Neil E. Golemo
Welcome to Here’s the Story, a show that brings Student Affairs to life by sharing the authentic voices and lived experiences of those who are shaping the field every day as a part of the Student Affairs NOW family, we are dedicated to serving furthering the people who walk the walk, talk the talk, and carry the rock, all of us who find ourselves serving students in their education and Student Affairs in Higher Education. You can find us at Student Affairs now.com or directly at studentaffairsnow.com/here thestory, or on YouTube and anywhere you enjoy podcasts today, we would like to thank our sponsor, Huron. Huron education and research experts help institutions transform their strategy, operations, technology and culture to foster innovation, financial, health and student success. I am lucky to be your host. My name is Dr Neil E. Golemo. I use the he, him series pronouns, and I’m blessed to serve as the Director of Campus living and learning on Texas A and M sunny Galveston Island campus. I’m a father, a husband, a son, and I’m trying to just do my best try and do a little good in the world, or get caught trying. I’m here with my co host.

J.T. Snipes
I guess that’s me today. JT snipes. My pronouns are he, him, his. And I serve as Associate Professor and Chair of the educational leadership department at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, despite my Baylor gear today it is department. So for those watching, I am in full Baylor gear, even though we lost but story for another day, I am here trying to live my best life as a free black man in a world that would have me live otherwise. I’m with you today from the ancestral lands of the Kickapoo and the Illinois Confederacy. The University resides on land seated in the 1819 treaty of Edwardsville, and is now home.

Neil E. Golemo
So I am happy to to have the next part, I get to introduce somebody who I sincerely have been looking up to for a long, long time, my one time former boss. And then I guess boss’s boss’s boss and and then he went to Missouri for a minute. But this is R. Bowen Loftin and Sir, do you want to tell us a little bit more about yourself and then tell us your story?

R. Bowen Loftin
Oh, not much to say, echoing, but a few words. Here, I am a husband. I’m a son of deceased parents. I have two children. I have seven grandchildren, no great grands yet. Wow. But I I’ve been married a long time, and I’m getting old. It’s not

Neil E. Golemo
like it’s 54 years or anything. So So, sir, tell us the story.

