Ralph Crawford ’54
In 1945, Ralph was serving in the Air Force. He was stationed in Foggia, Italy. That year, Ralph decided to dedicate his life to fulltime Christian ministry although he didn’t know where God would lead him. When he returned home to Oklahoma, he enrolled at OBU, where he solidified several decisions that guided his direction.

The first came by way of Beverly Huff, a fellow OBU student. He saw her standing in line waiting to enroll for classes. “I never dated back in my hometown or when I was in the service. Then I came to OBU and saw Beverly.” He remembers that when they first met, he didn’t know what to say. “I was so tongue-tied,” he says, “and she was so poised.” Ralph and Beverly married in the August of 1947 after only meeting the September before.

The second decision came in his senior year when Ralph took a pastoral position at Trinity Baptist Church in Enid, Oklahoma. “We traveled back and forth to Enid on weekends,” Ralph says. “We slept in the car each Sunday afternoon.” After some time, the church found enough money to supply a hotel room each week, and after almost two years, the church invited him to serve full-time. He had yet to finish his work at OBU, lacking one foreign language class. Ralph says he made the effort because of the OBU faculty. Dr. Yarborough sent him a note that read, “‘You need to get back here and finish that degree. When you finish that, you need to get into seminary.’ He is the one who got me back to OBU,” Ralph says. “Dr. Yarborough was perhaps the most important influence in my life, other than my dad. He was the sweetest, kindest and gentlest man I ever knew. He was one of the teachers who knocked the bark off of me and settled me down to a gentler spirit.”

Ralph served the Enid congregation until 1954. By that time, he and his wife were parents of their first son, Ralph Jr., born in 1951. After serving close to three years as pastor of First Baptist Church in Ryan, Oklahoma, Ralph and his young family moved to Ada, Oklahoma, where he began as pastor of another Trinity Baptist. The year was 1957. He and Beverly welcomed their second son, Ryan, in 1959. From Trinity, he moved his family to two additional Oklahoma churches, First Southern for a year, and finally to Olivet Baptist in Oklahoma City in 1964.

In 1990, after more than 25 years at Olivet, Ralph retired. He had left a legacy dedicated to the mission of the local church, and through the years he served on a variety of boards from the Baptist Hospital to the Baptist Foundation, from OBU to the Pastor’s Conference. Since his retirement, Ralph has continued his tireless service to the church, serving in more than 77 churches throughout Oklahoma as an interim pastor, evangelist, and Bible study teacher. He and Beverly are also proud grandparents of two grandchildren.

Deborah Gardner ’73
Ask Deborah Gardner what she does for a living, and she just might tell you that she’s in the customer service business. As chief of planning and organizational development for the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health, Deb led a customer service initiative in 2001. The training was considered one of the most successful programs ever launched, and additional funding was awarded in 2002. “I feel strongly that we have the best customer service of any government agency. We motivate our employees to bring their best self forward in working with patients as well as coworkers. This work makes me feel like I still make a difference in the patient arena. I use my nursing skills as well as leadership skills I learned at OBU,” she says.

Deb decided early on that she wanted to study nursing. “My father offered me some good advice. He said “Debbie, it’s fine if you want to be a nurse, but get a degree.’ OBU offered a bachelor’s degree in nursing, and that was important to my family background.

“I didn’t really know what I was doing when I first came to OBU until I took my first nursing class. It was like I knew then that I was where I needed to be.”

Upon graduation from OBU, Deb served in the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps for three years. After receiving her master’s in psych-mental health nursing, she worked as a clinical nurse specialist for Kaiser Permanente in Hawaii from 1979 until 1984. She first came to NIH as an internal consultant and clinical specialist in research in 1987. “I came to NIH in the ’80s because that was the place to be for learning more about the biological aspects of psychiatric illness and that is what I wanted to do. Judy Kiel was a huge influence on me at OBU. She was my psych nursing professor, and gave me many insights into psych nursing.”

Deb recalls some other important role models at OBU. “Jaunita Proctor and Juanita Millsap were amazing! These two women looked at the discipline of nursing not just as rote memorization of procedures, but they explained the principles behind the practice. To this day, my teaching is modeled after their Socratic styles. They cared about the whole student which created learning at multiple levels. Dr. Jim Hurley was also a strong influence. He was a challenging teacher who expected you to “think” about problems from a systems perspective.”

In March 2000 Deb began her present role, where she is responsible for leading the collaborative development and monitoring strategic and operational planning for the Clinical Center. “The NIH is a huge organization, consisting of 27 different institutes. I work at the Clinical Center, which is a hospital that is completely clinical research based. Patients are our partners in research. People come here to be on protocols, and often it is their last hope.”

Deb’s customer service abilities also come in handy in her personal life, since her husband is the town mayor. The Gardners reside in Falls Church, Virginia, and have two daughters, KC and Beth.

Michael “Hawkeye” Pierce ’73
Sometimes it is years after graduating from college that our chosen career paths are reaffirmed. That was the way it was for Dr. Michael “Hawkeye” Pierce. Since 1982, Michael has pursued a career in biochemistry and molecular biology. When his father died in 1982 from a cancer known as mesothelioma, that was the turning point in his decision to focus on cancer research. “His was a fast-spreading, metastatic form of cancer, and I realized then how ignorant we were about cancer, especially as it applied to complex carbohydrates on cell surfaces and invasiveness. We’ve come a long way since then,” he says.

Michael, director of the University of Georgia Cancer Center (Athens) is also professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and a member of the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center. He also heads a team of seven scientists who have been awarded a five-year, $6.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop cutting-edge techniques to analyze cell surface carbohydrates on cancer and stem cells.

“We now know that some of the enzymes that transfer sugars to proteins show specific changes as cells become cancer cells. When many proteins are made by cancer cells, the sugars attached to them change. By analyzing serum and urine samples for sugar signatures on a particular protein, we now can determine if a woman has a rare form of cancer known as choriocarcinoma. We are now expanding our analysis to other cancers that are more common, such as breast cancer,” says Michael. To commercialize this discovery, we have started a biotechnology company with the University of Georgia called Oncose.”

But science was not Michael’s first love. When he came to OBU, he was headed toward a career in music. He grew up in Midwest City, and his minister of music was Jim Brown, who taught him how to match pitch and sing. Brown later moved to OBU and continued his role as Mike’s mentor on many other levels. His first science professor at OBU was Dr. Bill Neptune, a brilliant lecturer who was also an amateur musician. Bill reaffirmed his belief that science and music, in many ways, go hand-in-hand. Michael says Jim Hurley had the greatest impact on his career path, along with fellow professors John Mills and Dick Canham.

Michael’s first research experience at OBU came as a freshman. “Dr. Mills had an NIH grant, and there were a couple of seniors, John Heinze and Mike Hunkapiller, who worked in his lab and took an interest in me. I started washing dishes in the lab along with David Lester, and that was the beginning. After working there and taking Hurley’s classes, I knew this was what I wanted to do. My mentors at OBU got me into a great graduate school, Johns Hopkins – just as I work hard to get my students into top schools and jobs.

“When I came to OBU, the world opened up for me. I saw talented people doing important work and becoming a part of their students’ lives. I often tell my students that ‘science is the only profession I know of where every day you try and prove what you learned the day before was wrong.’ There are not many folks who can do this day after day and survive. It is tough, but in the end, you can see the success in your students’ lives and in the lives of those that may be impacted by the knowledge that you gain. The Holy Grail for a biomedical researcher is to make a discovery that can benefit someone in need – and that is what we try to do every day.”