'Registrar emeritus' Alton Bray looks back on life, career at Southeast as he turns 100

Alton Bray paused to reflect as he sipped a cup of coffee earlier this week at Chateau Girardeau.

Someone had just asked for his secret to a long life.

“I never really thought about it. It just happened,” he eventually answered, with a slight grin. “Maybe there was God’s will in this. I’m a strong believer in the power of God.”

Born 100 years ago today, Bray is known to many as the “registrar emeritus” at Southeast Missouri State University, known as Southeast Missouri Teachers College when he arrived on campus as a freshman in the fall of 1937.

Bray grew up in northern Scott County and graduated at age 17 from Fornfelt High School in what is now Scott City. Some of his earliest memories include his grandfather’s Model T Ford, furniture-size radios filled with glowing tubes, and “coal-fired locomotives when a trip to St. Louis was an excursion aboard the Cotton Belt Railroad.”

By the time Bray graduated from high school, two of his older siblings were already Southeast alumni. His sister, Lois, earned a teaching degree in 1930, while Paul, one of his three brothers, enrolled in 1934 but left Southeast in favor of full-time employment.

Bray graduated from Southeast in 1941, majoring in physics and mathematics.

“I taught one year of high school in Benton, Missouri, and I was a coach for both the girls and boys basketball teams there,” he said. “From there, I spent a year with the Air Force as a civilian radar instructor before coming back to Cape to work at the college in 1943, teaching math and physics in the Navy’s V-12 program.”

In 1945, he was asked to fill in when the college’s purchasing agent, Jack Wimp, was drafted into the military. Returning in 1946, Wimp was assigned to the school’s veteran’s affairs office and Bray remained as purchasing agent.

Later that year, the assistant registrar resigned and Bray was appointed to fill that position, serving under E.F. Vaeth. When Vaeth died in 1951, Bray was named to succeed him and continued in that role until his retirement in 1984.

Hand notes to computers

As registrar, Bray managed the enrollment records and transcripts for tens of thousands of Southeast students.

“When I started, we had about 1,000 students,” he said. “When I retired, the enrollment was 9,000.”

In the 1940s and ’50s, all work in the registrar’s office was done by hand and manual typewriters were considered state-of-the-art technology. In 1962, Bray convinced Mark Scully, Southeast’s president at the time, to invest in the school’s first computer, a room-size IBM 1620, to help manage the university’s registration records.

“My office staff was pretty small. We wouldn’t have been able to handle all 9,000 students without computer registration,” Bray said and joked today’s cellphones have more computing power than that first computer.

Jane Stacy, a Southeast student in the 1960s who served as the university’s alumni director from 1973 until 2008, remembers how Bray “had to promise Dr. Scully that computers were not a passing fad.”

Bray served under three other Southeast presidents — W.W. Parker, Mark Scully, Robert Leestamper and Bill Stacy — all of whom he remembers well. He also remembers some of the university’s notable faculty and staff.

“There was Peggy (B.F.) Johnson who headed the math department and there was a history teacher named Bill Doherty who was a classic,” Bray recalled. “And there was also Dr. (A.C.) McGill who was head of the science department and Dr. (Homer) Bolen in the biology department.”

Student perspectives

Although he doesn’t recall many specific students, there are a few who stood out because of their academic accomplishments.

“When I first started, there weren’t any straight-A students. Rodney O’Connor from Jackson was the first to graduate with a 4.0 grade- point (average), in 1955, and Audrey Reynolds was the first girl in 1965,” Bray recalled and said straight-A students have become more common in recent years. “I think the grading system has gotten easier, but I didn’t say that,” he said with a smile.

Sandy Hinkle has been Southeast’s registrar since 1998 and was a student worker in the school’s admissions office in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She said many of her classmates were afraid of Bray.

“But I think that’s because they didn’t know him,” Hinkle said. “I had the opportunity to see Mr. Bray as a man who worked in another office close to mine, and I got to know him on a different level than other students.”

Hinkle said Bray “had the right answers and could help students and faculty through whatever situation they were in,” adding she still finds some of Bray’s handwritten notes in some of the student files.

“I always have the utmost respect for Mr. Bray,” she said. “I hope I’m doing him proud.”

Bray’s niece, Nancy Bray, graduated from Southeast in 1966 and remembers occasionally going with her Tri-Delta sorority sisters to the her uncle’s office because they believed she could help work out issues with class schedules and graduation credits.

“They thought I could help, and he thought it was funny that I came along,” she laughed. “He got a kick out of it and kind of enjoyed his reputation.”

Sports and family

In addition to his academic career, Bray played semiprofessional baseball and served as an official in several sports. He also spent seven years as secretary-treasurer of the Missouri Intercollegiate Athletic Association (MIAA) and six years as the association’s president. The MIAA was Southeast’s athletic conference before the school moved from the Division II to Division I of the NCAA and joined the Ohio Valley Conference.

Bray and his wife, Martha, met when he was 18 and she was 15 at a high school basketball game. They were married 66 years before she died in 2011 at age 87. She, too, was a Southeast graduate, as were the Brays’ three children — Ellen Busch, a retired school counselor in St. Louis; Mary Newberry, a retired teacher in Katy, Texas; and Dr. Jeffrey Bray, an anesthesiologist from Chesterfield, Missouri.

In addition to his three children, Bray has six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, one of whom is thinking about enrolling at Southeast.

Family members are gathering this weekend to observe Bray’s centennial birthday and, depending on the weather and how he feels, Bray may also celebrate by riding in the university’s Homecoming parade Saturday morning.

Stacy, who organized dozens of Southeast Homecoming parades during her years as alumni director, said it’s only fitting for Bray to be honored in this year’s parade.

“I adored Alton, and still do,” she said. “If I had to pick one person who gave everything he had for the university, I’d pick him.”