Be Nice To "Smarties." They Make Good Friends...

I am thinking of two smarties I have known nearly all my life.

One of those smarties is Bill Martin. We met at Abilene Christian College in 1954 and became fast friends. Immediately I became aware that he was a highly intelligent individual. But allow me to start at the beginning.

Patricia, the other smartie I have in mind, was the first of six children in the M. I. Summerlin family. Ike and Dorothy Summerlin lived in the Griffing Park addition in Port Arthur. Patricia was a Thomas Jefferson High School Yellow Jacket in Port Arthur during the early 1950s and graduated from there in 1955.

Patricia’s brother, Tim Summerlin, who taught at Lamar for a number of years and now is president of Schreiner University in Kerrville, is married to Mary Ellen Summerlin, former mayor of Port Arthur.

Anyway, my parents had been friends with Ike and Dorothy for years, mainly through church involvements. I was aware that Patricia existed but as a teenager I rarely left the confines of Beaumont to go out on dates.

During my high school senior year, however, I did have a date or two with Patricia. I would drive to her home in Port Arthur, pick her up and head back to Beaumont to see a movie at the Jefferson Theater. Then after a Coke at the Pig Stand, we would return to Port Arthur. I realized early on that Patricia was brilliant. She did not flaunt her intelligence but just being around her made the fact self-evident. The entire Summerlin family was intellectually gifted and they were a joy to visit. But that’s another story for another time.

I enrolled in Abilene Christian in 1953. Bill came along in 1954 and Patricia showed up on campus in 1955.

As mentioned at the outset, Bill was very intelligent. He had finished high school at Devine, Texas in 3 years and enrolled in college at age 16. There was one common element that drew us to be such close friends. Our senses of humor were very similar. Largely because of that, we became dorm roommates my junior year.

To make a longer story shorter, during my junior year Patricia and I resumed dating occasionally. She was aware that Bill was my roommate. He was making quite a name for himself in campus politics and general popularity. His humor column in the school newspaper fed all the more into his being well known by students and faculty alike.

I noticed that on my dates with Patricia, she always would get around to talking about Bill. In my mind I knew that Bill and Patricia closely matched intellectually. Finally I told Bill that Patricia would like to meet him. That bit of information seemed to pique Bill’s curiosity so then I told Patricia that Bill would like to meet her.

Finally they met and I was best man at their wedding a little over a year later. They were married in the old Procter Street Church of Christ building in Port Arthur.

Bill went on to earn his PhD from Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. In 1968, Bill and Patricia moved to Houston where Bill began teaching at Rice. He retired teaching at Rice in 2005 but remains as the Harry and Hazel Chavanne Senior Fellow in Religion and Public Policy at the Baker Institute. He has written for Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Esquire, Texas Monthly and in professional journals. He has written 7 books including “A Prophet with Honor: the Billy Graham Story” which is regarded as the authoritative biography of Billy Graham.

Patricia received her PhD in History from Rice in 1982. She subsequently worked with the School of Continuing Studies at Rice, and then became director of Academic Advising, then Dean, then Associate Vice-President of Academic Advising and Student Affairs. She instituted the Rice Student Volunteers Program, which involves huge numbers of Rice students, and she took a special interest in study abroad, raising the number of students who spent at least a semester abroad from two or three a year to several hundred.

I learned that you can make good friends with smarties. But the big lesson here is never to introduce your girlfriend to your roommate.

Winston Hamby
winhamby@gmail.com