Bolling was held in highest esteem

Word came in the past few weeks that Landrum Bolling died.

If you’ve never heard of him, that’s not surprising. It wouldn’t have surprised Landrum either. He wasn’t the sort of person to worry about things like name recognition.

The spotlight wasn’t his thing.

Quiet, steadfast, genial leadership was.

Landrum Bolling was president of Earlham College from 1958 to 1973. That’s a pretty tumultuous time period in American history. You won’t find much greater change than from the 1950s to the 1970s.

That was also a period in which my family was pretty closely linked to the college.

My brother Steve graduated from Portland High School in 1959 and from Earlham in 1963. I followed suit from 1966 to 1970, and my sister Louise followed from 1969 to 1973.

Add to that the fact that my wife Connie attended Earlham from 1967 to her graduation in 1971, and you get a pretty good picture of why Landrum Bolling tends to “loom large in our legend” as the old saying goes. (Whose old saying is that? I have no idea.)

As if that’s not enough, there’s my father’s friendship and work with Landrum over the years.

My dad was also an Earlham guy, class of 1931 as I recall. And when I was in my early teens, he was extremely active in the college’s alumni association, doing his best to raise money for scholarships to help kids attend a little Quaker college in Richmond.

So when Landrum contacted my dad in late 1966 or early 1967 with a proposal, my father was inclined to listen.

Would he, Landrum Bolling asked my father, be willing to leave his newspaper in Jay County, move more than 40 miles south, give up his deep community involvement, and become the first-ever vice president for development in the history of the college?

At that point, my dad was 55 or 56. That’s an age, I can attest, that can make a guy itchy to take on a new challenge.

It’s also an age that can make a guy skittish about the future. That’s about the time when the recliner beckons, when risk can become a dirty word and when those laurels you thought about resting on seem more comfortable than ever.

But my dad said yes. He’d leave the newspaper behind, he’d leave his hometown behind, and he’d take on something he’d never done before.

Landrum Bolling is a big part of the reason he made that decision.

Every once in awhile, we meet people in life — if we are very lucky — who seem to be operating on a higher plane than the rest of us.

They’re smarter. They’re more driven. They have a clearer vision of the future. And they have a moral compass that can’t be denied.

In other words, they’re the folks we hold in such high esteem that we almost automatically defer to their judgment. If they ask us to do something — no matter how difficult — our respect for them is so great that our natural inclination is to say, yes.

Dad said yes.

He joined Landrum Bolling at Earlham as vice president for development in spring 1968.

The college didn’t have much in the way of an endowment. There hadn’t been an organized approach to reaching out to donors and alumni. Up to then, it had pretty much been amateur hour. Dad’s job was to professionalize the operation and build that endowment for the future.

He was great at it.

And while it might have been something he could have bragged about, he never did.

As far as my dad was concerned, it was just something he did for his alma mater.

And for a guy who died this month at 104, a guy named Landrum Bolling.