Wake Forest Magazine, June 2009 - Past Issues - Wake Forest ...

Fredric T. Howard-
Professor of mathematics:
Unflagging
in his dedication to
teaching and research
Ask Fred Howard most any historical
baseball statistic, no matter how obscure,
and he’s quick with the answer. What major
league pinch hitter ended up in the Baseball
Hall of Fame despite a career batting average
of .000? That would be Walter Alston, who
played in exactly one game with the St. Louis
Cardinals, but who then went on to a successful
career as manager of the Brooklyn/
Los Angeles Dodgers for twenty years, which
earned him entry into the Hall of Fame.
Howard, who turned 70 the day before
Wake Forest’s commencement exercises on
May 18, is retiring as professor of mathematics
after what surely ranks as a Hall of Fameworthy
career: forty-three years teaching,
all at Wake Forest. “I was a child prodigy,”
he quips about his longevity. “The legendary
(baseball player) Casey Stengel lamented
growing old. He once said: ‘I will never make
the mistake of being 70 again.’ We can all
understand that sentiment.”
Howard’s love of baseball started when he
was growing up in Texas—his family lived
in Fort Worth, El Paso, and Abilene—and
continued into adulthood, when he began
collecting books on the history of baseball,
mostly pre-1970.
His family—his father was a chemical
engineer, his mother a Latin teacher and
homemaker—moved to Cullman, Alabama,
when he was in high school. He went to
college at Vanderbilt, intending to major in
English or history, but changed to mathematics
after making a 100 on his math final
exam his freshman year.
He went on to earn a master’s in mathematics
from Vanderbilt and then, in 1966,
his Ph.D. from Duke, where he met his
future wife, Gail, who was a graduate student
in English. He began teaching at Wake Forest
the same year and figured that he would stay
about ten years and move on. “But I liked
Fredric T. Howard
it so much and fit in so well that I decided to
stay,” he says. The only place he moved was
closer to campus, to a home on Faculty Drive,
about twenty-five years ago.
He joined a department that was finishing
a transition from Old Campus stalwarts—
Hubert Jones, “Pop” Carroll, Kenneth Raynor,
and Roland Gay—to the next generation.
Under the leadership of Ivey Gentry, a host of
newcomers joined the department in the early
to mid-1960s who, like Howard, would go on
to have long careers at Wake Forest: Ben Seelbinder,
Marcellus Waddill, and Gaylord and
Graham May. Howard’s retirement leaves only
Gaylord May still teaching from that group.
“It was a small enough department that we
all knew each other as friends and colleagues
and got along and worked well together
toward the same goal, to make the department
as good as it could be,” he says. He still plays
tennis and bridge with colleagues in math
and from other departments; friends say he’s
a fierce competitor on the tennis court and
around the bridge table.
Professor Emeritus of Mathematics John
Baxley joined the faculty two years after Howard,
and the two shared an office in Reynolda
Hall before the math department moved
to what is now Manchester Hall in 1969.
“Fred has always been a constant source of
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