It didn’t matter to freshman Gary Timmer that Jim Graham was just a few years older than him. 

This was college, Timmer reasoned. It was 1951, and this wasn’t the familiar country school down the road from his family’s farm on the southwest Minnesota prairie. So as Timmer painstakingly crafted his first English paper for his young Central College English professor, he chose his words carefully, figuring the more syllables in each, the better. 

Yet even though Graham had only recently descended from the lofty academic heights of Harvard University, where he earned his master’s degree, he had a disdain for inflating one’s self-importance or vocabulary. Throughout his career, Graham could seldom resist taking a mild poke at pretension and returned Timmer’s paper with a simple observation scrawled in the margin: “Who are you trying to impress?”

Timmer roared with laughter as he recalled the lesson 74 years later. It was as though he could see the ever-present twinkle in Graham’s eyes and his warm smile through the words.

Graham died at his Sierra Vista, Arizona home Feb. 23 at age 99. Timmer, a retired Central vice president of development, shared his memories of him a few weeks later as his own days were dwindling, before passing away April 5 in Pella at age 91. Others recalled their stories as well, typically with a smile.

Graham would prefer any printed memories of him be as succinct as the tightly crafted 205-word obituary he authored for himself. But much like the countless books he absorbed, there’s so much else to share.

He was more than an English professor. Graham spent a decade as Central’s academic dean. He helped launch the college’s international studies program, in some ways changing Central as much as the students who spent transformative semesters abroad. He was the school’s first chairman of its cross-cultural studies division. He even served as Central’s interim president prior to the arrival of Kenneth J. Weller in 1969.

And he coached tennis.

His path to Central was as unconventional as his resume. In 1950, the college was a small, somewhat Insular place with around 300 students mostly like Timmer, a Reformed Church youth with Dutch ancestry.

But Graham was born in Ponte Nova, Bahia, Brazil, where his parents were Presbyterian missionaries, far from the tidy brick streets of Pella. He spoke Portuguese as well as English, not Dutch. At age 14, he was sent to New York to attend high school before serving in the Navy during World War II, then landed at tiny Tarkio College in Missouri for his undergraduate work. It was there that he met Phyllis Currie, whom he married in 1948, but that was conditional. After he finished at Harvard, she insisted they live somewhere near her parents, who were in Corning, Iowa. Consequently, Graham wrote to colleges throughout the Midwest looking for work. Central stood out to Graham largely because it was the only college that responded.

“It was almost accidental,” said his son, Gifford.

It seemed like an odd fit. Yet he would spend nearly 50 years on staff, becoming as integral to the fabric of Central as the A Cappella Choir and the campus pond, which was created more than 10 years after Graham’s arrival.

Climbing the career ladder held little appeal to Graham. Gifford reflected on a letter that his father wrote to former Central president Donald Lubbers late in life.

“There’s one perspective of see what you can accomplish and then when you’re done, you could move on somewhere else,” Gifford said. “And Dad’s argument was to make something your career, to have your roots settled deep in a place. And I think that’s what he decided Central was for him.”

Lubbers saw it as a wise choice.

“Jim’s personality had a dominant effect on the whole college,” he said. “He was known for his loyalty to the college. He came right out of graduate school to Central and that was his whole career. In small colleges, the ones that are really good, the genius is the loyalty that people have to them and the loyalty they demonstrate by staying. Money is not their first concern. Jim exemplified all those fine qualities.”

Timmer, who similarly became a Central pillar as a longtime vice president for development, summed up Graham’s legacy simply.

“Jim Graham was a legend,” he said in March. “Marvelous man.”

When Lubbers took over as president in 1960 at age 29, he was the youngest college president in the U.S. He harbored ambitious ideas and quickly identified Graham as a leader bold enough to implement them, plucking him from the English department to serve as academic dean in 1961.

“He had good personal skills,” Lubbers said, from his retirement home in Allendale, Michigan. “People liked him. He related to people very easily. He understood Central College and the academic  program and he and I were in sync on what we wanted to accomplish.”

While Central retained its strong ties with the Reformed Church in America, the college began casting a larger recruiting net. Enrollment mushroomed beyond 1,000 students, eventually stretching above 1,800 under President Kenneth J. Weller in the 1980s.

The international programs which Graham and Lubbers helped launch accelerated the growth.

“We noticed that the University of Iowa discontinued some of its language programs and it made us think,” Lubbers said.  “And this was happening throughout the country. So we thought, there are going to be people who want to study language, let’s take advantage of that.”

In addition to operating its own international study centers in France, Austria and Spain, the college added English-language programs in Merida, Yucatan and London, expanding later with centers in Carmarthen, Wales and Leiden, the Netherlands.

Central’s programs, which attracted participants from other colleges and universities, were life-changing for students and perhaps Graham’s greatest point of professional pride. 

