Editor’s Note: As we gear up to celebrate 60 years of this tradition with you, let’s take a moment to remember some of the best of our previous Distinguished Alumni with Hall of Fame: Rewind. We hope you’ll enjoy reading about our outstanding alumni honorees from the past who shape the ranks of honorees of the future. The 2010 class highlighted in this Classic article represents the diverse paths Bears will take to fling their green and gold afar. Click here to watch interviews and speeches from previous Hall of Fame events, or click here to learn more about his year’s event and honorees.
On Friday, January 15, 2010, four remarkable Baylor graduates—Dr. James C. Kroll, Dr. Rebekah Ann Naylor, Bob R. Simpson, and Robert C. Zamora—will receive the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Baylor Alumni Association during a black-tie banquet in the Cashion Academic Center on the Baylor campus.
Presented annually since 1965, the award has honored governors and scientists, artists and denominational leaders, and educators and entrepreneurs. By earning the praise of their peers and colleagues, this year’s recipients—representing the fields of wildlife biology, medicine, business, and education—have brought honor to their alma mater.
Join us as we, in turn, honor their achievements as members of the Baylor University alumni family.
Dr. James C. Kroll ’69, MS ’70
Director of the Columbia Regional Geospatial Service Center and Henry M. Rockwell Professor of Forestry, Stephen F. Austin State University
What do the boy who collected frogs and snakes on his grandparents’ farm in Waco and the man who was key to the Columbia space shuttle recovery mission have in common?
If you guessed deer, you are correct.
Dr. James Kroll, widely known as “Dr. Deer,” is a regular contributor to the Sportsman’s Channel, the Men’s Channel, and to Texas Hunter’s and North American Whitetail magazines. And by the end of next year, he’ll have his own show on the Outdoor Channel, Dr. Deer’s World.
Kroll grew up in Waco, spending a lot of time watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, playing on his grandparents’ farms (both sets lived nearby), and hanging out with biology professors at Baylor. He wasn’t even out of the third grade before he decided he wanted to be a wildlife biologist.
“Everybody always thought I was odd,” he said. “I was always out catching frogs and snakes and bringing them home, raising them in the backyard.”
Later, people let him put radios on animals. Eventually, as he grew older, others gave him his own wildlife program, letting him create his own curriculum and research program. And they listened to him dream about concepts that would later become GIS (geographical information system) technology—once computers caught up with his ideas.
Kroll earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Baylor University, then a PhD from Texas A&M University in 1973. Stephen F. Austin State University, however, is where Kroll has spent most of his career. He arrived at the school in 1973, and in 1975 he became director of the Institute of White-tailed Deer Management and Research at the university’s College of Forestry and Agriculture. In 1997, he became director of the new Forest Resources Institute at the university, and in 2004 he was named director of the Columbia Regional Geospatial Service Center.
Although Kroll has always had his hands in many things, he goes by Dr. Deer for a reason. “Everyone is interested in deer hunting,” he says of his more than three-decade-long specialty in the animal. “I had seen what potential there was for institutes, but I wanted to have it be more than just a professor doing research on whatever he felt like doing. I wanted a research program based on people’s needs.”
What people—specifically landowners—needed to know was how to manage deer. So he went about teaching them, whether in the classroom or on television.
The idea behind the Forest Resources Institute (FRI) was to gather all the information about forestry, forest research, and wildlife and make it available on a database for anyone who needed it. But, he was told, computers can’t do that.
Kroll’s vision for the FRI was three-fold: assisting economic development, resource management, and landowners. Ultimately, he wanted to add a fourth area: supporting emergency management and planning. The satellite imagery and maps Kroll needed for his previous research seemed obviously important in an emergency.
People were interested but not enough to fund the idea. Then came September 11, 2001. Geospatial technology helped map the footprints of the buildings that fell in New York City. Soon after, Americans were watching GPS images of bombs in Iraq. Then, on February 1, 2003, the Columbia space shuttle fell from the sky, literally over Kroll’s house.
“In twenty-two minutes, we were mapping the debris and came up with a model of where the debris would be,” Kroll explains. “We accurately predicted where the crew cab would be. Suddenly, a concept was proven the hard way. I left home that morning at five minutes after eight, and I came back thirteen days later.”
Dr. Gary Kronrad, professor of resource economics at Stephen F. Austin, credits Kroll’s success with several personality traits. Kronrad said Kroll is tireless, energetic, personable, humble, charismatic, and a perfectionist. Early on, Kroll advised Kronrad to be an expert in one thing—to find his own white-tailed deer.
“Every student is a Dr. Deer-wannabe, but they don’t understand what it’s taken him to get there,” Kronrad says. “When he decides something’s worth doing, he does it perfectly. That’s what separates him from most people.”
Dr. Rebekah Ann Naylor ’64
Surgeon, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
Dr. Rebekah Ann Naylor refused to go to summer camp when she was growing up. It was too far away. She didn’t even like to go to parties, preferring instead to stay home with her parents.
But she never questioned going off to Baylor University at age sixteen. Same with becoming the first woman to graduate from the surgical program at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and moving to Bangalore, India, where she would spend almost three decades of her life.
