By Kalena Reynolds | Opinion Editor
Terry Terracino rang in her 70th anniversary of being crowned Baylor Homecoming Queen by riding in a glimmering black Corvette in the 2024 homecoming parade. Her daughter, Gretchen McCormack, and granddaughter, Dr. Arden Roeder, stood gleefully watching as they, too, celebrated their legacies at Baylor.
For Terracino, Baylor was not just a college but a community and a passion she passed on to the next generation, with both of her daughters attending Baylor and six of her grandchildren.
Terracino originally began her journey at her hometown college, the University of Miami. However, she decided to transfer to Baylor for her junior year after an extensive conversation with her pastor, who had also gone to Baylor.
“That fall, she was asked if she would be willing to be a homecoming nominee,” McCormack said.
Continuing to build on her legacy in her senior year, she graduated in 1956 with a degree in home economics. After graduating, she married her husband, the late Dr. George Ryals, a graduate of Transylvania University, who Roeder said was given the title of Baylor “alumni-by-choice.”
As their family grew, the pair would go on to share their passion for the university, specifically homecoming, with their children and grandchildren.
“I remember from a very young age, every year they went to this thing they called homecoming, and my sister and I would stay with our grandmother,” McCormack said. “As we got a little older, I always heard how much they loved [homecoming], but I didn’t really understand what it was or where it was.”
When McCormack was 14 years old and her sister Jennifer Ryals Ramsey was 11, their parents decided it was time to take a family trip to Waco for their daughters to attend their first homecoming. As the couple shared the sacred love for Waco with their kids through tradition, they began to instill the Sic ’em way into their children.
“I could remember being a young child and hearing the proverbial ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’ and my mom would answer on my behalf and say, ‘She wants to go to Baylor and be a home ec major,’” McCormack said.
Even though Baylor was a common conversation topic for the family, it was never an obligation for McCormack, as the love for the university was also passed down.
“When I was old enough to have an answer for myself, it was almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I answered the question when it was posed to me the same way, ‘Well, I’m going to grow up and go to Baylor and be a home economics major,’ which is what I did,” she said.
McCormack said she continued to pass on her mom’s curated passion to her children, and Roeder is now a lecturer in the Department of Communication at Baylor.
“Baylor was always this special place to visit,” Roeder said. “So we would come to homecoming, sometimes we would come to football games, we were certainly raised green and gold, the true bleeding green and gold, all the way through our childhood.”
After Roeder graduated from Baylor, she acquired her Ph.D in organizational communication at the University of Oklahoma. However, when Roeder decided she wanted to teach, she knew Baylor would be her first option, but didn’t know if that was a possibility.
“When I was going through my master’s and doctorate degrees and starting to think about what it would look like to get to teach long-term, of course, my first thought was ‘I would love to be at Baylor,’ but in academia that’s pretty rare,” Roeder said. “Actually, Baylor is really unique. A lot of our students don’t realize that we do have so many alumni as faculty.”
Roeder said that because of the rarity of colleges hiring back their own alumni, being at Baylor is incredibly full circle.
“For all my friends that graduated and left and got jobs and they come back for homecoming and stuff, Baylor is still to them as locked in their memory the way it was when we were students, like it is for so many people, but that’s my everyday,” Roeder said. “I still have to kind of pinch myself sometimes that I walk to my office on campus and I’m literally teaching in some of the same classrooms where I took classes as a student.”
Surreal moments were not short for Roeder and her family, as her grandmother often tells people about their unique ties to Baylor, from being the 1954 homecoming queen to having a granddaughter teaching at the university.
“I don’t want to discount the trajectory in our family’s history, but that’s one of the great and special things about Baylor is that we do love our own people,” Roeder said. “We love to have Baylor grads and Baylor alumni across campus.”
