with Mother Theresa to smuggling Bibles with a group across the Berlin Wall.
After such a trip the family, then expecting another child, made the decision to go back to Waco, start over, and live among the poor in their old house in North Waco.
Through community involvement Dorrell was able to witness poverty in a way that he believes few others ever would.
“My view of community involvement was drastically different than other Baylor students at the time,” he said, “Community engagement was not verbally as big of a deal as it is now.”
Now, says Dorrell, Mission Waco has hundreds of Baylor students volunteering every semester. He credits this to numerous programs and Baylor Chapel, which enables him the privilege to speak to the entire freshman class at the beginning of the year.
While he acknowledges the blessings of student volunteers, Dorrell is also very clear about the importance of relationships among those being served.
“Short-term activities may have great motives,” he says, “but students who commit three or more hours a week get to really know the participants and even learn from them.”
Dorrell describes the shock he experienced when he first began working with individuals who had suffered the traumas of poverty and abuse.
“In one of my first jobs in a local State Home for dependent and neglected youth, I got cussed out my first day, by a 6-year old,” said Dorrell. “All of a sudden I entered the world of kids who have been physically and sexually abused and everything that could go wrong.”
At the time he was a seminary student and says that he struggled with the work he was doing.
“In seminary, I had similar experiences working in the inner city of Fort Worth. We would sit around and talk theology all day, then I would go work with pregnant teens, drug addicts, broken families and all the rest,” said Dorrell. “Knowing Bible verses doesn’t change lives, but loving somebody who cussed you out makes it real. I was ready to quit within the first week then faced my own hypocrisy and knew it was time to put up or shut up.”
He explains that the volunteers who leave when a kid gets angry with them, or those who only come once, don’t make an impact. He says that all volunteers are appreciated, but these kids have had enough people walk in and out of their lives so staying with these programs is key to their success.
“I stayed and it changed my life,” said Dorrell, “I fell in love with broken kids and families.”
Dorrell makes it clear that the focus of his work and the work he facilitates goes beyond helping the community.
“Our first goal is to empower the poor. Our second is to mobilize the middle class to understand and act.” said Dorrell. “Our third goal is to address various systemic injustice that impact the poor.”
The dynamic is very much a “teach a man to fish” style of helping. Mission Waco offers job training programs, educational programs, recovery and homeless programs, and other workshops and activities available to help people better help themselves.
Dorrell believes volunteering with and attending Church Under the Bridge helps the middle-class Christians learn that not all homeless people are the same. These programs of inclusion are only the first steps in becoming part of and helping the community, just to get you in the door. But it is the second and third steps that Dorrell says are most important for community improvement.
“Not the first time you go, but if you keep going,” said Dorrell. “Our question is will you volunteer when you have a test the next day or if you have to give up a campus activity?”
Doing that, Dorrell believes, creates committed community changers. The people who show up multiple times a week are the ones who enjoy it and want to keep coming back, but it takes coming back again and again to get there.
Ultimately, according to Dorrell, if students get involved early on, they will likely continue to engage in their communities for the rest of their lives.
“Get out there not because we need you, but also because you need them.”
-Sierra Smith is a junior from Arlington, Texas, who’s majoring in journalism.
A Song in His Heart
A “miserable fail” in Nashville sent Brett James Cornelius ’91 packing, determined to return to medical school, leaving the music, the songwriting and the dream behind after a seven-year effort.
But this story has a happy ending. Though his performing career may not have worked out, Cornelius – now known professionally as “Brett James” – has become a phenomenally successful songwriter, penning songs for Tim McGraw, Kenny Chesney, Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, Jason Aldean, Keith Urban and many more, winning a number of industry awards, and now being recognized with the Baylor Line Foundation’s 2017 Distinguished Alumni Award.
Cornelius’s songwriting career began with an $80 pawn shop guitar he received from his parents the Christmas of his freshman year at Baylor University. Once he learned some chords, he wrote songs for fun and strummed on his front porch in Waco, Texas.