“I believe that a major goal we have for every Central graduate is that they develop a personal philosophy of life—a way of looking at and integrating the world around them,” Graham wrote in 1969. “For such a philosophy to be satisfying, it seems essential that a student at least once has the opportunity to see life from the perspective of another culture, whether they have actually lived abroad or simply come to know quite well a friend raised in another culture.”

The programs were impactful for faculty members as well.

“I had really no interest in international studies before I came to Central,” said Professor of English Emeritus John Miller, who Graham recruited to the Central faculty in 1969. “I’d never even been out of the country.”

But he later spent five trimesters as a faculty member on Central’s program in the Yucatan and a year as program director in London.

“All of that because Jim Graham was pushing international studies at that time,” Miller said. “I would say that for me, the most important thing that happened to me in my teaching career at Central was the international programs. He had a pretty large influence on me in that way and many students and other faculty as well.”

Graham served as president of the Iowa Partners of the Americas, and Associate Professor Emerita of Spanish Martha Betancourt, who Graham later married, shared his love for international study. They basked in every opportunity to experience another culture.

Graham could get a taste of perspectives from beyond the quiet campus by simply wandering to the college tennis courts. One of his squads included players from California, Hawaii and Japan. He delighted in noting with a wry smile that he could divide them at practices by calling out for Iowa players on one side of the net and Pacific Rim natives on the other.

Graham shined as academic dean and like Lubbers, and later Weller, Miller was a fan.

“He was lively and interesting,” Miller said. “He was a wonderful speaker and writer. He was a person of language and he could persuade. He would give speeches at commencement and so forth that were just dazzling. When you talked to him, you were very impressed by his ability to tell a story, his ability to relate to people. He was a very warm person.”

Academic deans typically remain on the administrative track. Some eye presidential openings on other campuses. But Graham missed his students in the classroom.

“He never really wanted to be dean,” Lubbers said. “And then one time he resigned. And I wouldn’t let him resign, so he stayed on.”

But Graham eventually got his wish. In 1975, he was appointed chair of the new Division of Cross-Cultural Studies.

In a sense, he was taking the advice he offered to Central students in a 1975 interview with the Central Ray.

“You have to be cheerful and ready in taking on new unexpected opportunities,” he said. “Students shouldn’t be overly concerned about choosing a career or worrying about making a living. That’s important, but more important is a willingness to plunge. To go several ways if needed, to be ready for life."

Most of his Central students after that were unaware that Graham ever served as academic dean.

“I don’t think we ever talked about his time as dean,” said Curtis Bauer '92, who developed a close relationship with Graham despite never taking a class from him. He’s now a poet as well as Professor of English and Creative Writing Program Director at Texas Tech University.  “I don’t think that was necessarily what he most enjoyed. I think he did it because he needed to do it. That also says a lot about him. He stepped up when it was necessary.”

But Graham remained influential with faculty in returning to his role as a colleague.

“He modeled creative thinking in assignments and class structure,” said Mary Stark, professor of English emeritus. “He helped me question some assumptions that we might have about teaching and I was really appreciative of that. He tried to help set me up for success.” 

His coaching career was perhaps a footnote to his classroom and administrative duties, yet he saw it as equally significant. He briefly served as men’s tennis coach in the 1950s, led Central’s women’s volleyball squad in 1976 and 1977, then had a successful run as women’s tennis coach from 1983-90, posting a 73-40 record. 

“He liked the teaching and it fit well with liking to play tennis,” Gifford Graham said. “He helped with Pella youth recreation teams, too. He wasn’t charging money for a lesson, he just loved the teaching.”

Coaching tennis was just another opportunity to work with students.

“What made him effective as a coach was what made him effective as a dean,” Lubbers said. “He could create an ethos of success.”

Shannan Mattiace ‘90 saw deeper connections.

“It was like tennis was a philosophical extension of other things that he also loved, which were about testing yourself, finding your limits, working with other people and doing something well and doing something beautifully,” said Mattiace, a four-time Iowa Conference placewinner, CSC Academic All-America® honoree and two-time De Haan MVP Award winner. She is now an associate professor of political science at Allegheny College (Pa.).

Bauer wasn’t an athlete, yet saw the connection as equally clear. 

“I think there’s a relationship, for me, between writing and physical activity and movement,” Bauer said. “And I think for Jim, there’s an art and a beauty to tennis. I think it would be easy for him to find that relationship and also to move the mind, to stop thinking and just start acting.”

Graham was unlike any coach Mattiace ever met.

“Completely different,” she said. “I grew up in a family of coaches, but more typical coaches, kind of, ‘Hey, education is important, but sports are really great.’ So I meet Jim and, for starters, he’s an English professor. And he was mostly interested in talking about (Central being) a liberal arts college. He was unapologetic about, ‘Hey, this is a place where you can study a lot of things and you can really expand intellectually and you can play tennis.’ It was always the scholar-athlete model but very much the scholar first.”

