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. Dr. Kent Gilbreath says it best in this winter 2004 Classic article—Baylor is a cauldron of leadership. 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.
Each year, the Baylor Alumni Association bestows the prestigious Distinguished Alumni Award upon a few select graduates with remarkable stories of success, dedication, and service. These are people whose lives are compelling, exemplary, and sometimes even hard to believe—certainly for their level of professional achievement, but also for the depth of their commitment.
On January 24, 2004, four outstanding alumni will receive this award at a black-tie banquet in the Barfield Drawing Room of the Bill Daniel Student Center.
This year’s recipients—Joel Allison ’70; Carrol Dawson ’60; Kent Gilbreath ’67; and Betty Welch ’57—came from differing backgrounds and took diverse paths after graduating from Baylor. But what they have in common is a drive to excel, a passion to serve, and a rich Baylor heritage. Their stories are worth telling.
Joel Allison ’70
President and CEO, Baylor Heath Care System
Growing up on the family farm outside Jefferson City, Missouri, Joel Allison was up before five o’clock to do chores before heading off to school. These days, he arrives before five o’clock at the Tom Landry Fitness Center at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas to work out before beginning his day as the president and CEO of Baylor Health Care System.
His early life as one of four children from a country family differs vastly from his adult life in the executive office at one of the country’s premiere hospitals. But his values remain the same. On the family farm, Allison learned a lot about discipline, values, and responsibility from feeding the animals twice a day, milking the dairy cows, and bringing in wood to warm the house for his parents, two brothers, and sister.
Allison’s mother was the center of the family—the one who waited up for the kids at night when they went out, read stories to them, and made sure they went to Sunday school.
“She was the one who really wanted me to pursue college,” says Allison, who did just that and was the first in his family to earn a college degree. “As a strong Christian, she was a great influence in my life.”
Allison also credits his pastor and high school football coach for teaching him many of life’s important lessons. “They were role models and mentors for me,” he says. “My pastor showed me by example how to live a good, strong, Christian life, while my football coach taught me the importance of discipline, character, and dedication.”
After participating in basketball, football, and track in school, Allison came to Baylor on an academic-athletic scholarship. He married Diane Bailey Allison ’70 at the end of their junior year at Baylor. But the road to hospital administration wasn’t one Allison found quickly. His interests are varied, as can be seen by the books in his office, which include the Bible, Taking Care of E-Business, and The Sportsman’s Guide to Texas.
He started his college career majoring in religion and journalism. Allison assumed he was heading down the path toward ministry when he put on scrubs and went on a hospital tour with his brother-in-law for a photojournalism class. He immediately loved the energy in the hospital. On another occasion, he was touring a hospital when the person giving the tour mentioned that he’d offered the hospital administrator job to a man who had planned to go into the ministry.
“T’d never thought of the administrative side of health care,” Allison remembers. “I realized this may be the Lord calling me into health care.”
Allison earned a master’s degree in hospital administration from Trinity University in San Antonio. Before coming to Dallas in 1993 and rising to president/CEO in 2000, Allison held executive positions at Hendrick Medical Center in Abilene (where he did his administrative residency); Methodist Medical Center in St. Joseph, Missouri; Northwest Texas Hospitals/Amarillo Hospital District; and Driscoll Children’s Hospital in Corpus Christi.
“The people aspect of health care is what I really enjoy and find most rewarding,” he says. “It is very gratifying to know that Baylor, as a faith-based organization, is fulfulling its mission of providing safe, quality, compassionate care to the patients we serve.”
Dr. Gary Cook ’72, president of Dallas Baptist University, has known Allison for more than a decade. Cook says Allison’s approach to leadership should be more common—but isn’t. “He’s taken that call to the ministry and turned it into hospital administration ministry,” Cook says. “I really see him taking a different approach than most chief executive officers. He is a servant leader. We were taught not to lord over people but instead to be a servant to the people, which is what Jesus did. It’s difficult in administration, but I think that’s what he tries to do.”
Allison and his wife have three children, two grown boys and an eleven-year-old daughter. He teaches them the same lessons his mother, coach, and childhood pastor passed on to him: “Whatever you do, do it with a passion. Fulfill what God would have you do and make a contribution.”
“The people aspect of health care is what I really enjoy and find most rewarding.”
Carroll Dawson ’60
General Manager, Houston Rockets and Houston Comets
Everyone in Alba was poor in the 1940s and 1950s. They just didn’t know it, Carroll Dawson says of his childhood hometown.
Though his family didn’t have much money, Dawson’s mother—embarrassed that her children were playing ball with an empty syrup bucket filled with sand and wrapped in rags—bought him a $14 leather basketball for Christmas when he was eight years old.
