Lyons Joel Heyman ’44, was honored as the 2003 Distinguished Alumnus during Darlington Celebration on Friday, April 19, as part of Alumni Reunion Weekend. An alumnus is nominated for the Distinguished Alumnus Award each year based on distinction in any of four areas: 1) notable achievement within an occupational or professional field, 2) service to his or her community, state, or nation, 3) service to the arts, sciences, or humanitarian causes, or 4) loyalty to Darlington.
David Hicks, Darlington’s president, introduced Heyman by referring to a letter he wrote nominating Heyman for a Heart of the Community Award. He noted in the letter that Heyman is a pillar of Darlington’s community, having sent his children here, served as a trustee from 1972-81 and as a Life Trustee since then, and chaired the school’s governance committee during the last strategic plan. The Heyman Family Foundation is a regular supporter of the school. Although his children graduated from Darlington years ago, Heyman is still very active at the school.
Hicks specifically noted Jo and Lyons Heyman’s “active and unapologetic role as Jews in our predominantly Christian city,” as he wrote. “It is refreshing to me to see how open and supportive they are of Darlington’s religious emphasis, while at the same time advocating an appropriate sensitivity to our religious diversity,” he said. “I have attended functions at the Forum where the Heymans’ and their congregation were instrumental in bringing the black and white segments of our community together. They have a beautiful way of affirming the faiths of others while celebrating their own faith by bringing people together.”
“I am struck by the high degree of dialogue and cooperation among Rome’s various faiths and Christian denominations,” Hicks read from his letter. “In my mind, Jo and Lyons symbolize and epitomize that hugely attractive characteristic at the heart of our City.”
Lyons Joel Heyman was born in Atlanta, Ga., in 1928, to Helene Joel and Charles Simon Heyman and moved with his family to Rome in 1938, when he enrolled in Darlington. He graduated in 1944. During his Darlington career, Heyman played basketball, tennis, was a cheerleader and “commando,” and served on the Dance Committee.
After graduating from Darlington, Heyman attended Vanderbilt University, earned a bachelor’s degree in 1948, and then returned to Rome to work for Fox Manufacturing Company as production office clerk. By 1965, he had been promoted through sales positions to become president of the company. In 1975, he was elected chair and CEO of the company. He also served in a number of roles with the Southern Furniture Manufacturers Association (SFMA), the largest furniture trade association in the United States, in various capacities, including president and board chair.
Past president Jim McCallie applauds Darlington’s honoring Lyons as the 2003 Distinguished Alumnus, saying, “Lyons is deeply respected and appreciated for his generosity, commitment to excellence, staunch integrity, and passion for religious and ethnic tolerance. His unwavering support for and service to Darlington have served as an inspiration to at least three generations of the School’s leadership.”
Lyons’ loyalty and dedication to Darlington School spans more than six decades. A member of the Board of Trustees from 1972-1981, Lyons continues to actively participate in Board meetings as a Life Trustee. When the Alumni Annual Giving Fund was expanded in 1975 to include a broader base of support, Lyons served as the first chairman of the Annual Sustaining Fund, now known as the Annual Fund. The goal for that first annual campaign was $100,000, almost ten times the amount that had been given in the previous year to support the School’s operating budget. Lyons rose to the challenge and put together an enthusiastic group of volunteers to bring the effort to a successful conclusion. He has served as Class Agent and hosted reunion parties in his home.
Heyman has served the community in numerous ways. In 2002, he and his wife Jo Heyman were awarded the Heart of the Community Award – the first couple to be so recognized. He is a life member of the Greater Rome Chamber of Commerce; served two terms as vice president and is currently on the board of the YMCA; is a member of the Rome Rotary Club (since 1952), serving as president and, currently, as vice president; and served on the board of the National City Bank (now Wachovia) and worked for the Greater Rome Chamber of Commerce, establishing the Greater Rome Existing Industry Association (GREIA) which has served as a model for a statewide organization. Heyman was involved in bringing United Way to Rome; has served the Community Chest; and is a member of the board and past president of the Rodeph Sholom Congregation.
Heyman’s community involvement continues through the Heyman Family Foundation, including service to Floyd Medical Center, Floyd Health Care Foundation, Battey Fellowship, Boys and Girls Club of Rome, Heyman HospiceCare, Rome Symphony Orchestra, Floyd and Berry colleges, and many Jewish organizations. He serves on the National and Southeastern regional boards of the Anti-Defamation League and is involved with the Atlanta Jewish Federation among others.
