He first pulled up to Brooks Hall on move-in day in 1956, behind the wheel of a brand-new, red and white Chevrolet station wagon. His name was Kenneth Reuben Durham, he’d driven five hours from his Panhandle hometown of Tahoka, and he was beaming. There was nowhere he’d have rather been at that moment.
From the thrill of that arrival until his death 68 years later, Ken Durham would become the walking paradigm of a quintessential and perpetual Baylor freshman. He arrived in Waco without fanfare and left equally uncelebrated, yet squeezed so much from his time on campus and fell so deeply in love with his alma mater that the experience came to define him in ways no one could have anticipated.
You might call Ken’s a freshman year for the ages.
While they went unheralded, we do know details of his time on campus; in fact, he made it his mission to meticulously record them. Ken had a lifelong passion for marking and honoring the passage of time: a love of history that would become a professional calling. At Baylor, this trait first emerged as a habit of saving and storing every memento of his adventures. His surviving scrapbook is thick with assorted flyers, photos, pithy game ribbons (Dunk the Methodists! Take the Starch out of Rice! Let’s Shoot the Bull!), tickets to Baylor events, a program from Van Cliburn’s campus concert, and keepsakes marking every campus and community activity imaginable. Hardly a single mid-century Baylor tradition is overlooked.
Instead of joining join a fraternity, Ken formed his own with three Brooks roommates who’d become fast friends. Calling themselves The Frogger Brotherhood, a TCU-inspired nickname for cringeworthy blunders, the group appointed Ken to compile a record of their most notorious snafus in a notebook called The Frogger Logger (epigraph: “semper froggus”). Quotable examples include the day one unnamed Frogger, whose Baptist upbringing had never acquainted him with the word “castration,” blithely pestered a history professor into defining the term for the whole class.
The Frogger Brotherhood became inseparable, and Ken was appointed its Master Frogger. Later, as campus crushes turned into dates, then girlfriends, fiancées, and wives, these too would become full-fledged members. The young women came to appreciate the benefits of self-deprecating humor on the tenuous maturity of college males.
In light of Ken’s love of history, it’s hardly surprising that the first and only Baylor coed to capture his heart was one with a singular narrative of her own. Jeannette Davis of Dallas, a cute and petite young Dallasite, had lost her father at a young age to World War II. In honor of her loss, Jeannette was awarded an AMVETS scholarship in the amount of $1,000 – a sum that, in those days, represented a full-ride to Baylor. Jeannette was handed her check by none other than President Truman in the Oval Office, and spent the remainder of her visit being shown around the Capitol by her congressman and a vice president named Richard Nixon.
Ken spotted Jeannette one Sunday night at First Baptist Waco, when she was introduced with first-time guests. On first sight, he was determined to win her heart. While quite bashful and lacking in courtship strategy, Ken knew he had a weapon to deploy: that roomy, red and white Chevy station wagon. Most underclassmen and women did not own cars, so he enlisted a Tahoka friend to round up some Collins girls, Jeannette included, for a Durham-chauffered trip to Friday night movies. Week by week, the roster of volunteering girls mysteriously dropped by one – until only Jeannette remained. Ken feigned disappointment at the attrition of his driving service, while privately celebrating the outcome of his less-than-subtle ploy. He’d secured a date with his chosen girl – without the awkwardness of asking her out.
Despite Ken’s timidity, he and Jeannette became an item, and soon a devoted couple. Like so many before and since, they painted every corner of Baylor’s campus with their romantic milestones. Friends still recall the sight of him dutifully waiting in the back of Miller Chapel for Jeannette to finish choir practice and take the short walk with him across Founder’s Mall to Memorial. There they lingered on the outer bench before saying their awkwardly prolonged good-byes.
A year later, during a visit to Cameron Park, Ken presented Jeannette with a six-inch-high stuffed kangaroo, complete with a baby in its pouch. Taken aback by the odd choice, and noticing a certain agitation in Ken’s demeanor, she fumbled with the gift and failed to deduce its meaning until he grudgingly urged her to give the baby a second look.
After her first tug she glanced up at him. “Is that what I think it is?”
He rolled his eyes with the frustration of a thwarted romantic. “Why don’t you open it and find out?”
Ken graduated from Baylor in 1960 with a bachelor’s degree in History and Education, but the joy of completion and the sadness of leaving his beloved campus were eclipsed by the separation they imposed on he and his fiancée. A year’s age gap delayed the wedding while Jeannette finished her bachelor’s and Ken pursued his master’s at East Texas State University. (Yes, it’s now Texas A&M Commerce, but out of respect for Ken, that fact is best overlooked. The university’s change in affiliation nearly gave Ken a stroke when he learned that his “second alma-mater” had been absorbed into Aggieland.)
The miles apart would force Ken and Jeannette to delay their wedding by nearly a year, an ordeal now documented in a box-full of love letters filled with the angst and longing of true love frustrated by distance and obligation. These too would spend decades neatly preserved, stashed away in a pristine and discreet cardboard box.
