'''Austin Toliver Powers''', usually known as '''A. T. Powers''' (June 26, 1896—October 14, 1975), was a leading figure from the 1930s to the 1970s in the theologically conservative American Baptist Association, based in Texarkana, Texas. He served as ABA president from 1957–1959, having been initially elected at the annual conference in Fresno, California.[1]

==Background==

Powers was born to James H. Powers and the former Mary Eliza Cole in Comanche near Brownwood in West Texas. He was descended from veterans of the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. James Powers was the oldest son of Samuel Hopkins Powers, an Indian fighter who surrendered late in life to the Baptist ministry, with his spiritual undertakings confined to rural churches. Samuel and James Powers were both tenant farmers. A. T. Powers recalled that despite modest circumstances, his father was civic-minded, self-educated, and among the best read men in the community. Mary Powers was the oldest daughter of William H. Cole, a slaveholder, preacher, and a soldier in the Confederate States Army who had been born in Cass County, Texas, but settled further west in Comanche. In his autobiography, Powers indicates that his Grandfather Cole was "a general", but the rank has not been confirmed.[2][3]

After residing in Comanche, the Powers family lived in several other Texas locations, including Lamesa in Dawson County and Port Lavaca in Calhoun County on the Texas Gulf Coast near Victoria. Their constant moving was spurred by James Powers’s efforts to find good drinking water.[4]

After high school, Powers entered the United States Army during World War I. However, a lifelong knee injury occurred while he was on duty in Hawaii and led to a prompt honorable discharge from the military. On August 3, 1918, he married the former Ida Lee Chapman (April 17, 1899—March 1980), the daughter of Andrew Berry and Willie Chapman, in Mangum, the seat of Greer County in southwestern Oklahoma, where James Powers had relocated his family. Ida was a dimunitive woman in size in striking contrast to her husband, who was physically large, 6’6" tall, and wore a size 16 shoe.[5][6]

==Pastor on the move==

While A.T. and Ida Powers were residing in Greer County near the town of Hester, Oklahoma, they attended a revival meeting featuring the Southern Baptist evangelist J.R. Caviness, who preached "Justification by Faith" from the Book of Romans, a message that during the Reformation had prompted Martin Luther to demand unfulfilled reforms in Roman Catholicism. Spurred by that sermon, Powers declared that he had found salvation in Jesus Christ and was baptized by immersion, the only method accepted by Baptists. After a short period of farming on a rented 140 acres near the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester, Powers underwent the call of the ministry. He and Ida joined the Pleasant View Baptist Church in nearby Ledessa, which later entered the "New Convention" of Oklahoma, one of several founding bodies of the ABA. In October 1919, Pleasant View licensed Powers to preach.[7]

Upon receiving the call to the ministry, Powers attended from 1921-1925 the Missionary Baptist College in Sheridan in Grant County, south of Little Rock. With assistance from the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1918, he received his Bachelor of Theology degree. At Missionary Baptist College, Power became a close friend of the clergyman Conrad Nathan Glover (1895–1986), whose father, R. W. Glover, had been a member of both houses of the Arkansas General Assembly. Powers and Glover were the only two individuals ever named moderator-emeriti of the ABA.[8] Missionary Baptist College closed in 1934, and Missionary Baptist Seminary thereafter opened in Little Rock through the auspices of the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church.[9]

Powers was a pastor while in Sheridan and then from 1925-1936 at the Promise Land Missionary Baptist Church in Hamburg in Ashley County in southeastern Arkansas. In 1931, while in Hamburg, he was granted an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Missionary Baptist College. From 1936-1939, he was the pastor of the Pauline Missionary Baptist Church in Monticello, the seat of Drew County, also in southeastern Arkansas. The Pauline congregation consisted primarily of blue collar members who worked for low wages in a cotton mill. The church paid Powers only $12.50 per month; therefore, he sold burial insurance to support his family during the height of the Great Depression. At the time, no Missionary Baptist pastor earned more than the $100 per month paid to Ben T. Bogard, a leading figure in the denomination, by the Antioch church in Little Rock.[10]

Powers then moved to the Main Street Missionary Baptist Church in Pine Bluff (since the Olive Street Missionary Baptist Church), where he served from 1939-1943. He was the pastor at Oak Lawn Missionary Baptist Church in Hot Springs, the seat of Garland County, Arkansas, from 1943-1948.[11]

