Wednesday, June 09, 2021
My Students: Henry Wright
I'm devoting Wednesdays on the blog to profiling my former students, alternating between Baylor and St. Thomas.
Henry Wright (that's him at the far right in the photo above) was unusual among my students because we were friends first, then he came to law school and was my student (which was, in fact, a little awkward). He's a Waco guy, having grown up in the town and gone to high school with a number of other notable characters in my Waco life. He went off to college at SMU and only six years after that was elected the mayor of Beverly Hills, Texas, a small community adjacent to Waco (which, despite being small, presented a number of wacky problems and very strange situations that he handled adeptly). During this time, he also started teaching philosophy at Baylor, where he was a popular professor (as is his wife, Lenore).
There have been a few people in my life who I've sometimes felt I'm not smart enough to hang around with, and Henry is one of them-- and I mean that in the best way. He has a breadth of knowledge that spans from art history to connecting a beam to a joist, both of which make for good conversation in the right setting.
In 2006, he started talking about coming to law school, and I encouraged him to do so. And then there he was at Baylor Law, excelling in a way that older students rarely do-- he still had the intellectual chops to run with the kids just out of college. Now he works for a small firm in Waco, and continues to teach at Baylor. His hometown is lucky to have kept him close!
And I need to get to Texas and see Henry again soon....
