Dr. Sonny Whorton Says It's Been A 'Wonderful Life'
8/21/2018 8:02:00 PM | Football
Former Football Player Became Authority in Biostatistics and Epidemiology
(Editor's note: This is the fifth in a series of feature profiles on this year's Hall of Fame inductees and Wall of Honor selections, leading up to the Sept. 21 Hall of Fame Banquet.)
By Jerry Hill
Baylor Bear Insider
Starting with his early days in Rule, Texas, weaving through his time as a football player at Baylor and then a professional career in education and research spanning nearly six decades, Dr. Elbert "Sonny" Whorton says "it's been a wonderful life, never a dull moment."
"The bottom line is I enjoyed messing with people and their problems and helping solve them," he said, "and I never had a dull client – never, never – all different and all separate stories."
The 79-year-old Whorton has a story of his own, far from dull and more than worthy of his selection for the Baylor Athletics Wall of Honor. An internationally recognized authority in biostatistics and epidemiology of genetic and environment toxicology, he will be honored at the Sept. 21 Hall of Fame banquet.
"I never really thought I would be honored like that, just because there are so many people that are way ahead of me," Whorton said. When he got the call from "B" Association Executive Director Walter Abercrombie, "it surprised me and humbled me very much."
Part of the freshman group that "hung in there" with new coach Frank Baker at Rule, Whorton went through a winless first season "and from then on, we lost no games." One of the victories, albeit in a scrimmage, was over a state championship Stamford team led by legendary coach Gordon Wood.
At the end of his senior season, Whorton got a call from Wood, asking him where he wanted to go to college.
"He was largely responsible for me getting my initial invitations with his good players to visit A&M, Oklahoma, Rice, Baylor and the rest," Whorton said. Along with Haskell's Robert Starr and Stamford's Royce West and Mike McClellan, "we all decided to go to Baylor, because our mothers wanted us to."
As a running back and linebacker at Baylor, Whorton played on the freshman team in 1957, sat out the '58 season and then lettered three years for coach John Bridgers (1959-61) on squads that made back-to-back bowl appearances.
It was at the 1961 Gotham Bowl where Whorton was reunited with Sammy Baugh. Five years earlier, he had tried to convince him to come to Hardin-Simmons University to play football.
"At the Gotham Bowl, he came to me and asked if I would now reconsider and join him with the New York Titans," Whorton said. "I didn't say no, but I said I would think about it."
A double major in math and physics, Whorton had plenty of good options, including jumping straight into the workforce, signing a pro football contract or continuing his education with a National Institute of Health fellowship at Tulane.
"I was either going to play pro ball with Sammy or go into the graduate field at Tulane," he said. "My wife said, 'If You go and play football, they're going to eat you up and you're going to have to drop out about October, and you're probably not going to get your bonus and then you're not going to have a job and you're not going to be able to get into school. She made it sound so bad, it was an easy choice."
Not only did the fellowship cover tuition, room and board, "pretty much everything," Whorton said, it also came with a $450-per-month stipend for the relatively new fields of biostatistics and quantitative epidemiology. He did his postgraduate work at Stanford and Tulane, then earned a PhD from the University of Oklahoma.
After a stint as a professor at the University of Vermont, Whorton returned to Texas to help rebuild the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
"The chairman of my department at Oklahoma (Edward Brandt Jr.) had left with a bunch of other guys to go to Texas to rebuild their medical school, because it was kind of falling apart," Whorton said. "He called me in Vermont and said, 'Son, are you ready to come home?'''
Although UTMB was still part of the UT system, it broke off to become its own graduate school, and it was Whorton that drafted the initial bylaws for the school. He also was the first graduate school associate dean and remained on staff for more than 40 years as a teacher and director of the biostatistics program.
As a consultant with the National Cancer Institute and head of an epidemiology committee, Whorton was part of a group sent to Jamaica in the early 1980s to "look into something that was a mysterious thing in the hospitals." There was no information about it at the time, but it turned out to be the early cases of the HIV/AIDS virus.