R. Bowen Loftin
Well, the one you asked me to tell you today is one that I I lived through back in 2008 It was a difficult time. I, at that time, was a vice president at Texas a&m University, and I served as the CEO of their Galveston branch campus, known as Texas and university at Galveston, the place you’re at right now. Neil, so great fond memories of that place. It taught me a lot. I had been in academia my entire career, but I had been on the faculty side almost completely and moving to the leadership of an entire campus, I discovered things like student life, Residence Life, bookstores, police forces, you name it. So it’s a lot of things going on, even in a small campus like Galveston was then, and I had to learn quickly that what I had picked up in 40 years of work at a university was not adequate, so I had to learn a great deal, and I was great fortunate to have a staff of people, many of whom are still there, like Todd Sutherland, Don Lang, are still there. I’ve had the responsibility to pick people to run the place after I left. Uh, interesting stories there too, but today you actually talk about particular event that happened in 2008 I had been there since 2005 so I was pretty seasoned by then. Another sidelight here is that I do enjoy the water. I enjoy sailing. We have been gifted a sailboat by an individual I knew well. His name is George Mitchell. He passed away many years ago. I. But George lived to be in his 90s, a billionaire, an extraordinary man who made an impact in so many different ways. We could talk about that all day, but one thing he did was gift two sailboats, one to the Galveston campus and one to the main campus and College Station. The one we got was called the Cynthia woods, after his wife’s first name and her maiden name. And we were happy to have this keel boat, a great racing boat. And we had, I’ve sailed it several times, not as captain, just simply as a passenger, enjoying myself. But this particular day, which was in June of 2008 June 6. In fact, the boat was leaving the Galveston dock near downtown Galveston, not from the campus, and we had a departure of 2pm I was physically present on the dock to say goodbye to the to the crew in the boat. It was crewed by two of our professionals, one a full time professional at the campus named Commander Steve Conway, a retired Coast Guard officer, and that’s a whole part of the story. Actually another Roger Stone, who actually worked at the medical school in Galveston full time, but volunteered to work with us. Commander Conway was the captain of the boat. Roger Stone was a safety officer, and we had four of our students on that boat. They were doing what’s called a regatta, amigos. It’s a It’s Veracruz, Mexico. So they were going to sail from Galveston to Veracruz. That’s a pretty good distance, over 600 nautical miles, and it would take a while to get there. And they would do things at Veracruz and return back to Galveston, ultimately. So I was there to say say goodbye. Pretty windy day, they took off, and I waved as they disappeared in the harbor, and then went back to my office to continue working. There were a lot of protocols associated with this trip. They carried a satellite phone with them, or a check in during the course of the day, and they missed the early check in on Saturday. This was a Friday. They left Saturday morning. They failed to check in as as required by the by the safety protocols we had. And I got a phone call. So I was at home early Saturday morning, in my office, phone rang, and it was a person on duty at the campus telling me the failure of the chicken. So I told him to relay that to the Coast Guard, and hung up basically, got further phone calls over the course of the morning, and things got more and more complex in my mind, that we had really lost contact with a boat which had very experienced people on it. And that was disturbing to me. The nearest Coast Guard station of consequence was down in the Corpus Christi area. At my request, they ultimately dispatched some planes try to find the boat. Wasn’t easy to find, big ocean, small boat, but at 515 on the eighth, this is course they left on the sixth, they failed to check in on the seventh early in the morning, at late on the eighth, Coast Guard found the boat. So planes flying over saw a boat floating upside down in the water. This is a keel boat, don’t forget. And the keel was obviously missing from the boat. So that explained a great deal right there. The keel weighed about 6000 pounds. They were sailing in fairly stiff breezes, and they were heeled over, almost certainly, and the Keogh must have fallen off. And when that happens, the boat will immediately turn upside down. So I knew much after the fact by talking to the people who were on the boat, but that’s what I was surmising already. The problem was there were no people near the boat. That was a problem. Now we had winds. We had fairly heavy seas for the Gulf of Mexico, and not surprisingly, you might have drifted away. So we kept looking. Luckily, Commander Conway was with him. Commander Conway, being an experienced Coast Guard officer, had a lot of experience, a lot of good sense, but he was thrown overboard when the boat turned upside down, along with the two students on top with him, and that was a problem. He had his life jacket on, as they did, but he had little equipment, but he had a flashlight, and that was important. So not not then, but later that night, on the night of the eighth of June, planes were still dispatched, looking for survivors, and they found light so he saw. Heard them, saw them going over. Use this flashlight in a dark ocean. That’s a very effective way to signal where you are. And so they were found about 1am on the ninth they were lifted out of the ocean by helicopter. People went down, actually from the helicopter helped them, got cables on them, got them up into the boat, and I was notified first when they were found about 1am and then later, when they were actually in progress, back to Galveston, to the hospital. There. When I had heard they were found, I made the wrong assumption that all were found. Then we had two professionals, we had four students on board. As they got them into the end of the helicopter, I got a radio message saying, Well, we have five so I had already contacted all six families, and they were in progress to get to the hospital to meet their loved ones. But I had to find out who was missing, and I was told it was Roger Stone, the safety officer. So his I called his wife on her cell. She was already in progress from her home in Clear Lake City, Houston, down to Galveston. I told her, turn around. We did not find your husband in this rescue, we will continue looking really hard for him, but we didn’t. Don’t have him right now. You don’t need to be at the hospital right now. So that was my first communication with her after we had found the boat. I talked to everybody beforehand several times about what was going on and keeping them apprised of the rescue efforts. But so I got to the hospital basically around the time helicopter did and was able to talk to everybody. We had five sunburned, dehydrated people. They’ve been in the ocean, but, you know, salt water is not like fresh water. So they were dehydrated. They had not had a water with them they could drink. And they had been in the sun quite a bit, and so they were sunburned very radically. And it was they were not in great condition, but they were alive. They were going to be okay. I got to store it in Conway about what happened. So they’d been sailing again, heat over, heavily, under a stiff breeze, and the Keith fell off boat rotated. Roger and two students were sleeping down below in the cabin. Steve and two students were aboard above board, and they were sailing. They were thrown clear the boat and life jackets on, but the guys downstairs were obviously sleeping, and it didn’t have his life jacket on. The story I got, ultimately, from the two students who were down below is that they woke up to water in the boat complete darkness.

