This is Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry:

He was president of Samford University, some 143 years ago, two campuses and one name ago, when the place was still known as Howard College. The statue, seven feet tall and tipping the scales at a metric tonne, was delivered to Samford two years ago after a long tour in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol.

He was replaced there by Helen Keller, and so now he’s back on campus. Not that he’d know this place. Birmingham wasn’t even a town then.

Curry, was a Mexican War veteran, Alabama lawyer and member of the state legislature, the U.S. Congress, the Confederate Congress and an officer in the Confederate Army. Later he would become a Baptist preacher.

He was also a Horace Mann universal education disciple. Booker T. Washington proclaimed “There was no man in the country more deeply interested in the higher welfare of the Negro than Dr. Curry.”

Curry was appointed president of Howard College in 1865, where he served for three years. Later he was an ambassador to Spain.

The sculpture had been stained by tobacco smoke and marked by generations of U.S. Capitol visitors with pens, proving people are stupid. But he was cleaned for his return to Samford, where he is on display in the Beeson University Center. He has a (presumably) unauthorized and sadly dormant Twitter account. And, now, is wearing what is presumably a university sanctioned Christmas hat.

Had a nice conversation with the fiancee of a former student today. (She is designing at Oxmoor House here in town.) He is a storyteller. Check out some of his recent work.

HUG: Greece (4/4) from 1504 Pictures on Vimeo.

Among other things, he’s also working as a research assistant on the first authorized biography on Jerry Lee Lewis. Those will be interesting interviews.

That would be the tale you told at every gathering, if it happened to you. It was just another day in Jerry Lee’s world.

Just another fine day on campus for me as well. I taught about broadcast writing today, and focused on radio scripts. We’ll do television next week.

So I did the spiel, told some of my own war stories and showed written examples. We talked about the active voice and visual structure and actualities.

I gave them two stories from the paper to re-write as an exercise. “This one,” I said, “is probably a 30 second story. This one is probably 45 or 50 seconds. Write them out and read and time them.”

I wrote a version of the longer story. It was 42 seconds.

It has been almost eight years, but I’ve still got that clock in my head.