"I told him about it, and he kind of chalked it up to something he was interested in but not really impressed with," Whorton said. "And later, it became AIDS. So, he missed out on really jumping on that early."
Texas Governor Mark White, a former fraternity brother of Whorton's at Baylor, appointed him as a Commissioner and Chairman of the Texas Radioactive Waste Authority and an honorary admiral in the Texas Navy.
During their college days, White beat Whorton by one vote in an officer's election for fraternity president.
"After it was over, I said, 'OK, Mark, what is a vice president supposed to do? He looks at me and says, 'Everything.' That was our relationship from then on," Whorton said. "As the president, he had to escort the sweetheart of the Tri-C's. Well, guess who that sweetheart was? Namely, my wife (Evangeline Loessin). I couldn't do it because I was playing football. So, he couldn't wait to escort my wife."
Whorton says Evangeline, his wife of 56 years, is "probably one of the most beautiful women that ever went to Baylor." She was the runner-up in a Miss Texas pageant and a Baylor Beauty.
Since retiring from full-time teaching duties, Whorton is under contract as a consultant with the Galveston National Laboratory to study the Ebola, Zika and Anthrax viruses. "Once you get into the research world, you can't really get out of it. You just miss it too much."
He and his wife still have their home in Galveston, where they founded Scenic Galveston, but spend most of their time on a farm in Eagle Lake, Texas.
"I really owe much of what I have accomplished to my Baylor start and her interactions, her sendoff and her support during the five years there," Whorton said. "Especially, my Try-C buddies . . . and Dutch (Schroeder), Charlie Driver, Hayden Fry, President W.R. White, Dr. Ann Miller, Dr. Robert Packard and Dr. Hawkins."
The Baylor Athletics Hall of Fame banquet will be held at 6:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 21, in the Brazos Room at the Waco Convention Center. Tickets cost $50 per person and can be purchased by contacting the "B" Association at 254-710-3045 or by email at Tammy_Hardin@baylor.edu.
By Jerry Hill
Baylor Bear Insider
Starting with his early days in Rule, Texas, weaving through his time as a football player at Baylor and then a professional career in education and research spanning nearly six decades, Dr. Elbert "Sonny" Whorton says "it's been a wonderful life, never a dull moment."
"The bottom line is I enjoyed messing with people and their problems and helping solve them," he said, "and I never had a dull client – never, never – all different and all separate stories."
The 79-year-old Whorton has a story of his own, far from dull and more than worthy of his selection for the Baylor Athletics Wall of Honor. An internationally recognized authority in biostatistics and epidemiology of genetic and environment toxicology, he will be honored at the Sept. 21 Hall of Fame banquet.
"I never really thought I would be honored like that, just because there are so many people that are way ahead of me," Whorton said. When he got the call from "B" Association Executive Director Walter Abercrombie, "it surprised me and humbled me very much."
Part of the freshman group that "hung in there" with new coach Frank Baker at Rule, Whorton went through a winless first season "and from then on, we lost no games." One of the victories, albeit in a scrimmage, was over a state championship Stamford team led by legendary coach Gordon Wood.
At the end of his senior season, Whorton got a call from Wood, asking him where he wanted to go to college.
"He was largely responsible for me getting my initial invitations with his good players to visit A&M, Oklahoma, Rice, Baylor and the rest," Whorton said. Along with Haskell's Robert Starr and Stamford's Royce West and Mike McClellan, "we all decided to go to Baylor, because our mothers wanted us to."
As a running back and linebacker at Baylor, Whorton played on the freshman team in 1957, sat out the '58 season and then lettered three years for coach John Bridgers (1959-61) on squads that made back-to-back bowl appearances.
It was at the 1961 Gotham Bowl where Whorton was reunited with Sammy Baugh. Five years earlier, he had tried to convince him to come to Hardin-Simmons University to play football.
"At the Gotham Bowl, he came to me and asked if I would now reconsider and join him with the New York Titans," Whorton said. "I didn't say no, but I said I would think about it."