During his sophomore year at the University at Oklahoma College of Medicine, Cornelius took a 1993 spring break trip to Nashville. Baylor classmate Deb Smith Markland ‘9o, Cornelius’s only connection to the music world, set the aspiring artist up with her “big shot” boss, Renee Nalli, who arranged for Cornelius to meet with a few recording labels. By his third day in Nashville, two labels had patted him on the back but had showed no interest. However, Cornelius said it was an unexpected third meeting that changed his music career.
“At the time [Arista] was the biggest record label in Nashville,” Cornelius said. “It was huge and all that kind of stuff. Next thing I know [Tim DuBois, President of Arista Records] was sitting across the table telling me he wants to sign me to a record deal on my third day ever in Nashville.”
Cornelius returned to Nashville after his second year in medical school and began making a name for himself. He was the “new kid on the block” but Cornelius said the newness wore off and the attention began to fade.
“You know, when I first moved to Nashville, everybody told me I was going to be the next Garth Brooks,” Cornelius said. “And they treated me like that, they treated me like I was going to be a big deal. So I was getting paid lots of money, I would go to a party and people would treat me like I was special. And then all of a sudden, it doesn’t work and you go to the same party and you’re getting ignored and you’re not making as much money. It’s humbling. I learned a lot through that process.”
But Cornelius’s hard work and perseverance continued to mark his journey. The aspiring musician returned to medical school to provide for his growing family because he said he realized he wasn’t going to make it as “the guy on stage.”
“I didn’t come to Nashville to be a songwriter; I didn’t even really know that was a job,” Cornelius said with a chuckle. “I came to Nashville because I wanted to be the next Garth Brooks. So I proceeded for the next five or six years to fail miserably as a recording artist.”
After returning to Oklahoma, Cornelius became a medical school student by morning and wrote songs in the afternoons and evenings. His rapid success was astonishing. On his third day back at school, Faith Hill recorded one of his songs and his songwriting career took off.
Within nine months of Cornelius’s return to Oklahoma, 33 of his songs had been recorded, five of which were Top 10 singles, and Nashville called offering him a record deal. He decided to leave medical school and return to Nashville in 2002 as a songwriter. Since then, he has written 2,500 songs and 25 No. 1 hits.
“So, I’m batting 1% on No. 1 songs,” Cornelius said. “Song-writing is really just about half inspiration and half perspiration. You just gotta show up to work and write a lot of songs and hope that the right songs find the right artist.”
He wrote by himself for five years, but said he enjoys hanging out and writing with other artists, which was how his most popular song, “Jesus Take the Wheel,” was created.
“You would think there would be some massive lightning strike type of moment with that one because it turned into a special song,” Cornelius explained. “But, it was a very typical songwriting day with two of my best friends, Hillary Lindsey and Gordy Sampson.”
The songwriter said he originally chuckled at the idea of Jesus driving a car and passed by it when Sampson proposed the title. The three friends were gathered around Lindsey’s living room drinking coffee and after a round of song-title propositions, Cornelius said they stumbled back on the idea.
“Fortunately, we came back to that one and started writing a song about a young girl, driving to Cincinnati on a snow-white Christmas Eve,” Cornelius said. “We loved the song when we wrote it. It moved us but it still seemed like a crazy idea. I mean Jesus taking the wheel? We almost didn’t even put it on a demo session because we didn’t think it was worthy of putting on a session. It seemed too crazy.”
Cornelius won a Grammy in 2006 for “Jesus Take the Wheel.” He racked up six Top 10 singles in 2014 alone. These included “I Hold On” for Dierks Bentley; “Bottoms Up” for Brantley Gilbert; “Something in the Water” for Carrie Underwood; and the duet “Somethin’ Bad” recorded by Miranda Lambert and Carrie Underwood. He is the owner of publishing company Cornman Music, and is on the board of CMA.
Despite his accomplishments, Cornelius said he most enjoys hearing stories about how his songs affect the lives of others.
“The ones that end up meaning the most to me are the ones that really touch people,” Cornelius said. “You’re like ‘Wow, some of the words that I made up in a room one afternoon touched lives. There is this megaphone called radio and they go out to the world and those little words that you got to be a part of become a part of someone else’s life and they mean something to someone. And that’s the best part.”
-Mary-Claire Brock is a Freshman Journalism major from Beorne, Texas, who expects to graduate in 2020.