==Leader in the ABA==

In 1948, Powers became the secretary-treasurer of missions for the ABA in Texarkana, Texas, a position that he filled until 1952, when he accepted a call to become the pastor of the Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church in Henderson in Rusk County in east Texas. He remained in Henderson until 1956, when he became the dean of the Louisiana Missionary Baptist Institute and Seminary in Minden, Louisiana, where his service extended until 1961. While in Henderson, Powers had taught at the Texas Baptist Institute and Seminary, which opened in 1949.[12] LMBIS was founded in 1952 by Powers’s colleague, L. L. Clover, a native of Clark County, Arkansas, who was pastor of the larger Calvary Missionary Baptist Church in Minden from 1948-1964. The faculty in these institutions is drawn from among area Missionary Baptist pastors. In 1957, Powers accepted the pastorate at Eastside Missionary Baptist Church in Minden after the death of the founding pastor, Charles Samuel. Powers worked closely with Clover during their five years together in Minden. In 1961, Powers returned to Texarkana to become the pastor of his last congregation, the West Lawn Missionary Baptist Church in Miller County, Arkansas, a position that he held until his retirement and Mrs. Powers’s diagnosis of Parkinson's disease.[13]

While with the ABA, Powers wrote Sunday school literature and co-authored with Conrad Glover, The American Baptist Association, 1924-1974, known as the Landmark Association.[14] The findings of Glover and Powers are cited in Samuel S. Hill’s Religion in the Southern States: An Historical Study and also in Religions of the World: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Beliefs and Practices by J. Gordon Melton and Martin Baumann, published in 2002.[15]

Elected unexpectedly as ABA president in Fresno in 1957, Powers gave his acceptance speech in shirtsleeves because of the heat in the convention hall. He vowed never again to appear in public except in coat and tie, for he did not know when he might be called upon to speak.[16]

On June 24, 1958, Powers delivered a stirring address at the AMA convention in Fort Worth, Texas, where the delegates, called "messengers," elected him to a second term as president. In a speech entitled "The Freedom and Sovereignty of a New Testament Church," Powers decried

"These days of religious pussyfooting, fence-straddling, complacency and inertia on the part of the religious world [and called on Missionary Baptists to be] more energetic and aggressive toward old-time, fundamental truths.
"No truth is more precious to Bible-loving Baptists than [that] a New Testament church is free and sovereign. . . . in sending forth missionaries and in fulfilling the commands of the Lord to go 'into all the world.' . . . Baptists have been ostracized, persecuted, maligned, called narrow-minded bigots for preaching this, but they have steadfastly clung to this truth. Our churches believe this and shall preach it until Jesus comes." [17]

On June 13, 1959, at the downtown Shreveport Municipal Memorial Auditorium, Powers delivered his second and last ABA presidential address. He rejected the label "Protestant" and declared that the history of Missionary Baptists begins, not with the Reformation, but on the Jordan River with "John, called the Baptist, and to our Lord, who started us on our way. In spite of our glorious history, we still face needs, supreme needs. We must realize these are to be found only in the mercies of God and faith in His Son. . . ."[18]

==Family, death, and legacy==

A.T. and Ida Powers had a son, James Berry Powers (March 9, 1921—August 3, 1992), former pastor of County Line Missionary Baptist Church and an ABA official in Texarkana, and five daughters, Mildred P. Alder (1919–2007) of Richmond in Ray County in northwestern Missouri; Alice P. Vining (1923–2005) of Malvern in Hot Spring County, Arkansas; Austilene P. Porter (1925–2001), who lived with her engineer-husband in both Venezuela and Florida, Miss Opal Margaret Powers (born 1928), a retired ABA bookkeeper from Texarkana, Arkansas, and Coy P. Green (born 1931), a former county employee from Greenville, east of Dallas, Texas.[19]

Powers died at a hospital in Texarkana, Texas, at the age of seventy-nine from complications of a fall. The couple and their son, who subsequently died of cancer, are interred at East Memorial Gardens Cemetery in Miller County, Arkansas.

Irvie Keil Cross (1917–2008), one of Powers’s colleagues at the ABA headquarters, wrote a biography of his friend entitled Austin T. Powers As I Knew Him. Recalling Powers's unique manner of preaching, Cross writes:

He was equal to any occasion, and you could count on an unusual message when he stepped on the platform. He also had an inexhaustible supply of personal illustrations. These were not something he had read in a book. That is what made them so valuable. They all happened to him or to someone he knew. He always had one that fit the occasion. . . . He seemed to have experienced more unusual situations than the average man. He also never forgot an event.”[20]

