HARRY TOUPS: My Friend and Colleague

 

Above, Harry Toups today.  Sure, it's unfair, for that's what he looks like now, and here I am fifty years ago in my research lab at LSU.  The last time I saw him was 14 years ago when my wife Pearl and I went to the 2008 Sugar Bowl game.  The day after we were supposed to rent a car and drive to the LSU campus to meet with Harry and his wife Margaret.  However, it was so foggy that I cancelled that trip.  Instead, they met us in New Orleans, and we talked all day.

Harry worked along side me when I earned my PhD in chemical engineering, as I suffered through a dissertation program that involved getting industrial funds to pay for the equipment, build a tunable later (before one could be purchased), then construct a micro reactor to break DNA/RNA bonds of E. coli, not long after Watson and Crick found them.  No one in his right mind trying to get a PhD actually tries to invent his own plan to do something never done before.  Harry was smart.  He did some computer modeling of what I tried in a laboratory.

When I first contemplated going to graduate school, Louisiana State University was not on my list.  However, the sugar company I was working for, C. Brewer, convinced me to go to LSU because it had the only sugar engineering school in the country.  Not only was I awarded a full fellowship by LSU, but C. Brewer continued to pay my salary.  Picked up a new car, and Pearl and I drove across the country.  First stop was at the housing office on campus, and amazingly enough, they just happened to have in their typewriter (in those days there were no computers) a letter informing me that they had just found a married student apartment for us.  We lived there for three years.  On campus, safe and relatively cheap.  Also, a block from where the second Popeye's opened.

I'll tell you more about Harry, but first, what we did as graduate students there:

• Studying was not a major factor.
• We played Stratomatic football, my introduction to fantasy sports.  Two professors joined in.  Harry was my nemesis.  I could never beat him.

• 
  We had intense Mexican food forays, with Tom Domenic, who was also in our ChE program, and others.  The Jalapeno peppers almost killed us, several times.

• 
  The apartment adjacent to campus for Pearl and me was a longer walk away.  The Toups' was across the street from Tiger Stadium.  We tailgated in their apartment before football games.
• That's about all I can remember about LSU.

Ah,  I found some LSU photos, so here they are of, on the top from the right, Tommy and Sandy, then below them, Harry and Margaret.

In the Fall 2022 issue of The Caine Department of Chemical Engineering Alumni Magazine, there were two articles of Harry.  His story:

• After he earned his PhD, he began working in the petro-chemical industry.
• Then, when he was in his mid-fifties, he, like Tina Turner, left a good job in the city...and became a ninth-grade physical science teacher, something he had long wanted to do.  He said he failed, and quit.  Something about classroom management.
• 
  Fortuitously, Margaret saw an ad seeking a faculty member for the LSU ChE Department in unit operations.  He was selected, and that was 19 years ago.
• He imparted a lot of wisdom:
• A profound failure does not have to define you; it may just be a wrong attempt before moving forward.
• One doesn't always know what one is preparing for in life, so value your current engagement.
• You might have a dream or a meaningful thread running through your life that you are not always consciously aware of.  Do not be afraid to embrace it when it shows itself.
• Never underestimate the power of someone who truly loves you and hates to see you lost and depressed.
• 
  In all of this, I see the role of Providence.  However, the Providence I speak of is far more personal than that of Edison.  I believe in a Providence more like David's, a Providence who saved me from calamity more than once, and a Providence to whom I am forever indebted.

• 
  In these past 19 years at LSU, my greatest joy has been working with, learning from, and seeing students succeed.  This joy is the genuine joy people with a heart for teaching seek.
• Finally, in memory of his grandmother, Anna Eliza Daly:

May the road rise up to meet you.  May the wind be always at your back.  May the sun shine warm upon your face, the rains fall soft upon your fields, and until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of his hand.

I still can remember, after half a century, this lady (Anna Eliza Daly), looking at me and praising my decision to return home to the University of Hawaii to teach.  No doubt I too was influenced by her.

In that same Alumni Magazine, there was an article of Professor Harry Toups receiving the 2022 William A. Brookshire Award for Teaching Excellence.  He also won a cash prize of $25,000.

Maybe one of my future trips should be to visit the LSU campus, then with them take a river cruise up the Mississippi.

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