R. Bowen Loftin
Had to figure out what’s going on. Apparently, Roger figured it out first. Roger Stone, our professional safety officer, figured out first what was going on. He literally pushed his two students out of the of the hatchway to get them out of the boat, and along with them, pushed two life jackets out. He turned around to go back to get a third life jacket. And was never seen again by those students alive. So that’s what really happened, based on the counts I got from them. Once I had gotten all this stuff, in my mind, I called a person I knew in Galveston who did a lot of a lot of water based recovery stuff. And so he dispatched his boat and a crew with divers to the location where the boat itself had been found. They got there the next day, the next morning, and divers went into the boat and found Roger’s body. I was contacted immediately and told what was going on. I called Bobson delec, whom you know, Neil. He was my PhD psychology professional, leader of our counseling services there. And I said, Bob, I need to go tell missus stone that her husband’s not coming home alive. And he said, I’ll come with you. And we drove there. I drove he wrote with me, and on the way there, he told me it was going to happen. He said, You’re going to have her direct her anger at you, because you’re the face of the institution, and she sees institutions, what caused her husband’s death, and she’s going to direct all of her emotions on you. Well, you hear that, but I never gone through something like this before. I didn’t quite understand what was going to happen till I got there, I got to the house where she lived, many people in the front yard. She was in the house. Obviously. I walked in the front door. She saw me, knew immediately why I was there, and came towards me with a very angry expression in her face, yelling at me and. Yelling at me, telling me to leave her house. And so I walked out the door, and I was standing in the front yard of the house and beginning to talk to people who were there gathered, who were friends and neighbors of the stones. And that moment, her 14 year old son came out of the house, walked up to me and said, Forgive my mother. She is very upset, but tell me how my dad died. And so at that point, I knew enough to tell him his dad was a true hero. His dad sacrificed his life to save two students in an effort to save his own life, he was unsuccessful and never made it out of the boat. But again, imagine yourselves, close your eyes and imagine being in total darkness. The world is upside down, and water is filling the area around you. Imagine that. So these were all experienced, tailored, especially stone the kids, not so much, but imagine that. So I had this moment with her son that made my day possible. Actually, I was extremely depressed by what happened, and I was trying to internalize it to myself, but the son asking the question tell me how my dad died, was the opportunity for me to tell him what an extraordinary human being was his dad, and to give him at least a brief story of what happened. Linda and I didn’t speak for a little while. Ultimately, she reached out to me and apologized for her reaction to me. We became friends. Ultimately, I still, I still chat with her via social media to this day, this many years later, that was 2008 don’t forget, a long time ago, this is 2025 and so we still chat. I offered both her kids a full ride scholarship to Texas. A and M both went to Rice, by the way, so that didn’t happen, but I brought them to a football game in my suite as President, we had a lot of interaction there. There were some financial transactions involved that both George Mitchell, who was the gifter of the boat, and I, were involved in. I won’t go into all that detail right now, but it was an extraordinary experience, and my first one to really force me into a role where I took full responsibility and went to tell people personally I wasn’t going to send somebody else to tell Mrs. Stone that her husband had passed away. I went there myself. I thought that was incredibly important to do that. And I think having gone through all the aftermath of this, it was the right thing to do, but also the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’ve talked to many military officers and others who’ve had to do the same exact task, and they’ve all told me the same thing, no matter how many times you do it, it never gets easier. It never gets any different. It’s always the same. When you go to tell someone, a loved one, that their loved person is not going to come back again, that is something that never gets any easier, no matter how many times you go through the process. Now I say this to you as a group here, listening to this podcast, watching it, Student Affairs personnel may get involved in that. I’m not sure if you ever knew Cynthia Hernandez or not. She was at our campus in College Station, she was the one that typically conveyed the bad news to a family. During my time as president, about five years, 75 students at Texas A and M University and College Station died for all kinds of reasons, and I was involved with the process of dealing with parents and families, but Cynthia was the one who usually made the call and told them what happened to their kid, as much as she knew and I would follow up, as you know, Neil very well, there is a very traditional thing at A And M called Silver taps. So during the academic year, once a month, about eight to 10,000 students gather at 1030 at night on the central plaza of the campus in silence and honor a deceased student or students that died in the past month. That happens eight times a year. So I’ve been to all those that I I was president, uh, been to many others besides that. Again, it’s an extraordinary event, and it just teaches you one important lesson. I’ll leave you with that. The lesson is that these kinds of things, these ceremonies, these events that you. Attend death do not lessen your grief, but you immediately become aware that your grief is shared, and shared grief is more easily born than grief individually. And so you don’t have less grief, but now holding yourself up becomes a more possible, more deliberate, a more successful process. And that’s something Student Affairs leaders, I believe, need to hold on to and recognize that you’ve got to tell someone who’s going through a very traumatic experience that they’re not alone, that they’re going to actually have people around them who share in the burden of grief.

