Donald R. Ellis Jr.

A photographer and audiovisual writer and producer, Don has worked for 22 years as a marketing communications specialist with Taylor Machine Works Inc. in Louisville, Mississippi, a $175-million manufacturer of industrial lift equipment. His wife, Nancy Smith Ellis, has a B.A. from Mississippi University for Women (formerly Mississippi State College for Women) and an M.A. from Mississippi State University, and is an educator and organist. The Ellises have two children: Kathryn Gable Ellis Conklin, 37, an educator who’s now a full-time mom and who earned the same degrees from the same institutions as Nancy; and Wesley Thomas Garvin Ellis, 33, also a graduate of Mississippi University for Women (which has enrolled men for two decades now).

Don has a strong spiritual side. He’s active in the First United Methodist Church of Louisville and was formerly its youth director. His hobbies include theological study and writing drama and liturgy for local churches. Rather than chase power and wealth, he says, “I have enjoyed the joy of trying to learn and understand more each day.”

Of his alma mater he writes: “Within what easily could have been an environment of traditional restriction, W&L was a crucible that demanded much of me and made me examine myself. I first saw W&L when I arrived for Freshman Camp. To say I was out of my element would be a vast understatement. But one statement made by a faculty member in those first days of college has remained with me. I wish I could remember the exact words; in essence he said that his primary role and that of all faculty members was not simply to pass on the facts of their respective disciplines, but to teach us how to teach ourselves. What greater gift could one ever receive in this life?”

Beyond his church-related work, he’s proud to have produced “effective sales and training media, material written for church use” as well as “two successful and impressive children and four wonderful, healthy, active grandchildren.” Besides never-ending learning, heenjoyus “a well-performed Wagnerian opera . . . a play that challenges me and demands a reaction from me; and art that reveals the artist.”

And like so many in  our class, he’s annoyed by “petulant infantilism in politics and rejection of our national principles by those ‘leading’ us”; the state of contemporary journalism; “corporate rejection of educational excellence”; and “a hungry and ill population in a world of plenty and scientific and medical miracles.”