By Rory Dulock | Staff Writer
What started out as an available job on campus working at the Texas Collection eventually turned into a passion and kickstarted the career of a 1984 Baylor alumnus.
Alan Lefever is director of the Texas Baptist Historical Collection and has served there for 33 years as the director. Before that, he was a student employee for six years at Baylor, working for the Texas Collection a total of 39 years.
Lefever said his role as director of the Texas Baptist Historical Collection allows him to help churches record their history, help genealogists do family history, teach two classes at Truett Seminary and go out to churches and present certificates for their anniversaries.
He said an important aspect of his work at the Texas Baptist Historical Collection is making sure “people plug in and realize the important role that knowing [their] history plays.”
“The reason that we exist, I think, is to help people understand better who Baptists are and the impact we’ve had on Texas,” Lefever said. “I think my role as both a director of the Historical Collection and then a professor over at Truett helps communicate what that Baptist identity is at Baylor in our history and how that influences who we are to this day.”
However, Lefever said either serendipity or accident brought him to doing this type of work.
As an undergraduate student, Lefever worked at Penland for a year before deciding he wanted a change. When an archives job opened up at the Texas Collection, he decided to go interview.
“The job actually was to identify old photographs at Baylor, and the first part of that was to identify old football photographs. And that was back in 1982,” Lefever said. “It was actually that job that led me to write my book on the history of Baylor sports because I found those photographs so interesting.”
Lefever said that while he was a graduate student, the school saw on his application that he’d worked in the archives at Baylor and said they had an opening in archives at the seminary. He began working there in August of 1985 and has been connected to the Texas Baptist Historical Collection ever since.
Not only has Lefever been able to give back to Baylor through teaching classes at Truett Seminary since 2000, but he has been able to get involved on campus in other ways, most recently being featured in a Baylor Connections. His involvement on campus doesn’t stop there, though. He goes to Independence with Line Camp every summer to talk about his Baylor experience.
“I give them a little bit of the historical background on the university, and I tell the students then that every single important decision that I’ve ever made in my adult life has been affected by the fact that I went to Baylor,” Lefever said.
Lefever said his youth minister originally brought him to Baylor, and it was because of him that he became influenced by the religion and history professors at Baylor.
“The thing that brought me to Baylor was [that] I had a youth minister who was a Baylor grad. He just recently passed away, but during his life, I think he helped bring at least 50 kids to Baylor. He was a big Baylor Bear,” Lefever said. “That had an impression on me. I got here as a freshman in 1980, and I just I fell in love with the place.”
Naomi Taplin, associate director of the Texas Baptist Historical Collection, said she looks forward to finding a way to make history personal and real for people every day, just like Lefever.
“One of the biggest things I’ve learned from him is that history is alive, it’s not dead,” she said. “It’s been a delight [working with Lefever] because he makes history come alive. He’s excited about history, and that rubs off on other people. It’s rubbed off on me.”
Lefever said that he constantly thinks about how when he first entered Baylor, he thought he was going to be a pastor. But his journey at Baylor and grad school at the seminary is what kickstarted his love for history.
“There’s not a day I get out of bed and come to work where I don’t think I’m the luckiest man alive because I have been doing what I love and basically the same job for almost 40 years in some way or another,” Lefever said. “I think my job at the Texas Collection, my time with my history professors and my religion professors prepared me for what I’ve been doing the rest of my life.”
