When 24-year-old Larry Story began teaching at what was Tarrant County Junior College in 1967, the sidewalks were not yet finished.
Almost six decades later, the community college has undergone a name change, expanded to five more campuses and enrolled more than a million students. Now at 83, Story is the last remaining founding faculty member. After 59 years of service, he is hanging up his hat.
“Everybody said, ‘You’ll know when it’s time to retire,’ and they’re right,” he said.
This spring semester will be the first time Story will not be in school in some capacity since he entered the first grade. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Arlington and a master’s from East Texas State University, now East Texas A&M, before immediately taking a teaching position at what is now Tarrant County College.
Story did not set out to teach this long, he said. He promised his wife, Judy, he would retire after his 50th year of teaching, planning for the two of them to spend more time together. But after she passed away during his 50th year, he continued.
“After that, I just thought, well, I’ve got nothing else to do, and so I just kept going,” he said.
The history professor has lived through a significant amount of history himself.
He recalls tension in classes where Vietnam War veterans and protestors learned side by side.
“That could get pretty volatile because the protesters had something to say, and the veterans, they didn’t want to hear it. They’d been through a lot,” he said.
He also taught during the Civil Rights Movement and remembers 1968, the year Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, as a particularly tough year.
Around this time, he taught alongside civil rights icon Reby Cary, who was a professor at the college before going on to serve as Fort Worth’s first Black school board member and as a Texas House member.
One particularly memorable moment came during a trip to Austin with colleagues for a Texas Junior College Teachers Association conference. The group made a stop at a diner.
When the waiters brought out the professors’ breakfasts, Cary’s toast was charred.
“They had burnt that toast to a charcoal patty, and we said, ‘We’re sending that back,’” Story said. “(Cary) said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘That won’t help.’ He said, ‘I’ve gotten used to it.’ So, we ate our toast and went on.”
Like many Americans, Story also remembers where he was on Sept. 11, 2001. He was in his faculty office when he heard about the terrorist attacks.
He did what he had done for the last 34 years — he went to class.
Story taught sections of Western civilization and United States history his entire career, but he never got bored teaching the same classes, he said.
He saw each of his more than 100 semesters as “its own little world.”
“Each class is different,” Story said. “It’s not the same job every semester because they’re new students, and my perspective on events changes, so I teach differently each semester.”
He taught at the college for so long that a student of one of his students became a faculty member alongside him, creating a lineage that can be traced similar to generations of family.
During the college’s first year, Story taught now-retired professor David Clinkscale, who later taught professor Armando Villarreal III.
“David told me, ‘This is the man that taught me. I taught you, so you are his academic grandson,” Villareal said.
Story does not have concrete retirement plans yet, but he has some ideas of how he will fill his time.
He is active in his church and can volunteer there. He enjoys visiting museums and presidential libraries. He may use his newfound freedom to travel.
“I have children and grandchildren scattered around the country, so I can go mooch off them, for a change,” he said with a laugh.
There was once a time when Story did not look forward to the break from the classroom that weekends brought.
But now, as he walks toward the world outside the sidewalks of the South Campus, he is excited to see where life will take him.
“There’s still things to do. There’s still things that I want to do,” he said.
McKinnon Rice is the higher education reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact her at mckinnon.rice@fortworthreport.org.
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Great Job McKinnon Rice & the Team @ Fort Worth Report for sharing this story.