==References==

*1.^ Billy Hathorn, "Austin Toliver Powers and Leander Louis Clover: Planting the American Baptist Association in Northwest Louisiana during the Middle 20th Century," North Louisiana History, Vol. XLI (Summer-Fall 2010), p. 127
*2.^ Hathorn, "Powers and Clover", p. 129
*3.^ There is no reference to a General Cole of Texas in Generals in Gray, Lone Star Generals, or The Handbook of Texas.
*4.^ Hathorn, "Powers and Clover", p. 129
*5.^ Family records of Opal Powers of Texarkana, Arkansas
*6.^ Hathorn, "Powers and Clover," pp. 129-130
*7.^ Hathorn, "Powers and Clover", p. 130
*8.^ Hathorn, "Powers and Clover," pp. 130-131
*9.^ Hathorn, "Powers and Clover," pp. 132
*10.^ Hathorn, Powers and Clover, p. 133
*11.^ Hathorn, "Powers and Clover", pp. 132-133
*12.^ "Texas Baptist Institute". tbi.edu. http://www.tbi.edu/history.php. Retrieved May 5, 2009.
*13.^ Hathorn, "Powers and Clover," pp. 134-135
*14.^ Samuel S. Hill, Encyclopedia of Religion in the South. Bogard Press, 1979; reissued Paris, Arkansas: Baptist Standard Bearer, Inc., 2005. http://books.google.com/books?id=yx2EarrpKGUC&pg=PA53&dq=Austin+Powers+%2BHistory+of+American+Baptists&lr=. Retrieved May 5, 2009.
*15.^ J. Gordon Melton and Martin Baumann. Religions of the World. Greenwood Press. ISBN 1-59884-203-X. http://books.google.com/books?id=F4YYAAAAIAAJ&q=Austin+Powers+%2BHistory+of+American+Baptists&dq=Austin+Powers+%2BHistory+of+American+Baptists&lr=&pgis=1. Retrieved May 5, 2009.
*16.^ Hathorn, "Powers and Clover," p. 127
*17.^ Freedom and Sovereignty of a New Testament Church,” Presidential address at the Will Rogers Memorial Coliseum, Fort Worth, Texas, June 24, 1958
*18.^ "The Needs of the Hour," Presidential address at the Shreveport Municipal Auditorium, Shreveport, Louisiana, June 13, 1959
*19.^ Hathorn, "Powers and Clover," p. 136
*20.^ I. K. Cross, Austin T. Powers As I Knew Him, Little Rock: Bogard Press, 1989, p. 26

*Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._T._Powers" on April 12, 2011, with permission of the author, Billy Hathorn

Categories: 1896 births | 1975 deaths | American clergy | American academics | Non-fiction writers | Baptists from the United States | People from Comanche County, Texas | People from Greer County, Oklahoma | People from Grant County, Arkansas | People from Ashley County, Arkansas | People from Hot Springs, Arkansas | People from Drew County, Arkansas | People from Pine Bluff, Arkansas | People from Rusk County, Texas | People from Texarkana, Arkansas | People from Minden, Louisiana | American military personnel of World War I | United States Army soldiers | Accidental deaths from falls

A. T. Powers

2011-04-12T14:04:53Z

Bhathorn: Created page with "'''Austin Toliver Powers''', usually known as '''A. T. Powers''' (June 26, 1896—October 14, 1975), was a leading figure from the 1930s to the 1970s in the theologically conserv..."

'''Austin Toliver Powers''', usually known as '''A. T. Powers''' (June 26, 1896—October 14, 1975), was a leading figure from the 1930s to the 1970s in the theologically conservative American Baptist Association, based in Texarkana, Texas. He served as ABA president from 1957–1959, having been initially elected at the annual conference in Fresno, California.[1]

===Background==

Powers was born to James H. Powers and the former Mary Eliza Cole in Comanche near Brownwood in West Texas. He was descended from veterans of the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. James Powers was the oldest son of Samuel Hopkins Powers, an Indian fighter who surrendered late in life to the Baptist ministry, with his spiritual undertakings confined to rural churches. Samuel and James Powers were both tenant farmers. A. T. Powers recalled that despite modest circumstances, his father was civic-minded, self-educated, and among the best read men in the community. Mary Powers was the oldest daughter of William H. Cole, a slaveholder, preacher, and a soldier in the Confederate States Army who had been born in Cass County, Texas, but settled further west in Comanche. In his autobiography, Powers indicates that his Grandfather Cole was "a general", but the rank has not been confirmed.[2][3]

After residing in Comanche, the Powers family lived in several other Texas locations, including Lamesa in Dawson County and Port Lavaca in Calhoun County on the Texas Gulf Coast near Victoria. Their constant moving was spurred by James Powers’s efforts to find good drinking water.[4]