Neil E. Golemo
You know, I was there. I was two years out of grad school, so I knew everything. And I’ve heard you tell parts of the story more than once, and I it still affects me. I can’t even imagine what that was like at all. You know, in our previous conversations, talked about silver taps. And, you know, A and M has a couple of traditions, right? And, and they’re, you know, they’re pretty serious about a few of them. And of all of them like that, is my favorite, because I just, I don’t know anybody who does anything like that, that

R. Bowen Loftin
that and muster are the two things that I hold most dear. They aren’t fun, but they’re so meaningful to you. And again, standing the circle plaza of Texas A and on the campus of 70 plus 1000 students. Now 50,000 plus then standing there at night in darkness with up to 10,000 people who are not talking, not on their phones, they’re simply they’re sharing your grief. That is a profound, powerful experience, and I’ve watched this happen. I’ve watched this happen over and over again, and I’ve watched the families again, not not experiencing a diminution of their grief, but all of a sudden realizing that 1000s share that grief, and that makes it more bearable.

Neil E. Golemo
We need to thank our sponsor, Huron. Huron collaborates with colleges and universities to create sound strategies, optimize operation operations and accelerate digital transformation by embracing diverse perspectives, encouraging new ideas and challenging the status quo here on promotes institutional resilience in higher education. For more information, please visit go dot H, C, g.com/now, well, first off, I gotta say that that was the that’s the second Cynthia Hernandez shout out that we’ve had on this podcast.

R. Bowen Loftin
No surprise, she she’s not, you know, where I am now. She went elsewhere, you know, to move up the ladder, but, but she was a very, very effective student affairs leader during my time, and is missed. Next time

Neil E. Golemo
I see her, I’m going to make sure that she sponsors us, because they more notices, you know, you, you made the decision that you were going to go give the news and instead of somebody else, and I just, what was that decision point? Like? Like, was there a break, or was there anybody pushed back?

