One Of UTEP’s Longest Serving Communications Professors To Retire

In a room full of journalists trained to tell stories, Dr. Barthy Byrd had each one hanging on her every word.

Byrd didn’t mince words when she said it’s the students she will miss most when she retires this summer after 27 years at the University of Texas at El Paso in the communications department.

One by one at a special lunch in her honor at ABC-7, she had her former students tell a story from one of her classes or she told the audience how a person was as a student.

The no-nonsense, tough-as-nails associate professor warned she may cry, though, when she started telling the story of a football player who took her class several years ago. He was struggling as a result of education problems he had growing up, but he kept trying.

She told him as long as he kept trying, she would give him every opportunity to improve his work and re-write and re-write his work until he got it right.

His efforts paid off and on graduation day, the big, mammoth man easily picked up the 5-foot-10 Byrd in a big bear hug, lifting her with her feet dangling a couple feet off of the ground.

He told her, “I’d be nothing without you.” Seventeen family members had driven from Houston to see him graduate. He is now a teacher in his hometown.

Byrd then told a story from when she was a reporter and “On The Road with Charles Kuralt” visited El Paso to do a story on El Pipo, the barber who also was a bullfighter. Byrd convinced the national TV show to let her follow Kuralt around El Paso for three days.

Kuralt’s interview with El Pipo wasn’t going well, with only short soundbites when Byrd saw how Kuralt changed his approach, asking El Pipo, “What do you do?” as he got his hair cut by him. He asked El Pipo to describe putting on the the haircutting smock and what he did at that job and how it differed from when he put on the bullfighter uniform.

Byrd mimicked El Pipo’s posture and attitude change – far different from that of a barber – as she recalled the story.

“I would hope that what I taught you to do was to pay attention and to get it right. And hope you become good writers but mostly to pay attention and to get it right,” Byrd told a group of ABC-7 employees who had taken at least one of her classes over the years.

After the special lunch ended, Byrd hugged her former students. She wasn’t physically lifted off the ground this time but the visit obviously buoyed her already high spirit.

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