Heyman and his wife Jo Marks Heyman have three children, Board of Visitor member Deborah Heyman Harris, Darlington Class of 1972; Lyons Joel Heyman Jr., Darlington Class of 1970; and David Marks Heyman, Darlington Class of 1974.
Heyman is the fourth member of Darlington’s Class of 1944 to receive the Distinguished Alumnus Award.
Lyons J. Heyman ’44, 2003 Distinguished Alumnus, Darlington Celebration, April 25, 2003:
To say that I am proud to be here in this position would be a gross understatement. So I won’t tell you that. I can tell you I am honored and humbled, all at the same time, and very happy to have this opportunity to talk to you a few minutes. But probably most of all, I am totally amazed that I should have been selected for this coveted role.
I look back on my days at Darlington and remember me as a very ordinary day student, nice enough kid, but nothing spectacular. I was not anything close to being a BMOC. I was not president of my class nor was I a football jock or a member of the Honor Society. But I truly remember those days with much fondness and being filled with many very happy remembrances. This is not to say that I never got into any trouble or that I was never called to task by Mr. Judd, but I choose to keep those events quiet. It was a long time ago and I cannot help but wonder to myself at how I should come from that lowly beginning to receiving this very distinguished honor!
I am going to talk to you a bit about my days at Darlington, share with you some memories and just maybe tell you a few stories about some of my teachers and classmates and me. If you thought I was going to tell you my secret as to how to be a super success in this life, you are wrong. I would not be so presumptuous as to think I could impart such wondrous knowledge known only to me.
I will not try to pontificate from this platform to explain the mysteries of this life and how I have solved them. In the first place I have no such ideas. In the second place you are surrounded by loyal, dedicated and caring teachers who have devoted their lives to giving you such knowledge and are attempting to pour this into your heads each and every day. So I will not stand here and attempt that; instead, I will tell you, no, if I could I would command you, to make the most of your years at Darlington because they will come and go before you know it and when you do appreciate it, it will be too late. But that, alas, will mean nothing to you now so you can forget I even said it.
I learned much at Darlington. One of my first lessons was in my sixth grade history class. You must try to imagine back in 1938 what Darlington looked like. Most of the buildings you see now did not exist; there was Wilcox Hall, then known only as the main building, and there was South Hall, the old-old gym by the lake, the administration building known more as the hospital than anything else to the students. I believe that there was one home on the campus that was used as a guesthouse for important visitors.
Space was at a premium and my sixth grade history class was held in what was then a room off the main assembly hall used as a library. My sixth grade teacher was Mr. Dawson. One of my classmates was from Lindale, from a prominent family there, but John was forever in trouble. Everything he touched seemed to turn sour. One particular day he was late for class and Mr. Dawson chewed him out. Why were you late, he asked? John hemmed and hawed and finally could not come up with any excuse except that he was late. You know, he was late—big deal! It was then that Mr. Dawson spoke those words of wisdom that I remember to this very day. “John,” he said, “always remember a poor excuse is better than none.” Don’t ask me why I remembered that but I did and you would be amazed at how many times over my life I have had the occasion to use that very phrase.
The Home-on-the-Hill was occupied by Dr. Clyde Wilcox and his family. (His son, Bub Wilcox, is hosting his Class of 1943 reunion party tonight.) Dr. Wilcox was a venerable old man to us but he was really a very young man from my point of view today. I can remember how old our teachers seemed to us. We were not surprised at how smart they were because look at how old they were. Anyway, today as I look back, I realize that I, personally, have known every president Darlington has ever had. Dr. Wilcox was the first and if I thought he was old, what must you think of me.
Truth is a vital virtue in anyone’s life. I did not have to learn that at Darlington, my family impressed that on me for as long as I can remember. My Dad impressed it on my many times throughout my entire life while he lived. Darlington reinforced it with the Honor Council and the Pledge of Honor that we wrote out on each exam paper.
So I have to stop here a moment and explain that when I tell you that I have known every Darlington president, that is the truth. You may know that when you are a witness or when you appear in court, you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Now I told you that I have known EVERY president at Darlington and that is the truth. BUT I have NOT told you the WHOLE truth. I cannot mislead you; my training at this age won’t let me. Fact is that before Darlington had a president, the top executive was the headmaster.