And a perfect fit for Central.

“He was all the things that a coach should be, especially in Division III,” said Beth Voorhis Kuney ‘’87, another women’s tennis CSC Academic All-America honoree.

He treated his athletes like his students, providing instruction while recognizing it was up to them to learn.

“He had all kinds of great tennis skills and he communicated about that,” Kuney said. “He knew how to coach but then he also let players sort of figure stuff out on their own as well.”

Graham was more concerned with a player’s frame of mind than her backhand.

“The mental part is always a challenge for any coach because tennis can be very mental, particularly singles,” said Kuney, now an attorney in Bakersfield, California. “It’s just you out there by yourself and you can be your own worst enemy or your best weapon. And so he would talk to us about the importance of staying positive and not letting the moment get in the way of the tennis.” 

Graham didn’t bark instructions to players. He quietly observed.

“During the matches, he would watch your game and he would try to figure out what was keeping you from playing your best tennis,” Mattiace said. “Sometimes those things had to do with something mechanical like, ‘Hey, you know what? I don’t think you’re throwing your toss high enough on your serve.’ But a lot of times, it was something mental, like, it seems like you’re getting really flustered by the fact that the other player is hitting it all to your backhand. So try this or that. He was very attuned to the mental part of the game.”

Graham wanted to win but relished meeting opponents as much as beating them.

“He would call our opponents—I always remember this—he would call our opponents our partners,” Mattiace said. “It was almost annoying because I’m competitive. I’m thinking, my partner, what? But that’s what he did. He knew a lot of the players from the other team and he would be so nice to them.”

In his near-century of life, Graham was a student as much as he was a teacher. Endlessly curious, the interest he took in others reflected his eagerness to learn, rather than just a desire to be polite. It was a quality that made him an engaging conversationalist, but a bit of a high-risk driver, more focused on better understanding his passengers and the world rushing by the van windows than eyeing the gray pavement stretching out in front of him.

“We would never let him drive on road trips,” Mattiace said with a laugh. “He was so distracted. And so I would drive the van and we would be up there having conversations, sometimes in Spanish. He loved to speak Spanish.”

That mirrored memories Bauer shared.

“It was just that smile that Jim had,” he said. “Something that was always present for me. Just asking questions and being curious. That’s what we do as writers, what we do as teachers and what we should be doing as humans, right? Be curious about the world we live in. Jim lived that.”

And always, there were books.

During Gifford Graham’s high school golf meets he recalls his father dutifully following him around the course with a book tucked under his arm, to read between shots.

For Bauer, that was a shared passion.

“Our conversations were always about books and always about literature but also our role as thinkers and members of a larger community of scholars of academics but also just being in the world and I think Jim’s presence in the world, just that kind of generosity and care is central,” Bauer said. “It’s something that he didn’t necessarily talk about as a subject but demonstrated in the way that he lived his life. He was constantly reading and rereading books and he would give me books every time I was there.”

His lust for reading was not diminished by failing eyesight in his final years, nor his thirst for answers to deep questions.

“He was probably just as voracious of a reader when it was audio books,” Gifford Graham said. “And there were certain audio books you didn’t have to check out but that you could keep. And one of them was the Old Testament. He read through the Old Testament multiple times. And I’m thinking, wow, once you’ve read through Numbers and Deuteronomy, OK, I think I’ve got enough of that. But the people at his church (in Arizona) talked about how interesting his Bible studies were. He taught a lot of Sunday School and I think that showed his love of teaching. He loved to get people talking to get people involved, showing them different angles.” 

Another constant with Grahm was the smile. His sense of humor undergirded most conversations, a reminder to never take things too seriously but also slipping in unexpectedly as a way of getting his point across. 

“He would always keep you a little off balance with that humor,” Mattiace said. 

Pretension was a frequent target.

“He loved making fun of people in power, but not meanly,” Mattiace said. “He was a guy that liked to break down hierarchies. Anyone that seemed self-important.”

For his former players, the memories remain vivid and as warm as their old coach.

“To be honest, I remember him more as a person than a coach,” said Kuney. “He could talk about anything and he was interested in what was happening in the world and in our lives. He had a far-reaching curiosity about things. I knew his office hours, regardless of whether I had him as a professor (that semester). If it was the off-season and I just wanted to spend some time with him, I knew where to find him. And he was always available.”

“I think about the van rides. And I think about the sense of community that he created on his team. He took care of his players and he cared about each one of us.”

Most of all, Mattiace remembers sunny September afternoons on the familiar courts next to Kuyper Gym.

“What a wonderful day it was to play tennis with him.”