The Harbinger - Bethany College

had Bethany professors Richard Kenney and Hiram Lester, who joined us
for dinner that night. When dinner was finished, the three of them presented
me with a framed photocopied Yale Divinity School degree. On the
degree, they had written my name.
“We figured that if you’re going to put in all that work,” Larry said, “you
ought to get a degree from a real university.”
Larry taught me that humility can be a funny thing.
Several years later, Larry agreed to perform the wedding ceremony for
me and my soon-to-be wife, Nancy. The ceremony was in the Andover
Chapel in Harvard Divinity School’s Andover Hall. The morning of the
wedding, he noticed there was no bible in the chapel. (Yale, of course,
would have had a lovely bible on hand.) The only bible we could find was
a dog-eared bright-red copy of the Oxford Annotated Bible.
“Is this the only bible available?” Larry asked.
A friend went home and retrieved a leather-bound bible we could use.
“Much better,” Larry said.
Larry taught me that attention to detail can transform an experience.
We received the call we knew we might eventually get. Larry and Carol
had promised to phone us if they thought our last opportunity to be with
Helen Louise McGuffie, who had been both Larry’s and my professor at
Bethany, was drawing near.
“It’s time,” Carol said when she called.
Nancy and I drove directly to the hospital where Helen Louise had been
since suffering a stroke and falling in her house. We were going to meet
Larry and Carol there and help move Helen Louise from the hospital back
to her house.
Helen Louise had lost the ability to speak. It was unclear what she was
aware of as she slipped in and out of consciousness. As the four of us
helped roll her bed into her house, Helen Louise looked up and said one
word, “Home.”
Larry taught me that a teacher can become a friend, and that there are
few things stronger than the bond of friendship.
Jeff Seglin, a 1978 graduate of Bethany College, is currently an Associate Professor at
Emerson College. His weekly ethics column, “The Right Thing,” is syndicated by the
New York Times Syndicate. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, Fortune,
and he is the author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility
in Today’s Business.
2