Ken and Jeannette did finally marry in 1961, and Ken went on to earn a Ph.D. from North Texas State. They soon settled in Longview, where Ken became a history professor at LeTourneau University and Jeannette embarked on a long career as an elementary schoolteacher. They raised three sons who became active Baptist laypersons – one even went to Baylor. Ken would publish a centennial history of LeTourneau, a definitive history of Santa Anna’s 28 days as a Texan Army captive, and a biography of Baptist historian William Edwards Paxton. He would even publish the story of his own father’s fight against community racism to help a black student named Andrew Nance graduate after the town’s “colored” high school had closed in the wake of desegregation.
But through the busyness of those ensuing decades, the hold of that freshman year never wavered. Ken and Jeannette made frequent trips to Baylor homecomings and football games. They marked countless reunions with the Brotherhood, whose bonds had deepened into those of lifelong best friends. Their son David even roomed at Penland with the son of another Frogger, prompting a Lariat article about the unusual pairing of roommates and sons-of-roommates, and the enduring bonds of Baylor kinship.
Ken eventually retired and had settled into a life of church volunteering and being Grandpa to his twelve grandchildren when there came a series of startling mental lapses. The word “dementia” soon followed. For a man who had devoted so much care to compiling and preserving history, it seemed like a particularly cruel old-age affliction – but Ken did not complain. He simply doubled down on the memories he loved most.
Aware that time was running out, he and Jeannette made a final, nostalgic return to Baylor. Accompanied by son John – who was still atoning for having attended Texas Tech and trying to live down his Red Traitor nickname – they ambled through the heart of campus, recounting their favorite memories with quiet, halting words. They posed at their favorite tree swings, alcoves and sightlines: the front of Pat Neff, the feet of Judge Baylor, the steps of Tidwell and Memorial. So much had changed, of course. The other Froggers were now deceased. Parts of campus were unrecognizable from the version that had once been the backdrop of their lives. Yet traces of their adventures and misadventures still crisscrossed the landscape.
It was enough.
This is where Ken’s ties to Baylor take their most noteworthy turn.
For the next – and last – two years of his life, Ken woke up each morning free of the disorientation, confusion, and anguish that so often accompanies late-stage dementia. He greeted his days with an untroubled smile, his thinning features beaming with the certainty that despite all appearances, he was not actually in an East Texas memory care facility.
Ken’s heart, soul, and mind, had returned to Brooks Hall and the year 1956. Mentally and emotionally, he had reinhabited the body of a Baylor freshman.
Everything else was gone. The historian had forgotten every bit of the knowledge he’d gathered and shared about Texas and Baptist lore and his prodigious trove of random, arcane facts. When shown his book on Santa Anna and asked if he remembered writing it, Ken shrugged.
Dementia would eventually, one by one, steal the names of sons and grandchildren. Jeannette herself came to elicit little more than a vague smile.
Finally, it claimed even Ken’s memory of his own name.
At the end, the one enduring core of Ken’s consciousness, his final hold on eight decades of living, was his rekindled experience of that freshman year. For him, the figures bustling around him were clearly not nurses or aides or visiting sons or beloved wife, but fellow Baylor freshmen rushing to prepare for class. His every visitor was greeted by a bright yet preoccupied grin.
Don’t have much time to talk this morning – I have to make it to Chapel!
Did you study for that history test? I stayed up half the night…
I’m fine! I have quite a courseload, but loving it!
What about you?
Why the long face? It’s almost spring break!
For his final Halloween, Ken dressed up as a Baylor fan. John brought a green and gold baseball cap, T-shirt, knee-blanket, and pennant, and it was like the mere of touch of green and gold was enough to trigger Ken’s widest grin in ages. Like a true freshman, Ken wore the baseball gap backwards and took one of his final photographs, still wearing that undimmed smile.
John also brought up a cherished possession: Ken’s frayed old freshman slime cap. To his surprise, Ken grinned with recognition. His father held it, tried in vain to flop it over his head, but waning motor skills would not allow. Instead, he raised it up for a long look.
John noticed the word slime scrawled inside, and asked if this had been his freshman nickname. Ken shook his head and uttered words for the first time in days.
“It’s what they called all the freshmen.”
They would be the last coherent words John would hear his father speak.
At the end of our lives, after all physical evidence of our passage has faded, memories are all that remain. They lie hardwired inside us, encoded by our brains into the mystery of the human mind. And it’s no small wonder that when dementia cruelly steals them from an ailing brain, memories tend to vanish in order of the joy they gave us.
The last one to endure is usually the most beloved.
Ken was allowed to inhabit his. His fellow Bears understand why. Nothing matches the wonder and discovery of the transformative first year. The word “fresh” truly belongs in the name because it’s the most bracing breath of fresh air many of us experience. It’s that first lungful of freedom beyond the cocoon of family and childhood. Our inaugural gulp of independence, exploration, and discovery. Our initial introduction to the person we’re meant to become.
That’s why, in his final months, Ken didn’t just return to his college days. He re-kindled the glow of a new identity in a new location with a bright new future. It was a blessed way to spend one’s last days on earth.
Ken’s perpetual freshman year was given a peaceful ending: an afternoon nap, Jeannette’s hand clasped in his, from which he did not awaken. The Durham family wonders if somehow, where he is now, Ken isn’t a freshman all over again.