After high school, Powers entered the United States Army during World War I. However, a lifelong knee injury occurred while he was on duty in Hawaii and led to a prompt honorable discharge from the military. On August 3, 1918, he married the former Ida Lee Chapman (April 17, 1899—March 1980), the daughter of Andrew Berry and Willie Chapman, in Mangum, the seat of Greer County in southwestern Oklahoma, where James Powers had relocated his family. Ida was a dimunitive woman in size in striking contrast to her husband, who was physically large, 6’6" tall, and wore a size 16 shoe.[5][6]

==Pastor on the move==

While A.T. and Ida Powers were residing in Greer County near the town of Hester, Oklahoma, they attended a revival meeting featuring the Southern Baptist evangelist J.R. Caviness, who preached "Justification by Faith" from the Book of Romans, a message that during the Reformation had prompted Martin Luther to demand unfulfilled reforms in Roman Catholicism. Spurred by that sermon, Powers declared that he had found salvation in Jesus Christ and was baptized by immersion, the only method accepted by Baptists. After a short period of farming on a rented 140 acres near the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester, Powers underwent the call of the ministry. He and Ida joined the Pleasant View Baptist Church in nearby Ledessa, which later entered the "New Convention" of Oklahoma, one of several founding bodies of the ABA. In October 1919, Pleasant View licensed Powers to preach.[7]

Upon receiving the call to the ministry, Powers attended from 1921-1925 the Missionary Baptist College in Sheridan in Grant County, south of Little Rock. With assistance from the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1918, he received his Bachelor of Theology degree. At Missionary Baptist College, Power became a close friend of the clergyman Conrad Nathan Glover (1895–1986), whose father, R. W. Glover, had been a member of both houses of the Arkansas General Assembly. Powers and Glover were the only two individuals ever named moderator-emeriti of the ABA.[8] Missionary Baptist College closed in 1934, and Missionary Baptist Seminary thereafter opened in Little Rock through the auspices of the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church.[9]

Powers was a pastor while in Sheridan and then from 1925-1936 at the Promise Land Missionary Baptist Church in Hamburg in Ashley County in southeastern Arkansas. In 1931, while in Hamburg, he was granted an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Missionary Baptist College. From 1936-1939, he was the pastor of the Pauline Missionary Baptist Church in Monticello, the seat of Drew County, also in southeastern Arkansas. The Pauline congregation consisted primarily of blue collar members who worked for low wages in a cotton mill. The church paid Powers only $12.50 per month; therefore, he sold burial insurance to support his family during the height of the Great Depression. At the time, no Missionary Baptist pastor earned more than the $100 per month paid to Ben T. Bogard, a leading figure in the denomination, by the Antioch church in Little Rock.[10]

Powers then moved to the Main Street Missionary Baptist Church in Pine Bluff (since the Olive Street Missionary Baptist Church), where he served from 1939-1943. He was the pastor at Oak Lawn Missionary Baptist Church in Hot Springs, the seat of Garland County, Arkansas, from 1943-1948.[11]

==Leader in the ABA==

In 1948, Powers became the secretary-treasurer of missions for the ABA in Texarkana, Texas, a position that he filled until 1952, when he accepted a call to become the pastor of the Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church in Henderson in Rusk County in east Texas. He remained in Henderson until 1956, when he became the dean of the Louisiana Missionary Baptist Institute and Seminary in Minden, Louisiana, where his service extended until 1961. While in Henderson, Powers had taught at the Texas Baptist Institute and Seminary, which opened in 1949.[12] LMBIS was founded in 1952 by Powers’s colleague, L. L. Clover, a native of Clark County, Arkansas, who was pastor of the larger Calvary Missionary Baptist Church in Minden from 1948-1964. The faculty in these institutions is drawn from among area Missionary Baptist pastors. In 1957, Powers accepted the pastorate at Eastside Missionary Baptist Church in Minden after the death of the founding pastor, Charles Samuel. Powers worked closely with Clover during their five years together in Minden. In 1961, Powers returned to Texarkana to become the pastor of his last congregation, the West Lawn Missionary Baptist Church in Miller County, Arkansas, a position that he held until his retirement and Mrs. Powers’s diagnosis of Parkinson's disease.[13]

While with the ABA, Powers wrote Sunday school literature and co-authored with Conrad Glover, The American Baptist Association, 1924-1974, known as the Landmark Association.[14] The findings of Glover and Powers are cited in Samuel S. Hill’s Religion in the Southern States: An Historical Study and also in Religions of the World: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Beliefs and Practices by J. Gordon Melton and Martin Baumann, published in 2002.[15]

Elected unexpectedly as ABA president in Fresno in 1957, Powers gave his acceptance speech in shirtsleeves because of the heat in the convention hall. He vowed never again to appear in public except in coat and tie, for he did not know when he might be called upon to speak.[16]