The first headmaster that I knew was Dr. Earnest Wright and he was at Darlington when Dr. Wilcox joined the school as its first president. Dr. Wright continued to serve Darlington as headmaster throughout my years at Darlington and later succeeded Dr. Wilcox as Darlington’s second president. Dr. Wilcox taught me many things but I never had him in a class for which I am grateful to this day.
We had chapel back then as I am sure you do today. Chapel, from my point of view, (I had no idea what the real reason was for it) provided an opportunity to have the student body together for speakers who were brought in to impart words of wisdom and a place to instruct us in the rules and regulations of the day. There was also the opportunity to provide us with some spiritual guidance as well … I am sure.
I do not recall the circumstances, probably there was a speaker who touched on the subject, but whatever, Dr. Wilcox, who always presided, looked over his students and said, “Who among our students wants to be average?” Well, you can imagine that every hand in the room went up (I guess we were pretty stupid in those days). Dr. Wilcox then proceeded to inform us what average meant. Again, you all may know but it was new to all of us at the time. He said average was the worse of the best and the best of the worse. He called for another show of hands about who wanted to be average and not a hand went up. I learned something from that and I never again wanted to be average, nor did I want anything with which I was associated to be average.
I also learned the meaning of the word “beinst” from Dr. Wilcox. How many times in this world have you been denied something? Then, maybe because of who you are, or who your parents might be, you got what you wanted. That’s where Dr. Wilcox said “beinst” came in. “Normally I would not do this,” you are told, “but beinst it is you, I will make an exception.”
One of my classmates who is here today was my chemistry lab partner. I guess Bill Smith was the smartest person in our class and we were good friends but that still does not explain how I happened to get him as my lab partner. Mr. Judd was not only the master of the day school, he also taught chemistry. He knew his students well and he probably knew I needed help in lab and that is why he teamed me up with Billy. Well, chemistry was not my best subject and were it not for Billy, I might still be in Darlington today … as a student. However, Mr. Judd was unquestionably the very best chemistry teacher in the whole wide world and when I went to Vanderbilt my freshman chemistry was a snap and I was ready to take on the whole field by myself. Mr. Judd had covered every bit of freshman chemistry at Darlington. The second semester at Vanderbilt when I hit physical chemistry, I had no idea what was going on. But, as they say, that is another story.
I learned another important lesson when I was in the seventh grade. Let me pause here to tell you that in those days Darlington only had six grades. You entered Darlington in the sixth grade the eighth grade made you a freshman in high school. We only had 11 grades in the old days, so we graduated from the eleventh grade and I went off to Vanderbilt at the ripe old age of 16. Incidentally, I thought I was pretty grown up in those days. Anyway, what I learned in the seventh grade has helped me all through my life. Our seventh grade math (back in those days we didn’t call it math, it was arithmetic) was taught by a man whose name was Frank Rogers.
I am not going to bore you with the many details about Mr. Rogers, who I later in life would know and love as Frank, but he was a tough guy. You did not fool around in his class and in those days, everyone knew that seventh grade arithmetic was the hardest course you could take at Darlington.
I made the mistake of sitting in the back of the class with my friend from Lindale, John. The year had not improved John’s deportment, or his total disinterest in any of his classes. He was forever talking in class and in general would disrupt the class from time to time.
Now, Mr. Rogers used to play baseball and whereas I am not sure if he was a pitcher or not, he could have outdone Greg Maddox or John Glavine. Mr. Rogers could be writing on the blackboard and would hear the disruption in the back of the class. Knowing it was John and knowing where he was sitting, without so much as missing a beat he would turn from the board and in one continuous movement throw that chalk directly to the back of the room. If you sat too close to John, you yourself might get hit, so after the first few days in class, I moved toward the front row.
In those days there was no such thing as a calculator and seventh grade arithmetic introduced us to fractions and percentages for the first time. We learned how to multiply and divide all these by hand and the names of each part, etc. There was tough work for seventh graders. Be careful with whom you associate as you go through life.
While I was in Darlington, World War II started. The only reason I mention that is that there were almost no cars on campus. I do not believe that dorm students could even have a car and if such did exist, there would have been no gasoline for it since gas was severely rationed.