R. Bowen Loftin
It never occurred to me not to go. I mean, I guess I could have sat there and thought through all of the various threads that might come from this particular decision point. But once I knew what had happened and I had enough data, I had enough information. I mean, I had had bits and pieces of data coming to me, and I made sure, you know, Linda was not in the dark exactly. I mean, this was on the news. This was something out there, but I had to go because I was the campus leader, and that was clear to me. I never even had a question about that. I mean, cinderelec offered to go and tell her. I mean, others could have gone too. I could have sent somebody who worked for me. I could send you. Had to go talk to her, but I felt it was important that she speak to someone she would recognize as the campus leader. It wouldn’t be appropriate to have the College Station president come down. That was Elsa Morano at the time, it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to send a police officer, as sometimes happens. What you learn in talking to people who’ve gone through this, especially military people, you learn that they they go to homes from time to time, and they’re. A special group who’s trained to do that, but having said that many people choose to also do something alongside of it, Robert Gates was Adams president when I was hired as a vice president. He had been the director of the CIA. He had served in the Bush School as dean for a time at Texas A and M, and when Ray Bowen resigned as president and retired as that role, the board selected this gentleman, Robert Gates, to be the president. After he left a and m, he hired me about other things, but he left a and m, not because of me. He left to become the Secretary of Defense the United States for for George W Bush, and one of the few people in history who served at that level for two presidents, for different parties. So he not only serve, served George W Bush, but when Obama became president, he also kept him as Defense Secretary. That’s very unusual, very, very unusual. But Bob, as Secretary of Defense, told me, he said, Look, people were dying. We had combat operations. We had accidents. He said, every single service person who died, I wrote a personal letter to their family. He wasn’t the one carrying the news to them. They already knew their loved one was gone, but he took the time to write them a personal letter. And I was impressed by that. I really was I do. I’ve done this. My scale is so different. It’s just an amazing he spent a fair amount of time, many times every day, going through and writing these letters of condolence to families. And he understood, I think, intrinsically, that even though the letter couldn’t say something brand new, the fact it came from him in the form, it came personal, handwritten, yeah, would be meaningful. And I think he was absolutely right about that.

J.T. Snipes
You know, I’m, I’m very curious about this notion of shared grief. I think it’s very powerful. You did such a eloquent job of talking about how, when I often think about grief, it is individual. It’s something that I’m carrying, and it’s a pain that I have, and I really appreciate the opening to talk about grief as a shared component. I’m a part of a club right now. I guess it’s a club. I don’t really know the the right language for it, but it’s a, it’s a, it’s a dialog group of black Christians and white Jewish folks. It’s called rekindle. And one of the things that I’m learning from my Jewish friends is this notion of sitting Shiva, right? There after someone has passed. And that’s what I thought of as you were sharing your story, a moment where we can come together and grieve together. And I think there’s a really powerful, somewhat liberatory idea of us grieving together. And I do have a question for you so

R. Bowen Loftin
you’re eloquently explaining your own, your own point of view. Well, I

J.T. Snipes
mean, I’m just responding to what what you opened up and thinking about your role as a university president. In particular, there is so much grief on our college campuses, and I wonder how you hold that I’m thinking about historically, like, at what point do you allow yourself to take in the grief? Because if you take it all in, it can be overwhelming. So I’m curious if you’ve ever thought about I’m going to

Neil E. Golemo
cut in real quick, because I just want to say something about Dr Loftin. We were talking earlier, and this is not his first time on a student affairs now podcast, but I remember he was in an earlier episode, and he made the comment that he had lost 75 students during his time as President. And I remember where I was, I was vacuuming when I was listening, and I stopped where I was, and I remember thinking like, of course, like bone would know exactly, like the exact number. It was 75 right, sir. So answer the question.

