When I was ten years old, my maternal grandmother, Velma Ray Kay Hugghins, was driving me to the store when she turned toward me with a seriousness I had never seen before.
“In 2045,” she began, “there is a time capsule on Baylor’s campus that will be opened 100 years after it was sealed. I put a yearbook inside it when I was a college student. I won’t be alive when they open it, but you will be. Promise me you’ll be there that day.”
I did not yet understand history, or inheritance, or the weight of unfinished stories. But I promised her, and I sealed the moment in my memory.
She died less than five years later. The promise remained.
Only later did I understand that my grandmother belonged to Baylor’s Centennial Class of 1945 — the only class of students to attend Baylor for the entirety of America’s participation in World War II, from the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 until the surrenders of Germany and Japan in 1945. But they were more than a commemorative cohort. They were the hinge between sacrifice and renewal — the generation that held the door open for the rest of us.
Many years later, I learned that the item she placed in the centennial time capsule was a copy of the 1945 Round Up yearbook. She was the managing editor of The Round Up that year, and the editor-in-chief was a student named James Leo Garrett who eventually became a renowned American theologian.
According to an oral history interview my grandmother gave in 1982, James Leo was the one responsible for proposing the structure of the centennial volume to be divided into three distinct movements: “Baylor of the Past,” “Baylor of the Present,” and “Baylor of the Future.” It was a fitting structure for a class standing at such an important juncture in Baylor’s history.
To understand the Class of 1945, we must begin where they began — not with war, but with inheritance.
Baylor of the Past
Baylor was chartered in 1845, the same year Texas entered the Union. By the time my grandmother arrived on campus in the fall of 1941, the University had already endured the Civil War, Reconstruction, relocation, fire, World War I, the financial uncertainties of the Great Depression, and the slow maturation of a frontier college into a national institution.
She and her approximately 2,500 centennial classmates inherited a university founded by early Baptist visionaries such as Judge R.E.B. Baylor, William Milton Tryon, and James Huckins, who imagined a Christian university on Texas soil.
The 1940s were a time when every student on campus had an evening curfew of 7 p.m., and young women were required to wear hose if they were going out on a date. You could be expelled for cutting chapel more than three times, and young women were expelled if they were caught smoking.
Very few students — with the exception of the very wealthy — had a car. Students walked to their local churches on Sunday mornings. Even their yearbook had church membership photos in it. Football games were not played in a stadium, but on Carroll Field, which sat in the area where the Student Union Building stands today. There were no TVs, no fast food restaurants, and no hum of Interstate 35.
On their way to class, the centennial class walked past the recently completed Pat Neff Hall, its chimes ringing from the tower linking daily life on campus to ritual and tradition, as they still do today. They attended chapel at 10 a.m. every day, where President Pat Neff himself was known to be present, linking administrative authority to spiritual formation. They studied in the F.L. Carroll Library, in Tidwell Bible classes that would one day find a permanent home in the Tidwell Bible Building envisioned in their yearbook’s master plan. They conducted research in the Strecker Museum and pored over rare volumes in the Browning Collection, whose future library building was still being imagined and funded.
For my grandmother, Baylor’s past was not abstract. Her own father, a devoted educator, had graduated in 1921. Family names that now mark dormitories — Kokernot, Alexander, Martin — were family friends of hers while growing up.
The Baylor of the Past gave the centennial class roots. They were not simply students passing through. They were inheritors and stewards of a 100-year-old institution. In honoring the Baylor of the Past, they were not indulging nostalgia. They were drawing strength from continuity, knowing that whatever storms the present might bring, they stood within a tradition that had already endured.
Baylor of the Present
On the morning of December 7, 1941, campus life fractured. In Brooks Hall, freshmen who had been worrying about examinations and weekend games gathered around crackling radios, listening to news about the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Among them was my maternal grandfather, John Allen Hugghins, 18 years old, newly arrived, still learning the geography of campus. Within months, he and many of his classmates would trade textbooks for uniforms and leave their studies in those red-brick corridors for ships, cockpits, and foxholes.
And many of them would not return.