One or two of the Upper Day students did manage to have some sort of transportation, which in those days were called jalopies. This was not a car in the sense we knew even in those days. This was a contraption that had four wheels and a body and some sort of “souped-up” engine and absolutely no muffler. Much to the consternation of Dr. Wilcox and other teachers, these guys would race around the campus from dawn to dusk or whenever they got out of a class. What to do? Easy. Today you live with the solution to that problem. You know them today as the speed bumps you encounter on the roads around campus. It was not our class that created them; we were much too quiet and well behaved and certainly too unsophisticated. It was the class two years ahead of me and those few students who were old enough (16) to drive.
I am afraid I am wandering. When I start thinking back to those days, a lot of thoughts come to mind. Mr. McNall taught me English, probably the best teacher I ever had. Today there is so much misuse of the pronouns “I” and “me” that it drives me crazy. Mr. McNall explained, in words even we could understand, that if you said Jack and me went to town that was wrong. Today you hear it said that me and Jack went to town. You should say that Jack and I went to town. Who went to town? Jack and I and I is the subject of the understood verb “went” to town, not Jack and me since you would not say me went to town. So much for your English lesson today. Maybe your teacher will explain it better than I.
I learned at Darlington that you had to try before you could accomplish. I have heard it explained better in latter years that if you do not try something for fear you may fail, that fact already determines failure. The road to success is paved with the stepping-stone of failure. Only by trying and failing do you obtain the knowledge that makes you try again and this time take a different route.
I learned at Darlington to respect myself and all other people and I learned what the Golden Rule has always taught: Do unto others what you would want done unto you.
I learned teamwork and that the good of each is determined by the good of all.
I learned that you must study to achieve and if you wanted something badly enough it could be yours if you put your mind to it. The more difficult the job, the more satisfying it is to achieve. That for which you work less is of less value to you.
Truth, integrity, and morality are basic characteristics that determine who you really are. Your family should teach you who you are and who you want to be. Darlington can enforce those basic tenets and help you to compound them and improve on them as you prepare to go through your life.
And one more thing I want to throw into this equation is the word “responsibility.” Life is not always fun and games and happiness. In fact, you are not guaranteed a full and happy without some sorrow mixed in. After all, without the hard times how would you appreciate the good times? But you also owe. This world does not owe you anything; you have to work to earn whatever you achieve. If you work hard and do have some measure of success, you have a responsibility to give back to those who made your success possible. You should feel this in every endeavor you undertake.
If you serve on any committee, organization, or group, give it your best or do not accept the job. In a business or in any charitable organizations in which you agree to join, know that with the joining comes a responsibility to do a good job or turn the whole thing down to begin with. Watch for people who know and understand responsibility; they are the doers and workers and makers. Stay away from those who will take and take and give back nothing. They will only drag you down.
For some of you in this room, this is the fourth address you have listened to from some old guy who had gone to Darlington in the dark ages. Whatever do they all talk about for so long? As President Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg, “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here but will never forget what they did here.” You will not remember my words any more than those of Distinguished Alumni before me. But what I am sure we all hope you remember is what all of us have tried to tell you: Darlington offers you something so unique and so precious that we hope some of it will rub off on you over your years here. If it does, it will insure that you will be well trained in intrinsic human values and prepared for your leadership role in the complex world in which you will live and bequeath to your own family and children.
Darlington has and always will be very meaningful to me. I hope it will be to you. Mr. Neville says that Darlington is different things to different students. It is home and school and family for its boarding students, their home away from home. It is school and some recreation for its day students who go home at night to be with family and neighborhood friends. Whatever it is to you, I hope it will become part of you and influence your life so as to make you a better human being for your years here.
To you seniors, my heartiest congratulations on what you have accomplished here and my wishes for the very best in your collegiate years and ahead. To you who still have more years to learn and enjoy Darlington, may you do so with a new awareness and appreciation for what you are being given and may you take full advantage of its many fruits. And to President Hicks, Headmaster Rhodes, and your able and capable colleagues, may you continue to rise and meet the challenges you have assumed as you mold these young minds and bodies for their role in the years ahead.
And as for me, what more can a person ask for in this life. I am blessed with a wife who has stuck by me for more years than even I could every have expected. We have three fine children and three fine spouses who do nothing but make us proud and happy each and every day. They have given us five wonderful, loving grandchildren who we know will bring pride and joy to their parents.
And on top of all of that, I am so highly honored today by Darlington. Have I been successful in my life?