“I was thirteen when I really felt that God was calling me into medical missions,” Naylor remembered. “So from then onward, I was really directed toward that goal and preparing for it.”
Passion mixed with practical preparation and hard work—that pretty much sums up Naylor’s career.
She moved to Fort Worth when she was eight, living with her parents and two older brothers. When she was eleven, she traveled with her parents to Europe and Egypt, her first peek into the world of poverty. At thirteen, she decided she would be a medical missionary but didn’t concern herself too much with the where and the how.
After graduating from Baylor in 1964, Naylor went to medical school, graduating from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. She spent the summer before her senior year at a Baptist hospital in Thailand working with a surgeon. It was there, at age twenty-three, that she decided surgery would be the route to her medical mission future.
“I realized I just loved it—loved the operating room, loved doing things with my hands, seeing patients immediately improved or cured. I went back to school that fall and said, ‘This is what I’m going to do.'”
On her way home from Thailand, she stopped by India to visit a rural hospital that had been started by a missionary doctor in 1901. She’d read about this doctor as a child and had always wanted to visit the hospital.
“I was in India for four days. It was hot, dirty, crowded. So many people looked hopeless. The only time I got sick the whole summer was in India. And I said, ‘When I get out of this place, this is it. I’m so glad I saw it, but I don’t want to come back.'”
In an entire world of need, she never could have known that the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board would appoint her to serve at the Bangalore Baptist Hospital in Bangalore, India.
When she was appointed to India, she did what she always does. She went.
“I just assumed that’s what God directed, and, indeed, certainly it was,” she said. “But I thought, ‘Oh, no.’ It was kind of like going off to college. This is what I was going to do. Turned out I lived there for twenty-eight years and worked for them from this side of the world for another seven years. It was a lifetime commitment I was making.”
Since returning to Fort Worth in 2002 to care for her aging mother, she has been the director of student education in the department of surgery as well as a professor and mentor at UT Southwestern Medical Center, where she did her residency in the early 1970s. Naylor, sixty-six, is the primary caretaker for her mother, who is now one hundred years old.
This year, however, she’s taking her career in a new—or, actually, an old—direction, as a health care consultant with Baptist Global Response.
Camille Hornbeck, author of Rebekah Ann Naylor, M.D., Missionary Surgeon in Changing Times, is thrilled to see Naylor getting back to mission work. Hornbeck, who read each of the forty-seven hundred or so letters Naylor wrote to her parents during her adult life, feels it is Naylor’s “commitment to the call” that makes her friend and biographical subject different.
“She is a focused, energetic, and committed person,” Hornbeck said. “She thinks logically, linearly. She sets her goals and systematically achieves them.”
While beginning her career with the Baptist Global Response in January, she still maintains close ties with the hospital in India and looks forward to a long visit there in the future.
“My work there,” she says, “is not done.”
Bob R. Simpson ’70, MBA ’71
Chair and Founder of XTO Energy Inc.
Bob Simpson, chair of the board and founder of Fort Worth-based XTO Energy Inc., grew up the youngest of four brothers on a ranch near Cisco, a town of about four thousand located more than a hundred miles west of Fort Worth. From this modest beginning, Simpson rose to become the leader of one of the world’s largest independent energy companies.
Simpson has been listed several times on Barron’s magazine’s list of the world’s best CEOs, most recently in March 2008. Under his leadership, XTO showed a five-year profit growth of 44 percent and outsmarted the major oil companies, according to the article. He retired as the company’s CEO in 2008.
He may not be a household name like Warren Buffett or Steve Jobs, but the folks at Barron’s were impressed with Simpson’s potential: “Simpson has long shown up to work in cowboy boots,” Barron’s reported. “He also raises cattle and likes to kick back on his Texas ranch with his family, which includes the actress Jessica Simpson [his niece]. But he’s fast becoming a star in his own right.”
Simpson attended Baylor University on an academic scholarship and worked at Merrill Lynch to help pay the bills. “My job was at Merrill Lynch, where my early passions resided,” Simpson has said. “My early observations of Wall Street operations gave me a broad understanding of how capitalism works in our economy.”
Apparently, he learned his lessons well.
After graduating from Baylor, Simpson worked at Arthur Andersen, one of the Big Eight accounting firms. Then he went to Southland Royalty Company in Fort Worth, a publicly held oil and gas company. He started as the company’s tax manager, became vice president of corporate development, and was chief financial officer when the company went through a hostile takeover in 1985.
Within the next year, Simpson had co-founded Cross Timbers Oil Company, as it was then called, with seven employees. XTO Energy now has twenty-four hundred employees nationwide and is well respected for savvy acquisitions and production techniques that have kept the company growing in a way that Wall Street loves. In fact, the company became such a success story that in December 2009, Exxon Mobil bought XTO Energy in an all-stock deal worth $31 billion.
“We established the company with a vision of acquiring oil and gas production and hiring good people,” Simpson has said. “The philosophy revolves around people, doing things we like, with people we like. The vision is simple, and we have not changed it.”