“I had the only basketball in town,” remembers Dawson, who now serves as the general manager for the NBA’s Houston Rockets and the WNBA’s Houston Comets. “We used that thing for a basketball, for a football, and for every kind of ball.”
As a boy, Dawson worked on his family’s farm hauling hay and working the watermelon, cotton, and sweet potato fields. As far as sports went, his high school had slim pickings, with only sixteen boys among the thirty-six kids in school. “We could barely fill the basketball team,” he says. “Two of those boys had polio. We made one of them the manager. Everybody was involved.”
Dawson led the Alba High School boys’ basketball team to a 44-3 record his senior year, in 1956. He earned junior college all-America honors at Paris Junior College and all-Southwest Conference honors during his senior year as a basketball player at Baylor. In 1963, he returned to Baylor as assistant coach under Bill Menefee.
Dawson became head coach for Baylor basketball in 1973. He then joined the coaching staff of the Houston Rockets in 1980 and was inducted into the Baylor Athletics Hall of Fame in 1998. In February, he will be inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame. He has six championship rings—two with the Houston Rockets and four with the Houston Comets—and says he is most proud of being part of the Rockets team that, in 1994, brought the first NBA championship title to his home state.
“It’s a long way from Alba to Paris Junior College to Baylor to the general manager of the Rockets,” says Menefee, Baylor’s head basketball coach from 1962 to 1973 and later the university’s athletic director. Menefee helped recruit Dawson as a player, then later as a coach.
Dawson used to carry a deck of cards with him when he went recruiting for Baylor basketball. If the conversation lulled, he’d pull out that deck and do a card trick, instantly engaging the prospective player. Menefee says Dawson was always a hit with the players.
“He definitely was a presence,” says Tom Stanton, Baylor’s former director of athletics, whom Dawson recruited from high school. “He was six-foot-seven, had black hair, big long sideburns, and such an engaging personality.”
Dawson ended his thirty-eight-year coaching career after he was struck by lightning on a golf course in 1989. He lost one eye in the incident and “couldn’t even see to the other end of the court” with the other, so he moved to the front office. Later, he found another love—his wife, Sharon Strickland Dawson ’67, a former classmate from Baylor. The two married in 2000 after they were reunited at a Baylor football game.
“Basketball has allowed me to travel the world,” Dawson says. “We’ve played in Europe, Japan, and Mexico. Last year, I got to go to Chine to negotiate with the Chinese government to draft Yao Ming as our first-round draft pick.”
Dawson says he has Baylor to thank for his basketball career, education, early coaching career, lifelong friends, and his marriage. He appreciates the university’s solid Christian foundation: “I can remember in the 1960s when everybody was protesting, being radical, crazy, burning flags. Baylor was stable.”
Although Baylor has seen its share of instability this year—especially in the basketball program—Dawson says he has every confidence that his university and new head coach Scott Drew (whom Dawson knows well) will hold steady as it always has for him.
“A lot of people go to school and have a four-year experience. But to me, Baylor is a lifetime experience. It stays with you.”
“A lot of people go to school and have a four-year experience. But to me, Baylor is a lifetime experience.”
Kent Gilbreath ’67, MA ’68
Professor of Economics and The E. M. and Thelma Stevens Chair of Private Enterprise and Entrepreneurship, Baylor University
Dr. Kent Gilbreath’s introduction into the business world started at his dad’s general store in Valley Mills when he was about seven years old. These days, his résumé is nine pages long. Now an economics professor at his alma mater, Gilbreath earned a degree in economics with magna cum laude honors from Baylor in 1967 and completed a master’s degree in economics one year later. He went on to earn a doctorate in economics from the University of Florida in 1971.
Gilbreath, who is in his thirty-first year of teaching at Baylor, specializes in economic history, U.S.-Mexico relations, and energy and environmental economics. He has traveled around the world teaching international economics, served several terms as a board member of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and written Business and the Environment: Toward Common Ground, which was published by The Conservation Foundation.
But it all started in that little general store.
“The greatest experience that I had at my father’s store was meeting people from all walks of life,” Gilbreath says. “It was a rural Texas community. People were not typically highly educated, but they were generally very good people who cared about other people’s children and would be kind to them—help teach and support them.”
The high school football star helped read to his father’s illiterate customers, sometimes signing their checks for them because they couldn’t write. “At a very early age, I got used to dealing with people from all walks of life,” he remembers. “From working in my father’s store to serving on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank, I’ve dealt with people at both ends of the economic spectrum. What I’ve learned is that people are people; there’s really not all that much that separates us once we remove the income.”
Gilbreath has met people from around the world through his travels to Scotland, Ireland, England, East Africa, and Mexico, to name a few destinations. During his career, he spent some time involved in small business development on the Navajo Indian Reservation and wrote a book—titled Red Capitalism, An Analysis of the Navajo Economy—about the experience. “I learned a stillness,” Gilbreath says of his time with the Navajos. “I learned about reflection. I learned about enduring. And I learned about appreciating beauty.”
