Mary Joan "Mary Jo" Peppler (born October 17, 1944) is an American former volleyball player and coach. Peppler was inducted into the Volleyball Hall of Fame in 1990. She also played professional basketball with the New Jersey Gems of the Women's Professional Basketball League for one season.
Gordon Baxter (December 25, 1923 – June 11, 2005), nicknamed Bax, was a well-known Texas radio personality, an author of books and a columnist for newspapers and magazines. He was a lifelong resident of Southeast Texas, having grown up in Port Arthur where he was born.
He lived near Beaumont during most of his professional years and was probably best known locally as a radio heartland humorist in the Jean Shepherd tradition. He was also known nationally to several generations of pilots who read his columns on the joys of flying in the aviation magazine, Flying.
Baxter was entranced by aviation from childhood. At the age of ten, he paid "a 1933 fortune" of five dollars for his first airplane ride in a Curtiss Condor and was hooked on flying. Despite a slow start in the cockpit and as a writer, by the end of his writing career he had spent more than 25 years with Flying, written 13 books and contributed to a Microsoft CD-ROM title, World of Flight.
During World War II, Baxter joined the Army Air Corps, hoping to be a pilot. Baxter himself noted that his ruination as a military pilot was predicted in high school by a math teacher who told Gordon that he spent too much time dreaming and drawing airplanes and not enough time studying. In the Army Air Corps, he trained in a Stearman. He entered the Merchant Marine as an officer, but after his ship was sunk in the South Pacific, he became a turret gunner in B-17s. Once there, he became a sharpshooter in every turret position. It was only after World War II that he succeeded in soloing in a Luscombe, eventually becoming an active pilot in the late 1950s.
Harry Joseph Middleton Jr. (October 24, 1921 – January 20, 2017) was an American journalist, author, and library director who served as Lyndon B. Johnson's Presidential speech writer and staff assistant from 1967 to 1969. Middleton was also director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum from 1971 until 2002, and led the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation from 1993 until 2004.
Leon Hale (May 30, 1921 – March 27, 2021) was an American journalist and author. He worked as a columnist for the Houston Chronicle from 1984 until his retirement in 2014. Before that, he had a column in the Houston Post for 32 years. He was also the author of twelve books.
Thomas Joseph Cade (January 10, 1928 – February 6, 2019) was an American ornithologist most notable for his efforts to conserve the peregrine falcon.
David Ray Wilkerson (May 19, 1931 – April 27, 2011) was an American Christian evangelist, best known for his book The Cross and the Switchblade. He was the founder of the addiction recovery program Teen Challenge, and founding pastor of the interdenominational Times Square Church in New York City.
Wilkerson emphasized such Christian beliefs as God's holiness and righteousness, God's love toward humans and especially Christian views of Jesus. Wilkerson tried to avoid categorizing Christians into distinct groups according to the denomination to which they belong.
William Roe Polk (March 7, 1929 – April 6, 2020) was an American foreign policy consultant and author. He was a professor of history at Harvard University and the University of Chicago, and was President of the latter's Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs.
Reverend Carroll L. "Bud" Pickett (1933 – April 3, 2022) was a Presbyterian minister in Huntsville, Texas. In the 1960s and 1970s, Pickett served as pastor for three churches in Texas. In 1980 he began serving as a chaplain in the Huntsville, Texas, prison, where he spent most of the next 15 years working with prisoners facing imminent execution. After retiring from the Texas Department of Corrections, Pickett wrote and spoke against the death penalty. His 2002 book, Within These Walls: Memoirs of a Death House Chaplain, won several awards. The 2008 documentary At the Death House Door: No Man Should Die Alone chronicles his prison ministry.
John S. Dunne, C.S.C. (December 3, 1929 – November 11, 2013) was an American priest and theologian of the Congregation of Holy Cross. He held the John A. O'Brien Professorship of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.
Charles Allan "Skeeter" Skelton (May 1, 1928, in Hereford, Texas – January 17, 1988, in El Paso, Texas) was an American lawman and firearms writer. After serving in the United States Marine Corps from 1945-46 he began a law enforcement career which included service with the United States Border Patrol, a term as Sheriff of Deaf Smith County, Texas, and investigator with both the US Customs Service and Special Agent in Charge with Drug Enforcement Administration. After his first nationally published article hit newsstands in September 1959, Skelton began writing part-time for firearms periodicals. In 1974 he retired from the DEA and concentrated full-time on his writing.