Simpson and his wife, Janice, have seven children. The couple serves as co-chairs of events through the Careity Foundation, which raises funds for cancer research and services. And each year, XTO buys the grand champion steer at the Fort Worth Stock Show, the proceeds of which go to educational scholarships.
Simpson has also done much to help renovate downtown Fort Worth, including basing his company there. Oil and Gas Investor magazine named Simpson Executive of the Year in 2006, the same year Institutional Investor magazine named him one of the best CEOs in the country.
Doug Smith, assistant athletic director at Baylor, first met Simpson about five years ago when the athletic department started talking about moving its offices from Floyd Casey Stadium. In December 2008, due in part to Simpson’s financial support, the department moved into the Alwin O. and Dorothy Highers Athletics Complex and the Simpson Athletics and Academic Center, a 96,300-square-foot state-of-the-art facility along the Brazos River.
Simpson’s son, Blake, is a junior at Baylor and a backup deep snapper on the football team. The Simpson family has a skybox at the stadium and never misses a home game. “He’s a philanthropist through and through and cares deeply about Fort Worth and Baylor,” Smith said. “He’s a great gentleman, and I stress that. He’s a great gentleman who is very sincere and a great person to be around.”
What makes Simpson a success? Many things, according to Smith, including intelligence, an appreciation for teamwork, and a sense of humor.
Simpson describes himself as a shy Baylor student who watched people and thought about his core beliefs. “My mother, Mina, taught me the importance of quiet learning and often quoted Abraham Lincoln on the value of keeping your own counsel: ‘It is better to be silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.’ Many solid people go about doing what they should be doing in life without making a big fuss about it.”
Robert C. Zamora ’65
Retired superintendent, South San Antonio ISD
Robert Zamora was an athlete. An impressive one, but one who never intended to go to college.
That he became superintendent of South San Antonio ISD (known as South San) is a byproduct of a passion. The passion started with his non-English speaking, migrant farm-working parents.
Zamora was one of seven children of migrant workers who had only a few years of education. They moved where the crops took them: beets in Minnesota, cherries in Michigan. It would’ve been easy for his parents to not bother with education. But they usually found a way to get their kids to school, despite their constant movement. In Minnesota, for example, the kids went to a boarding school Monday through Friday.
“My dad worked during the day and went to night school to learn English,” Zamora says. “They came from the mentality that education was going to be the top priority for all of us because they didn’t get it. They saw the struggles they and other family members had.”
The farming stopped when Zamora was nine and one of his older brothers wanted to play sports. They moved back to Texas for good, and Zamora’s dad worked as a stone mason and bricklayer. His parents didn’t understand extracurricular sports, and Zamora’s older brothers often had to sneak out to play. By the time it was Zamora’s turn to play, they were accustomed to it.
Dutch Schroeder, Baylor’s baseball coach from 1962 to 1973, first met Zamora in 1958, when Zamora was playing baseball for South San High School. As a high school freshman, Zamora was already lead pitcher. The team had won the state championship, and Schroeder was asked to speak at the championship banquet.
“I met the entire Zamora family,” he remembers. “When he was just a ninth grader, Robert was already about six-foot-two or so. He was going to be a big boy. They won three out of four state championships while he was pitching for South San.”
Zamora was an all-state baseball and basketball player by the time he was a senior. So Schroeder and Carroll Dawson, Baylor’s basketball coach, came down to recruit him. Zamora assumed he would work on the local Air Force base, not go to college. But when Schroeder and Dawson came recruiting—especially from the Southwest Conference, which most impressed this young Texas athlete—he reconsidered.
Zamora came to Baylor—one of five Hispanics at the school at the time, as he remembers. Unfortunately, he hurt his shoulder during his freshman year and couldn’t pitch for Baylor. He stopped playing basketball after his first year but did play first base for the baseball team, which was ranked eighteenth in the nation. During summers, he worked at Baylor Stadium, watering and seeding the football field.
Just as he was about to graduate, Zamora got an offer to coach back in San Antonio. He hadn’t really thought about what he was going to do after college, but coaching sounded good. The PE major became head coach at South San High School, where his baseball team twice made it to the state finals. He was named Coach of the Year by the Texas High School Baseball Coaches Association in 1976, and twenty-one years later he entered that association’s Hall of Fame.
He eventually moved into administration, becoming an assistant principal, then principal, then assistant superintendent, and finally superintendent.
He retired in 2002 but continues to serve as an advisor to the South San ISD as associate superintendent, as the district keeps calling him back for more. In 2006, the Robert C. Zamora Middle School was christened in his honor.
He credits his many years in athletics for his success in administration. Sports taught him discipline, a strong work ethic, fairness, teamwork, and loyalty, he said. “Sports helped me in that you want to be fair, compassionate, and a good listener. Parents used to come and talk to me about their child. I wanted them to leave satisfied that the problems or issues they had when they came to talk to me were taken care of, because they wouldn’t have been there if they weren’t concerned.”
Zamora and his wife, Mary Helen, met in high school. She stayed near San Antonio and became a dental assistant while he was at Baylor. They have one son, who coaches in South San, and three grandchildren.