On June 24, 1958, Powers delivered a stirring address at the AMA convention in Fort Worth, Texas, where the delegates, called "messengers," elected him to a second term as president. In a speech entitled "The Freedom and Sovereignty of a New Testament Church," Powers decried

"These days of religious pussyfooting, fence-straddling, complacency and inertia on the part of the religious world [and called on Missionary Baptists to be] more energetic and aggressive toward old-time, fundamental truths.
"No truth is more precious to Bible-loving Baptists than [that] a New Testament church is free and sovereign. . . . in sending forth missionaries and in fulfilling the commands of the Lord to go 'into all the world.' . . . Baptists have been ostracized, persecuted, maligned, called narrow-minded bigots for preaching this, but they have steadfastly clung to this truth. Our churches believe this and shall preach it until Jesus comes." [17]

On June 13, 1959, at the downtown Shreveport Municipal Memorial Auditorium, Powers delivered his second and last ABA presidential address. He rejected the label "Protestant" and declared that the history of Missionary Baptists begins, not with the Reformation, but on the Jordan River with "John, called the Baptist, and to our Lord, who started us on our way. In spite of our glorious history, we still face needs, supreme needs. We must realize these are to be found only in the mercies of God and faith in His Son. . . ."[18]

==Family, death, and legacy==

A.T. and Ida Powers had a son, James Berry Powers (March 9, 1921—August 3, 1992), former pastor of County Line Missionary Baptist Church and an ABA official in Texarkana, and five daughters, Mildred P. Alder (1919–2007) of Richmond in Ray County in northwestern Missouri; Alice P. Vining (1923–2005) of Malvern in Hot Spring County, Arkansas; Austilene P. Porter (1925–2001), who lived with her engineer-husband in both Venezuela and Florida, Miss Opal Margaret Powers (born 1928), a retired ABA bookkeeper from Texarkana, Arkansas, and Coy P. Green (born 1931), a former county employee from Greenville, east of Dallas, Texas.[19]

Powers died at a hospital in Texarkana, Texas, at the age of seventy-nine from complications of a fall. The couple and their son, who subsequently died of cancer, are interred at East Memorial Gardens Cemetery in Miller County, Arkansas.

Irvie Keil Cross (1917–2008), one of Powers’s colleagues at the ABA headquarters, wrote a biography of his friend entitled Austin T. Powers As I Knew Him. Recalling Powers's unique manner of preaching, Cross writes:

He was equal to any occasion, and you could count on an unusual message when he stepped on the platform. He also had an inexhaustible supply of personal illustrations. These were not something he had read in a book. That is what made them so valuable. They all happened to him or to someone he knew. He always had one that fit the occasion. . . . He seemed to have experienced more unusual situations than the average man. He also never forgot an event.”[20]

==References==

*1.^ Billy Hathorn, "Austin Toliver Powers and Leander Louis Clover: Planting the American Baptist Association in Northwest Louisiana during the Middle 20th Century," North Louisiana History, Vol. XLI (Summer-Fall 2010), p. 127
*2.^ Hathorn, "Powers and Clover", p. 129
*3.^ There is no reference to a General Cole of Texas in Generals in Gray, Lone Star Generals, or The Handbook of Texas.
*4.^ Hathorn, "Powers and Clover", p. 129
*5.^ Family records of Opal Powers of Texarkana, Arkansas
*6.^ Hathorn, "Powers and Clover," pp. 129-130
*7.^ Hathorn, "Powers and Clover", p. 130
*8.^ Hathorn, "Powers and Clover," pp. 130-131
*9.^ Hathorn, "Powers and Clover," pp. 132
*10.^ Hathorn, Powers and Clover, p. 133
*11.^ Hathorn, "Powers and Clover", pp. 132-133
*12.^ "Texas Baptist Institute". tbi.edu. http://www.tbi.edu/history.php. Retrieved May 5, 2009.
*13.^ Hathorn, "Powers and Clover," pp. 134-135
*14.^ Samuel S. Hill, Encyclopedia of Religion in the South. Bogard Press, 1979; reissued Paris, Arkansas: Baptist Standard Bearer, Inc., 2005. http://books.google.com/books?id=yx2EarrpKGUC&pg=PA53&dq=Austin+Powers+%2BHistory+of+American+Baptists&lr=. Retrieved May 5, 2009.
*15.^ J. Gordon Melton and Martin Baumann. Religions of the World. Greenwood Press. ISBN 1-59884-203-X. http://books.google.com/books?id=F4YYAAAAIAAJ&q=Austin+Powers+%2BHistory+of+American+Baptists&dq=Austin+Powers+%2BHistory+of+American+Baptists&lr=&pgis=1. Retrieved May 5, 2009.
*16.^ Hathorn, "Powers and Clover," p. 127
*17.^ Freedom and Sovereignty of a New Testament Church,” Presidential address at the Will Rogers Memorial Coliseum, Fort Worth, Texas, June 24, 1958
*18.^ "The Needs of the Hour," Presidential address at the Shreveport Municipal Auditorium, Shreveport, Louisiana, June 13, 1959
*19.^ Hathorn, "Powers and Clover," p. 136
*20.^ I. K. Cross, Austin T. Powers As I Knew Him, Little Rock: Bogard Press, 1989, p. 26

*Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._T._Powers" on April 12, 2011, with permission of the author, Billy Hathorn

Categories: 1896 births | 1975 deaths | American clergy | American academics | Non-fiction writers | Baptists from the United States | People from Comanche County, Texas | People from Greer County, Oklahoma | People from Grant County, Arkansas | People from Ashley County, Arkansas | People from Hot Springs, Arkansas | People from Drew County, Arkansas | People from Pine Bluff, Arkansas | People from Rusk County, Texas | People from Texarkana, Arkansas | People from Minden, Louisiana | American military personnel of World War I | United States Army soldiers | Accidental deaths from falls

2010-07-16T17:16:08Z

Bhathorn: /* References */

'''Walter Thomas Price, IV,''' (born 1968), known as '''Four Price''' because he is the fourth generation in his family to bear the name Walter Thomas Price,<ref name=price>{{cite web|url=http://www.fourprice.org/|title=Vote Four Price|publisher=fourprice.org|accessdate=July 9. 2010}}</ref> is an attorney from Amarillo, [[Texas]], who is the [[Republican Party (United States)|Republican]] nominee for the District 87 seat in the Texas House of Representatives in the [[general election]] pending on November 2, 2010. The position will be vacated in January 2011 by the long-term incumbent David Swinford, a Republican from Dumas in Moore County who did not seek reelection.

==Background==
Price graduated in 1986 from Tascosa High School in Amarillo. He holds a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from the [[University of Texas at Austin]] and a [[Juris Doctor]] from St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio. He and his wife, the former Karen Diane Mayfield (born ca. 1964), have four children, Brooke, Cody, Abby, and Curry, ranging in ages (as of 2010) from nineteen to eleven, respectively.<ref name=price/>

Price advocates the placing of government "on a diet. It doesn't tax too little -- it just spends too much." If elected, he vows to bring the "voice of the Panhandle" to state government. His familial roots in the Texas Panhandle date to 1917, when his maternal great-grandfather, Jesse Benjamin Latham, settled his young family in Carson County before relocating to Amarillo.<ref name=price/>

Price practices business and [[probate]] law with the Amarillo firm Irwin, Merritt, Hogue, Price & Carthel, P.C. He previously practiced with Mullin, Hoard & Brown LLP in Amarillo and with Fulbright & Jaworski in San Antonio. Price is a director of the Amarillo Economic Development Corporation, president of the Amarillo Area Bar Association, and a director of Cal Farley's Boys Ranch Foundation. He is a member and former deacon of the First [[Presbyterian]] Church of Amarillo. A former director of the Don and Sybil Harrington Cancer Center, he is also a life member of the University of Texas Ex-Students Association. Price is an avid outdoorsman.<ref name=price/>

==Election history==

District 87 encompasses part of Potter as well as Carson, Sherman, and Moore counties.

Campaigning for the March 2 primary, Price ran what he called "grass-roots efforts, we knocked on a lot of doors and focused on what is important to the people."<ref name=amarillo>{{cite web|url=http://www.amarillo.com/stories/030310/new_news1.shtml|title=Kevin Welch, 'Four' the one
'Grass-roots efforts' lift Price by Leal|publisher=amarillo.com|accessdate=July 15, 2010}}</ref>He defeated '''Victor E. Leal''' (born March 22, 1962), an Amarillo/Canyon businessman and the owner of Leal's Mexican Restaurants. Leal is also an appointee of [[Governor]] [[Rick Perry]] to the Texas Economic Development Corporation and the former [[mayor]] of Muleshoe in Bailey County, where the restaurant chain was originated by his father, the late Jesse Leal.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.connectamarillo.com/news/news_story.aspx?id=305067|title=Owner of Leal's chosen for state-wide EDC, May 27, 2009|publisher=connectamarillo.com|accessdate=July 9, 2010}}</ref> Price received 6,355 votes (55.2 percent) to Leal's 5,166 (44.8 percent).<ref name=elections>{{cite web|url=http://enr.sos.state.tx.us/enr/results/mar02_148_state.htm?x=0&y=18482&id=272|title=Republican primary election returns, March 2, 2010|publisher=sos.state.tx.us|accessdate=March 6, 2010}}</ref>There were questions about Leal's residency, but the restauranteur carried the support of retiring Representative Swinford and former [[U.S. Representative]] Larry Combest.<ref name=amarillo/>
Leal said that the legislature needed more businesspeople like himself, instead of more lawyers like Price. However, Price retorted, "To say there's too many lawyers in the legislature is like saying there's too many doctors in a hospital."<ref name=amarillo>{{cite web|url=http://www.amarillo.com/stories/030310/new_news1.shtml|title=Kevin Welch, 'Four' the one
'Grass-roots efforts' lift Price by Leal|publisher=amarillo.com|accessdate=July 15, 2010}}</ref>