He met his wife, Shirley Nims Gilbreath ’68 of Santa Fe, New Mexico, at Baylor. Their first date was a “Coke date,” an old-fashioned take on getting a cup of coffee. They have two daughters.
Gilbreath’s sister, Betty Gilbreath Price ’59, remembers her brother as a boy—nine years her junior—reading encyclopedias because there was little else to read. “We didn’t have a library,” Price says. “But we were raised to explore and not to be afraid—to go out and do things. My dad had a ninth-grade education, but he was one of the smartest men I’ve ever known. And Kent just always had a thirst for knowledge. He wanted to know more and more and get further and further into other people’s ways of doing things.”
Lately, Gilbreath has gotten into the Baylor administration’s way of doing things. A series of essays he wrote, questioning the Baylor 2012 ten-year vision and the administration’s leadership, has contributed to the vigorous discussion about those topics on campus. But such questioning—such leadership—is what Baylor proudly produces, Gilbreath says.
“Baylor, to me, is a cauldron of leadership. We turn out a disproportionate number of leaders in our society. It’s the education and values that make students want to contribute.”
Another of Gilbreath’s specialties is testifying as a forensic economist in trials, assessing economic damages when a person is killed or injured. He’s worked on cases ranging from breast implants to airplane crashes. “I dealt with a case some years ago where a high school superintendent had been killed in a car wreck. I assessed the value of his lost income. A couple of years later, after one of my classes, a student walked up to me and said, ‘I’m here because the money we received in the case involving my father’s death allowed me to come here.’ It was one of those moments where you know you’re not just doing a calculation. You’re actually affecting people’s lives.”
“What I’ve learned is that people are people; there’s really not all that much that separates us once we remove the income.”
Betty Welch ’57
Linguist and Translator, Wycliffe Bible Translators
Betty Welch will never forget her first mud stove. In fact, she can still tell you how to build one if you’re interested.
She was first introduced to the mud stove during Jungle Camp in southern Mexico in 1961 at the age of twenty-six. After graduating from Baylor in 1957, she taught school for two years and then joined Wycliffe Bible Translators. Later, she earned a master’s degree in linguistics from the University of Michigan.
Welch spent three months at Jungle Camp training for her new career—translating the Bible for people groups that do not have it available in their own language. Specifically, Welch was beginning a lifetime career of analyzing and writing a previously unwritten language, and then translating the Bible for the Tucano people, who live in the Amazon rainforest of southeastern Colombia.
In addition to building a mud stove in Jungle Camp, Welch went on survival hikes, foraged for food from the jungle floor, developed a tolerance for bugs and snakes, and learned how to build a raft.
“It was a very stretching experience,” she says. “It was one of the highlights of my life. God did so much in that time.”
Welch first went to Colombia on September 2, 1962, and first came in contact with the Tucano people on July 13, 1963. Those were pivotal moments in her life, and she remembers the dates as clearly as her own birthday.
Welch’s mother, who was a French and Latin teacher, introduced the young girl to foreign languages. “I grew up looking at her Latin books,” she says. “I remember that when I was very young—probably before I could even read, I think—I would look at the pictures in her books. I dreamed of going to Rome, which I’ve never done. But that’s all right; I’ve been a lot of other places.”
Those early linguistic leanings took a new direction in 1956 when five missionaries were killed in Ecuador. That’s when Welch, then a Baylor student still finding her way, learned that the Bible as we know it didn’t exist in many parts of the world.
“That was the biggest turning point in my life,” Welch remembers. “I didn’t even realize that groups existed that didn’t have God’s Word. The Lord really burdened me at that time, even though it was still some years before I went that direction.”
Birdie West, Welch’s lifelong friend and co-worker from their early days in Colombia with the Tucanos, says seeing God at work in Welch was always easy. “Our work is not the kind of thing you decide on your own to do,” West says. “If we had gone under our own strength, I think we would have given up a long time ago.”
Welch and West are still working with the Tucanos. Their careers have meant books, including the New Testament, for the Tucanos in the villages where before there was only a spoken language. In the 1960s, they started creating an alphabet, and now they are creating an Old Testament abridgment and compiling a bilingual dictionary in Tucano and Spanish.
Although continued warfare in the country means they can no longer go to the villages, the Tucanos come to them in the capital of Bogotá.
At sixty-eight, Welch is planning her next trip to Colombia.
“I would not change my life,” she says. “It’s been such a wonderful, wonderful experience to get to know a group of people such as the Tucanos—to live with them and become part of their family.”
“I didn’t even realize that groups existed that didn’t have God’s Word. The Lord really burdened me at that time.”