R. Bowen Loftin
And again, the number is not unique. I mean, what you find is with the demographic, the university campus and the size of the campus, the number 75 over a four to five year period is not unusual at all. Now, Galveston has gone years without a death, but that’s a very small campus. Years. So when you scale it up to 50,000 60,065 70,000 students, where we are today, the actual expectation of a statistician would be, you’re going to see around that number of deaths. The des had no similarities. They were all unique. There were people who died from a disease, surgeries gone wrong, car accidents, and I, I knew the story of every single one of those deaths. A few were extremely difficult for me. One young man that died on campus I had taught in Sunday school, just a purely random thing. I knew him. I knew his family, which was somewhat dysfunctional, and it was very challenging. Another young man that died in a car wreck. I had met many times on campus. We had become friends. In a sense, we knew each other, and we joked about stuff we had fun. That was a hard one, too. I had a half a dozen of the 75 that I knew, and that made it more difficult for me, more personal for me, and in a way you have to understand has to be more personal. You just know them. It’s not something just not a name. But I tried to learn about every single student who died. I tried to communicate with the families, and it was appropriate silver taps, I don’t if you know this, but silver taps has a pre piece of part before the ceremony that’s everybody’s involved in, and that was a time when the students who lead it interact with the families. And I would be there, and I can tell you so many stories about that, but one I’ll just tell you very quickly, which illustrates this whole thing you brought up about shared grief. This was a single mother who had no prior A and M experience, lost her son, and I called her Cynthia. Called her first. I called her next, later on and talked to her about it. And normally, when you get to sober taps the pre part, there’s a whole family there. There’s maybe 20 people from one family there. You know, moms, dads, grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings. You got a whole lot of people. She was by herself. She came totally by herself. And I saw her immediately when I walked in the room, you know, a black, single woman sitting in the room there, I knew immediately who she was. I walked up to her and said a few things to her, and just stood back and let the kids come and do their thing. These students, who lead several taps, managed everything, and they had a whole series of things that they would say to her and give her, and they try to make sure that in the group with them were students who knew their her student, the deceased student. And I just watched that. And you could watch what happens. You could watch her body language and watch it change again. You didn’t see a diminution of grief, but you saw the fact she was recognizing that she wasn’t alone anymore, and that is something humans humans simply grasp onto. There is no way not to. I can’t imagine a human being who wants to be alone all the time. Maybe they exist, I don’t know, but when you have that kind of experience, you may need to be alone a little bit, but you also want to be with other people who have at least some exposure to the individual you’ve lost. Growing up in a small town in Texas, East Texas, when I was a boy, my dad sat up with a body that’s gone pretty well today, but my dad when a person we knew died, and we knew most people in town, a town of a couple 1000 people, you know everybody. So when my dad knew somebody had died, he would be volunteering, set up with a Bucha. They would go and drink coffee in two hour shifts all night long, cuz the body was never left alone. Now that that sort of tradition, I think is pretty much gone in this country today. But I grew up with that. I grew up with with the celebration of people coming together from out of town who came back for the funeral. It was a social event, a good one. You enjoyed seeing people you hadn’t seen for a while. You had covered dishes, you had things to eat and stuff to drink and and you could talk about, tell stories about the person who had passed away. So it wasn’t all shedding tears and yelling and screaming. It was about also remembering, remembering the good things, the important things, the wonderful things,

Neil E. Golemo
and carrying on. I. And how we do the go about the business of carrying on. And so.

R. Bowen Loftin
I do think Student Affairs personnel like yourselves must deal with this from time to time. In some manner, you’re going to have to communicate bad news in some ways, to somebody and and I think it’s important to understand that that’s something that comes with the territory. And while you can’t make it easier, you can learn from experiences you have, and you can insert more and more into it that may be helpful to not only the person you’re talking with, but to yourself.

Neil E. Golemo
Well, at the end of the day, it’s about relationships and caring, like whether you are giving good news, whether you are giving bad news, like, it’s so important to have the relationships and have that meaningful connection, because we are in this all together. We all leave a mark and make mark. And the few students, you know, thank goodness you know, I haven’t had to deal with this too much, but I’ve had to deal with it enough and and I just know that, like one of the things that’s so meaningful about this work is the connection. It is so important, and it’s a blessing to be able to do this and get paid for it. Like, there’s definitely days.

R. Bowen Loftin
I gotta look into that a little bit.

Neil E. Golemo
Don’t get me wrong. There are days where I definitely, like, I have to remind myself, I get paid for this, but I just gotta say like I’m so grateful that I got to learn from people like you. Like you always set such a great example, and you were always so visible and sincere and authentic. And I don’t know. Sometimes you see people and you think there’s no way they’re actually that nice or that kind.

R. Bowen Loftin
And my wife for 53 years, and see what she says about

Neil E. Golemo
well, I have no idea if, if you pick up your socks or not, sir, but

R. Bowen Loftin
she doesn’t, but I do.

J.T. Snipes
There you go. So I told you this question was coming 53 years, you open the door again as someone who hasn’t been married nearly that long, what is what keeps you all together? And I see you’re smiling right now, so I’m assuming happy.