Price now faces Abel G. Bosquez (born September 13, 1958) of Amarillo, a technician for Pantex, who was unopposed in the primary for the [[Democratic Party]] nomination. Bosquez received 881 votes, whereas the Republican primary turnout was 11,521 ballots. There is also a [[Libertarian Party]] candidate, James Hudspeth of Dumas.<ref name=elections/>

The winner will serve with Republican colleague Representative John T. Smithee, also of Amarillo, who visited Price's home on the night of the election to offer support in the general election. "We had two outstanding candidates in this race, and I think either one of them would have done a super job. And you know Four has a good temperament and he has a hard work ethic, and he's really as honest as you can be."<ref name=ch10>{{cite web|url=http://www.newschannel10.com/global/story.asp?s=12076152|title=Four Price Wins Republican Primary|publisher=newschannel10.com|accessdate=July 15, 2010}}</ref>Leal also offered his support for Price in the fall campaign.<ref name=ch10/>

==References==
{{reflist}}

[[Category:Texas]]
[[Category:Republican Party]]

2009-06-11T22:56:03Z

Bhathorn:

Ricky L. Cox

2009-06-11T22:55:18Z

Bhathorn: A shorter version of this article appears on Wikipedia. I am the author.

'''Ricky Lee Cox''' (born July 1, 1958) is a dentist<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.topix.com/yp/campbellsville-ky/8367344187-cox-ricky-l-dds|title="Cox, Ricky L DDS"|publisher=Topix.com|access date=May 16, 2009}}</ref>in Campbellsville, [[Kentucky]], who served a single term from 1999-2001 as a [[Republican Party (United States)|Republican]] member of the Kentucky House of Representatives.

Cox, a Campbellsville native, has nine siblings, including Nancy Jane Cox Kenny (born 1967), Miss Kentucky of 1990, who is a [[television]] anchorwoman in Lexington, Kentucky.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.lex18.com/Global/story.asp?S=1204719|title="Nancy Cox"
|publisher=Lex18.com|access date=May 16, 2009}}</ref> Cox's daughter, and hence Nancy Kenny's niece, [[Emily Cox]] (born 1986), is the 2008 Miss Kentucky, a title expiring in July 2009. Both Nancy and Emily Cox are Campbellsville natives, but they entered their respective state pageants as "Miss Bowling Green", where each was living at the time. Emily Cox began piano lessons at the age of five; Nancy Kenny is a talented gospel singer. Emily's mother is the former Jenny L. Smith (born ca. 1960) of Campbellsville, the wife of Ricky Cox. She has two siblings, Evan L. Cox and Evily Cox.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.wbko.com/home/headlines/25745759.html|title=Daniel Kemp, "WBKO Talks with Miss Kentucky 2008"|publisher=WBKO.com|access date=May 16, 2009}}</ref>

Cox was elected to the legislature by a margin of sixty-nine votes in the 1998 general election, after the 10-year incumbent Republican, Ray H. Altman, a Campbellsville insurance agency owner, declined to seek a sixth two-year term. Cox defeated [[Democratic Party (United States)|Democrat]] Russell Montgomery of Campbellsville, 6,640 votes (50.3 percent) to 6,571 (49.7 percent).<ref>{{cite web|url=http://elect.ky.gov/NR/rdonlyres/A9603388-CED9-4E09-BCC9-D54781003617/0/statereprev1.txt|title=Kentucky Election Returns, November 3, 1998|publisher=Elect.ky.gov|access date=May 14, 2009}}</ref>

In 2000, fellow Republican Russ Mobley, a retired Campbellsville University theatre arts professor, was elected to succeed Cox, who did not seek a second term. When Mobley declined to pursue a fifth term in 2008, Republican John "Bam" Carney, an educator at Taylor County High Schoool, won the position. In the Republican primarym, Carney defeated two including former Democrat Russell Montgomery, over whom Cox had prevailed a decade earlier.