A double major in math and physics, Whorton had plenty of good options, including jumping straight into the workforce, signing a pro football contract or continuing his education with a National Institute of Health fellowship at Tulane.
"I was either going to play pro ball with Sammy or go into the graduate field at Tulane," he said. "My wife said, 'If You go and play football, they're going to eat you up and you're going to have to drop out about October, and you're probably not going to get your bonus and then you're not going to have a job and you're not going to be able to get into school. She made it sound so bad, it was an easy choice."
Not only did the fellowship cover tuition, room and board, "pretty much everything," Whorton said, it also came with a $450-per-month stipend for the relatively new fields of biostatistics and quantitative epidemiology. He did his postgraduate work at Stanford and Tulane, then earned a PhD from the University of Oklahoma.
After a stint as a professor at the University of Vermont, Whorton returned to Texas to help rebuild the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
"The chairman of my department at Oklahoma (Edward Brandt Jr.) had left with a bunch of other guys to go to Texas to rebuild their medical school, because it was kind of falling apart," Whorton said. "He called me in Vermont and said, 'Son, are you ready to come home?'''
Although UTMB was still part of the UT system, it broke off to become its own graduate school, and it was Whorton that drafted the initial bylaws for the school. He also was the first graduate school associate dean and remained on staff for more than 40 years as a teacher and director of the biostatistics program.
As a consultant with the National Cancer Institute and head of an epidemiology committee, Whorton was part of a group sent to Jamaica in the early 1980s to "look into something that was a mysterious thing in the hospitals." There was no information about it at the time, but it turned out to be the early cases of the HIV/AIDS virus.
"I told him about it, and he kind of chalked it up to something he was interested in but not really impressed with," Whorton said. "And later, it became AIDS. So, he missed out on really jumping on that early."
Texas Governor Mark White, a former fraternity brother of Whorton's at Baylor, appointed him as a Commissioner and Chairman of the Texas Radioactive Waste Authority and an honorary admiral in the Texas Navy.
During their college days, White beat Whorton by one vote in an officer's election for fraternity president.
"After it was over, I said, 'OK, Mark, what is a vice president supposed to do? He looks at me and says, 'Everything.' That was our relationship from then on," Whorton said. "As the president, he had to escort the sweetheart of the Tri-C's. Well, guess who that sweetheart was? Namely, my wife (Evangeline Loessin). I couldn't do it because I was playing football. So, he couldn't wait to escort my wife."
Whorton says Evangeline, his wife of 56 years, is "probably one of the most beautiful women that ever went to Baylor." She was the runner-up in a Miss Texas pageant and a Baylor Beauty.
Since retiring from full-time teaching duties, Whorton is under contract as a consultant with the Galveston National Laboratory to study the Ebola, Zika and Anthrax viruses. "Once you get into the research world, you can't really get out of it. You just miss it too much."
He and his wife still have their home in Galveston, where they founded Scenic Galveston, but spend most of their time on a farm in Eagle Lake, Texas.
"I really owe much of what I have accomplished to my Baylor start and her interactions, her sendoff and her support during the five years there," Whorton said. "Especially, my Try-C buddies . . . and Dutch (Schroeder), Charlie Driver, Hayden Fry, President W.R. White, Dr. Ann Miller, Dr. Robert Packard and Dr. Hawkins."
The Baylor Athletics Hall of Fame banquet will be held at 6:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 21, in the Brazos Room at the Waco Convention Center. Tickets cost $50 per person and can be purchased by contacting the "B" Association at 254-710-3045 or by email at Tammy_Hardin@baylor.edu.
Smoooooooth 🌀 | DJ Lagway to Taz Williams Jr.
Wednesday, April 01
Willis Connection | DJ Lagway to DeBraun Hampton
Wednesday, April 01
BEAR JACKS 🔊
Wednesday, April 01
Dawson Pendergrass Media Cameo
Wednesday, April 01