Enrollment shifted dramatically. Letterman jackets gave way to military khaki. Classrooms once filled with young men preparing for law or medicine were increasingly sustained by women who assumed new responsibilities. Wartime shortages touched everything from paper supplies to construction schedules. The Student Union Building, begun before the war, stood incomplete on the former Carroll Field, its progress slowed by global conflict.
Still, campus life did not collapse.
Young women organized, governed, and preserved the rhythms of student life. Having been the valedictorian of her high school, my grandmother became the first woman to serve as president of the Baptist Student Union during those years, stepping into leadership while so many young men were overseas. She was named to “Who’s Who,” was an active leader in her sorority Alpha Omega (now Pi Phi), and was a member of Dr. A.J. Armstrong’s literary club Sigma Tau Delta.
As managing editor of The Round Up, my grandmother documented a campus suspended between absence and anticipation. But the 1945 yearbook does not read like a chronicle of despair. It reads like a testament to resilience. Photographs in the yearbook show that life went on, learning continued, and rituals and traditions were honored.
But beneath the composure runs an undercurrent of ache.
Young men from Baylor were now across oceans, dying. My maternal grandfather, who was only recently enjoying freshman life in Brooks Hall, now found himself as commanding officer of the ship LSM-201, which was an active ship at the Battle of Iwo Jima and appeared in Time magazine. He wrote a book of poetry during the war, which he later shared with Dr. Armstrong when he returned to Baylor.
Decades later, when my grandfather was in his 80s, he drove back to Waco before the original Brooks dormitory was demolished. He asked me to meet him beneath its archway to hear his stories. He stood there with a mixture of pride and grief, remembering the 18-year-old boys who had once rushed through those doors with him — boys who never returned to marry, to hold grandchildren, or to finish the degrees they had begun. He thought of them every day of his life.
The Baylor of the Present was not carefree collegiate life. It was leadership without certainty. Scholarship under shadow. Laughter in dormitories haunted by empty beds.
The members of the centennial class carried those absences into commencement, and yet they did not allow the University to falter.
They edited their yearbook. They raised funds. They rehearsed plays. They studied in libraries. They worshiped and prayed. And they graduated.
If the Baylor of the Past gave them roots, Baylor of the Present demanded their courage. The centennial class met that demand not with spectacle, but with fidelity — to one another, to their studies, to their country, and to a university that needed them to hold steady while the world convulsed.
Even in that season of upheaval, they chose not merely to survive history, but to commemorate it.
The Centennial Class and the Time Capsule
In 1945, at the heart of Founders Mall, the centennial class sealed a time capsule in an act of defiant hope. Pat Neff Hall stood at one end of the mall, and Waco Hall framed the other.
Inside the capsule were artifacts of a campus that had endured blackout drills, rationing, and wartime chapel services. Among those items was the green-bound Round Up yearbook placed there by my grandmother, its embossed cover bearing the weight of a century. As managing editor, she had helped record the names and faces and moments of a class that studied while heartbreaking telegrams arrived as classmates fought on distant beaches and battlefields.
The centennial class graduated into a world altered by loss. And yet, they understood something profound: institutions endure because dedicated people decide they will. By sealing their yearbook beneath the soil, they were speaking forward to generations they would never meet. They believed that Baylor’s story did not end with sacrifice. They believed that the richest chapters of Baylor’s story still lay ahead. They wrote as much in their centennial yearbook in a language that feels less like optimism and more like covenant. Having endured global war, they could have been forgiven for caution. Instead, they sealed the time capsule and entrusted the future to students not yet born.
The following year in October 1946, dozens of lampposts were dedicated to memorialize the Baylor students who had sacrificed their lives in the war. My maternal grandparents, then newlyweds and dorm directors of Kokernot Hall, attended the dedication ceremony. I can only imagine the weight in the room, especially for young men like my then-23-year-old grandfather who had survived when so many of his classmates had not. For him, the glow of the lampposts on campus was not merely ceremonial. It was consecration.
Baylor of the Future
The most audacious section of the 1945 Round Up was not the Past or even the Present. It was the Future.