R. Bowen Loftin
I’ll try to make it as short as possible, but understand, my wife has a PhD as well. We met in grad school. Okay? The mutual friend. When I’m asked where I met her, I met her in a bar, very special bar, A bar helped build at Rice University for graduate students named Valhalla, which is still there today. We met there 53 plus years ago, okay, and then I got married fairly quickly. After that, we realized we were old enough to kind of have been through some stuff, and we kind of knew when it was the right thing to do. But I would say this about about my wife. She is highly educated, highly intelligent. You can argue about my intelligence, although I have the same, same diploma on my wall, PhD, but, but again, we’re not the same. That’s, I think, one of the secrets to our success here. I won’t say everybody has to have this situation, but I view us as complementary, not duplicative. We don’t duplicate each other. She’s a life science person. My degree is in physics, okay, so I’m we’re pretty different in that regard, and I couldn’t imagine, you know, being in a situation where we did exactly the same thing together, because we just don’t she just got back to ride it riding a horse for a couple hours. She loves horses. She’s an equestrian. She rides several days a week. She competes. And she’s not young anymore. Don’t tell her. And and I think that the fact we have different things in our lives helps reach I was over this morning watching football practice. She went to ride a horse. Okay, pretty different things, all right, but that’s okay. We’re going to be together watching a tennis match and a softball game later today. So we both enjoy athletics. We both enjoy sports. We go to that a lot. We’re together a lot for that, but we do other things during the course of the day, typically, that are fairly different. And I ain’t that to us is a secret of our success.

Neil E. Golemo
Wow. 53 years I’m 13 in so

R. Bowen Loftin
every day I’m thankful she hasn’t shot me yet. I. But,

Neil E. Golemo
yeah, I I feel like you got some people beat for sure. For

R. Bowen Loftin
sure, you can’t be married to somebody for any pretty time at all and not have some anger, not have some some difficult times. You’re just going to happen. It has to happen. I can’t imagine it not happening, but how you get over those things, how you go on, that’s the important stuff. You learn, and you get better at it over time. I think she hadn’t shot me like I said. She hasn’t shot me yet. I’m sure there were times when she thought about that.

Neil E. Golemo
Loving people you love is an action. It is a verb and a noun, and it’s, it’s all about making the choice to get up and do it again and again. At least that’s what little I’ve learned. That’s a reasonable thing to say, Yeah, well, probably should end on that. Then, first off, I actually do want to say one more thing. JT, Baylor won today. So, so sick. Oh, they did win one by two. That’s right.

J.T. Snipes
Oh, my gosh, yeah. I gotta play closer attention.

R. Bowen Loftin
I gotta tell you guys. I last night I was watching two things I do, games on simultaneously. I watched us win a basketball game up in Denver against Yale, and I watched us lose a baseball game in Vanderbilt. So I watched two different kind of games last night almost simultaneously, side by side. So,

Neil E. Golemo
yeah, I watched the game last

J.T. Snipes
night. It was great. Well, Sr, we made the tournament for the first time, and they did, but I’m glad to hear Thank you, Neil, for correcting me.

Neil E. Golemo
Let’s get rid of it. I was gonna say I got a compliment from Dr Loftin, and I got to correct you, so this is the best way. All right, I want to thank our guest, Dr Loftin, for sharing his joy with us and also our sponsor, Huron, this has been here’s the story part of the Student Affairs NOW family, we are so glad that you joined us to laugh, cry, learn, commiserate, maybe, but always celebrate being a part of the Student Affairs experience. If you have a story, and we all have a story, please consider sharing with us by leaving a two minute pitch via voice file at studentaffairsnow.com/herethestory. Every story is welcome and every earnest perspective is worthy. And even if you don’t feel like sharing yours, you can still find ours and others at studentaffairsnow.com on YouTube, anywhere you can find a podcast. I also want to say thank you to Nat Ambrosey, who has been editing us and making us sound better than we have any business sounding. Thank you, Nat. And I guess I’ll just going to go ahead and say, you know, I hope this has fed your flame a little bit, because your light matters. Keep using it to make the world a brighter place. Until next time this has been here’s a story I want to thank you. Dr Loftin, this is Neil Golemo.

J.T. Snipes
J.T. Snipes, thank you

Neil E. Golemo
so Gig ’em all that you.

–