BAXTER SEMINARY
The Uppermans
-BAXTER TENNESSEE-
Dr. Harry L. Upperman
Mrs. Elma E. Upperman
President's Home
I Believe Card
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Mrs. Elma Elizabeth Upperman
"We gathered recently to bury Elma Clark Upperman, 87, retired teacher, widow of Dr. Harry L. Upperman, who was president of Baxter Seminary, homemaker, and member of the United Methodist Church. "That’s about all you would know about her if you wrote a news story about her life and death. Of course, you could use more words - you could pad the story - but when you finished, the substance would be about the same. The number of organizations she served, the length of her tenure at the now defunct Baxter school, and the college degrees she earned are not the fiber and thread of her life. The things you do not write in an obituary are the things that made an enduring impact on her community and more especially on the graduates of Baxter Seminary. "Elma Clark Upperman was a cultural shock wave, and those of us who were swept to another plateau by her energy and persuasion, found our lives forever altered and enriched. Think of the 13-year-old boy from rural Putnam County who had never listened to a bar of classical music, who thought literature was authored by Zane Grey and whose concept of art was limited to mountains, sunsets and streams. "Imagine the boy in the home of Mrs. Upperman, surrounded by shelves overflowing with books, classical recordings, paintings of significance and conversations about ideas instead of things. It was heavy stuff for an adolescent who found himself being talked to, instead of down to. Mrs. Upperman encouraged us to foster great expectations, to believe in ourselves, to overcome, disappointment and to meet challenges. She was never surprised when we surprised ourselves by conquering our fears and subduing our inadequacies. She measured our success by our development of our own potential, not by the comparison with others. Though not on a grand scale - after all, we were not students at Harvard or Yale - succeed we did. We became preachers and teachers, doctors and lawyers, farmers and politicians, engineers and businessmen, designers and planners, employers and employees. "But more importantly, the graduates of Baxter Seminary became responsible citizens, and this pleased Mrs. Upperman. She was an encyclopedia, the ultimate source of the deeds of her boys and girls. She loved to boast of the achievements of 'my children,' and she was just as proud of a good corporal as of a good general. She maintained an interest in her grandchildren, the sons and daughters of the boys and girls of Baxter Seminary. "The boys wanted to write and, despite his humble efforts and poor sentence structure, she said she was sure he could learn. Others wanted to become physicians, and despite their limitations, they became physicians. And some wanted to become engineers, and they became engineers. And she was proud of them all! "And so her boys and girls buried Elma Clark Upperman in a cemetery beside her husband who died in 1984. Their graves are not far from the campus of Baxter Seminary which folded soon after their retirement in 1957. The school there now is Upperman High School. One of her boys, the Rev. Bill Starnes, pastor of Woodbine Methodist Church in Nashville, preached her funeral. He quoted Robert Louis Stevenson who wrote of the lamplighter 'knocking holes in the darkness.'
'Truly, Elma Clark Upperman knocked holes in the darkness. - J. B. Leftwich, writer of the "Nashville Eye" column in The Tennessean, before his retirement, was The Tennessean’s state correspondent in Lebanon, Tennessee (1987). - More at www.ajlambert.com. National Forensics League One of Mrs. Upperman's passions was Speech. This manifested itself as the introduction to and the training of students to participate in the National Forensics competitions locally, statewide, and nationally.
Photo: Baxter Seminary Highlander - Baxter Seminary Yearbooks 1934-1960 by Mike and Audrey Lambert www.ajlambert.com
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