In those pages, printed while ships were still at sea and Europe still smoldered, the student editors published campus master plans. They envisioned completion of the Student Union Building — lounges and meeting rooms to foster fellowship. They projected the Tidwell Bible Building, honoring decades of instruction and affirming the centrality of Christian scholarship. They described expanded library facilities, graduate programs, scientific laboratories equipped for modern research, and an academic standard equal to the foremost universities in the land.
They urged Baylor to take the long look.
They called for broader curricula, professional schools, strengthened graduate study, and facilities that would support both faith and inquiry. They imagined a university that would produce not only ministers, but statesmen, scientists, diplomats, teachers, and scholars.
It was a remarkable document — students in wartime sketching blueprints for peace and prosperity.
Much of what they envisioned came to pass. The Student Union Building would eventually open and become a center of campus life. The Tidwell Bible Building would rise. The Armstrong Browning Library would stand as a monument to the spirit of scholarship. Graduate programs would expand. Research laboratories would modernize. Baylor would grow into the complex, nationally recognized university that the class of 1945 imagined.
They did not live to see every fulfillment. But they built in faith.
Concentric Circles
For my family, the future unfolded in concentric circles.
After graduation, my grandmother completed her master’s degree and taught for a couple of years in Baylor’s English department — the same department in which I now teach today. She was even there in 1947 when President Pat Neff presented an honorary degree to Harry Truman in Waco Hall.
She soon moved to Houston with my grandfather, and, for the next 50 years, my grandmother’s main project besides raising a family was tracing our family’s genealogy with the same discipline she once applied to Browning scholarship under her original thesis supervisor Dr. Armstrong. She followed our lineage back through the Republic of Texas and beyond to the earliest European settlers in North America at the Jamestown settlement.
The fruition of her half century of research — an intricate family tree with hundreds of members — now hangs on the wall in my home. She believed in long stories. She believed in the responsibility of inheritance.
Decades later, on the other side of my family, my paternal grandfather, Herbert Hal Reynolds, would serve as Baylor’s president from 1981 to 1995, his office housed in Pat Neff Hall overlooking Founders Mall. Coincidentally, in the 1990s, the rose gardens dedicated to my paternal grandmother, Joy Copeland Reynolds, were planted on each side of the centennial time capsule which my maternal grandmother had helped seal half a century before.
Neither woman could have imagined that their lives would converge at the heart of that place — one having placed a centennial yearbook beneath the soil, other tending blooms above it. Nor could they have imagined that I, their grandson, would stop there each day on my way to teach class, or kneel to propose to my future wife nearby in Armstrong Browning Library, or bring my daughters to smell their great-grandmother’s roses and press their small hands against the stone of the time capsule as they ask what lies inside.
The capsule has recently been moved to a new location between the Carroll Science Building and the Student Union Building. Even so, every semester I still take my students outside the walls of my classroom to view the time capsule and to meditate upon the inscriptions on the lampposts in Founders Mall and in the Quadrangle. I tell them about the centennial class that steadied through war, about the lampposts that glow for the fallen, and about a green yearbook waiting for light.
2045
In 2045, Baylor will mark 200 years since its charter and one hundred years since the end of World War II.
When the earth opens and the time capsule is removed, the centennial class will no longer be present to witness its reappearance. But the fruits of their faith will be. Hands not yet born when the capsule was sealed will lift its contents into the light. The green-bound Round Up will emerge, its pages bearing the faces of students who studied beneath wartime skies. Ink that once felt contemporary will feel archival. Names once spoken daily will become history.
But the centennial class did not bury their yearbook as relic. They buried it as promise. Because they believed students should inherit more than buildings.
When the centennial time capsule is opened, it will not simply mark the passage of 100 years. It will testify to a courageous generation that held steady while the world quaked — and who, in the midst of uncertainty, chose hope.
I made a promise once, as a child, to be there when it is opened.
In 2045, I intend to keep that promise — not only for my grandparents, but for the Centennial Class of 1945 who believed that the future was worthy of their faith and that the richest chapters in Baylor’s story still lay ahead.
When that green yearbook is lifted into the light, it will not simply represent a class that endured war. It will represent a generation that believed in classrooms not yet built, in children not yet born, and in promises not yet fulfilled.
They held the door open for us.
It is our turn to walk through — and to keep it open still.
