Personal Hook

I still tell the story.

About a university president who somehow kept up with thousands of students before computers could do it, who followed their progress before Twitter could do it, who talked to them face-to-face before Facebook pretended to do it, who invited them into his home socially every week to network with each other and faculty before social networks claimed to do it.

About a Memphian, via Milan, who cleaned fish and told jokes in a frat house kitchen to 20 guys, and when he looked at any one of them, he turned 25,000 students into one.

He made it personal, and that makes it last a lifetime.

From an article in Tennessee Alumnus, January, 2012, and as published in The Daily News, January 6, 2012, and in The Memphis News, January 7-13, 2012

CAUGHT FOR LIFE.

At five o’clock on a Sunday morning in 1969 the phone in the frat house rang. When a phone rings at that time on that day in a frat house, it’s a wrong number, bad news, or somebody calling for bail money. This call was for me.

“Dan?” said the voice. “This is Andy Holt.”

Andy Holt. A voice equal parts molasses and grits, a wit sharp enough to shave with, and a personality warm enough to take the chill out of anybody or any room. A speaker and storyteller so mythically gifted, he could open both the minds and wallets of state and federal legislators. As in Dr. Andrew D. Holt. As in President of the University of Tennessee. On my frat house phone. Talking to me.

“Yeah, right,” I coughed through the bale of cotton behind my teeth. “Who the hell is this?”

“Wake up, son. This is Andy Holt and we’re going fishing. I’ll pick you up in 15 minutes.”

Andy Holt made it his business to meet as many students as he could. If he already knew your family, he would make it a point to spend some time with you before you graduated. During his salad days as a teacher and administrator at the West Tennessee State Teachers College, now the University of Memphis, he became a close friend of my godfather and one of my uncles.

I didn’t know that, but Andy Holt did. So 15 minutes after I hung up the phone, found a pair of jeans in the third pile on the right and made it out onto the porch, he docked a battleship of a Buick out front, threw open the door, handed me a bacon sandwich and set sail for some pond somewhere in west Knoxville.

We sat on the bank and caught, give or take, three million bream. They were standing in line. We talked about my family, about football, about Vietnam, about girls, about raising chickens and changing majors and the Grateful Dead. And we laughed. A lot.

Then, in what was already a remarkable morning, he did something remarkable.

He drove back to the house, grabbed the big cooler full of fish, and told me to wake everybody up and meet him in the kitchen. In the next hour or so he taught the 20 or so zombies I was able to raise how to clean bream, how to tell a good story, and how to make an impression that lasts a lifetime.

He wasn’t a university president, former national president of the NEA or Columbia Ph.D. He was Andy from Milan, hanging with some buddies.

This isn’t about UT. It’s about the difference between personal contact and cell phones, emails, texts and tweets. None of those existed, and yet this busy man found one ordinary kid among 25,000 and personally turned college into an extraordinary experience.

And I still tell the story. And still write checks.

I’m a Memphian, and I’ve been fishing with Andy Holt.