As a legislator, Cox supported legislation in March 2000 to require that [[evolution]] if taught in Kentucky public school be presented as a factor only within the individual species, not across species lines.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.edweek.org/login.html?source=http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2000/03/08/26evolution.h19.html&destination=http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2000/03/08/26evolution.h19.html&levelId=2100|title=David J. Hoff, "State Capitals Stirred by Evolution", March 8, 2008|publisher=Edweek.org|access date=May 16, 2009}}</ref>

==References==

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Kentucky]]
[[Catgegory:Politicians]]

Oliver Clark Thomas

2009-06-07T15:37:12Z

Bhathorn:

'''Oliver Clark Thomas''' (March 24, 1914—December 16, 2008)<ref>{{cite web|url=http://ssdi.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/ssdi.cgi?lastname=Thomas&firstname=Oliver&start=121|title=Social Security Death Index|publisher=Rootsweb.ancestry.com|access date=May 11, 2009}}</ref> was a decorated [[prisoner of war]] held by the [[Japan]]ese during [[World War II]] who later as a Lubbock, [[Texas]], businessman headed the trade group, the Texas Good Roads/Transportation Association.

Thomas was born in Hereford in Deaf Smith County in the Texas Panhandle but moved thereafter with his parents near [[Dallas, Texas|Dallas]], first to Greenville in Hunt County and then to Kaufman, where he was awarded [[Eagle Scout]] designation in 1930 and graduated two years later from Kaufman High School. He attended [[Southern Methodist University]] in Dallas and later [[Texas Tech University]] in Lubbock, from which he graduated.<ref name=Thomas>{{cite web|url= http://lubbockonline.com/stories/121908/obi_369256589.shtml|title=Obituary of Oliver C. Thomas|publisher=''Lubbock Avalanche-Journal''|access date=May 11, 2009}}</ref>

Thomas enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps, forerunner to the [[United States Air Force|Air Force]], a week after the attack on [[Pearl Harbor]], [[Hawaii]]. He was an instructor at the Aircraft Mechanics School at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas. He subsequently volunteered for the [[B-29]] flight engineering school and participated in seventeen bombing missions over Japan. On his last flight, his plane was shot down over [[Yokohama, Japan|Yokohama]]. He bailed out and was held prisoner at Kempi Tai police headquarters in [[Tokyo, Japan|Tokyo]]. After the two [[atomic bomb]]s were unleashed on [[Hiroshima, Japan|Hiroshima]] and [[Nagasaki, Japan|Nagasaki]], he was taken to Omori prison camp on a small island in Tokyo Bay.<ref name=Thomas/>

Thomas was liberated in August 1945 by a task force sent by [[Admiral]] [[William F. Halsey]]. He witnessed the signing of the Japanese surrender from his hospital ship on September 2, 1945. Thomas was awarded the Air Medal with an Oak Leaf Cluster, a Unit Citation, the [[Purple Heart]], the P.O.W. Medal, and the [[Distinguished Flying Cross]].<ref name=Thomas/>

After the war, Thomas and his late brother, Hughes Thomas, opened Thomas Brothers Office Outfitters in Lubbock and operated that business until it was sold in 1991. Thomas served on the Texas Good Roads/Transportation Association for many years and was elected its president from 198-1984. The association, which has related groups in other states, is the lobbying organization of highway contractors doing business through the Texas Highway Department. Thomas also served on the Lubbock Chamber of Commerce and chaired that group’s Highways, Streets and Roads Committee. He was affiliated with Phi Kappi Psi fraternity, Rotary International, and the First [[United Methodist]] Church in downtown Lubbock.<ref name=Thomas/>

Thomas was married to the former Melba Watson (1913-1994). Survivors included his stepson, Dr. Ray Moore of [[Little Rock, Arkansas|Little Rock]], [[Arkansas]], and two sisters-in-law, Mrs. Kay Fulton of Lubbock and Mrs. Joyce Woods of Shamrock in Wheeler County, Texas. Services were held at First United Methodist Church. Interment with military honors was at Resthaven Memorial Park in Lubbock.<ref name=Thomas/>

On May 31, 2009, [[Republican]] State Representative Carl Isett of Lubbock introduced a resolution to honor Thomas’s memory.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.legis.state.tx.us/BillLookup/History.aspx?LegSess=81R&Bill=HCR270|title=Texas Legislature: Bills Authored/Joint Authored by Rep. Carl Isett, June 7, 2009|publisher=Legis.state.tx.us|access date=June 7, 2009}}</ref>

==References==

{{reflist}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Thomas, Oliver Clark}}
[[Category:Texas]]
[[Category:World War II]]