Donald Holliday

OBITUARY – By Donald R. Holliday

Donald Ray Holliday was born on Constitution Day 1939, a momentous event throughout the nearly invisible community of Pinetop, Missouri, to Admiral Schley and Eva Mabel (Drane) Holliday. He began his formal education there in Pinetop where it was easier for him to follow his older brothers to the one-room school than it was for his mother to keep up with him while tending a farm wife’s duties, which then included a little sister. After one year at Pinetop, Donald who had just turned six began first grade at Hollister School, into which Pinetop had been consolidated. After a relatively unspectacular twelve years, he graduated high school. By then he had been educated to advanced degrees in the physical and mental calluses of an Ozarks tobacco, beef, dairy, hog, and arrested-frontier farm. The field and barn laboratory taught survival to the highest level of human endurance. Well beyond mere survival lay the colossus life in woods and spring-fed streams where he grew to relish extremes beyond Navy Underwater Demolition Team requirements.

Following graduation, he enlisted in the Navy where he was amazed that everyone got to sleep in until six in the morning, finished most days by five or six, and got a day or two off each week. Assigned to an attack aircraft carrier, he became a flight-deck equipment operator and fire-and-crash rescue specialist. He continued naval service until 1993, on record most of those years as a personnel classifier—the guy who decides what you’ll be in the service! Off record, he was a plain brown envelope; his first assignment therein was as an aviation boatswains mate ordered during the Cuban missile crisis to a guided missile cruiser, then to the USS Constellation.

After being honorably separated from active duty in 1960, Donald entered College of the Ozarks, finished an AB degree at Drury College, an MA degree in English at University of Arkansas. During 1962-1969, to keep the wolf away he operated heavy equipment and drove over-the-road trucks, including livestock hauling throughout a still very much Jim Crow South; he also worked stints in Alaska, employed by the Alaska Railroad where he was regarded as their lightning operator.

He was hired in 1966 as an instructor of English at, now, Missouri State University where he won educational leave to complete his PhD at University of Minnesota. Upon completing all coursework for his earned doctorate, he returned to Missouri State as a tenured assistant professor. To forestall the wolf again until paychecks began, he took to the road, driving a triple-deck hog truck from St. Joe, MO to Krey Packing in Lafayette, LA. (Jim Crow was still there.) He remained at MSU until his retirement in 2001, having advanced to associate professor and then professor in due course. He served as assistant head of the English Department during the latter 1980s, a department that had precisely as many tenured faculty members in 1985 that it had two decades earlier, during which SMSU/MSU enrollment had tripled; the huge increase in numbers of required classes was covered by hiring three-year-term instructors. As assistant head, Don wrote a proposal to university administration urging an inversion of the large number of term instructors and small number of tenured faculty by developing the graduate program in English—at no greater cost to the University. Administrators approved the proposal, which resulted in two outstanding developments: all other departments in the College of Arts and Letters, then others across campus, modified his proposal to fit their own programs, and as assistant head of the department, he turned to hiring eight tenure-track faculty in one year. Such a great thrust caught the attention of numbers of outstanding applicants, several of them established scholars, which resulted in the bringing together of a faculty to compete with any in the nation.

Then, based on his record in the English Department, he was chosen as Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Letters, by a new dean of the College. He served in that position for two years, helping to hire many new faculty in Arts and Letters and handling the College budget. After two years, he chose to return to his first educational loves—learning and teaching.

In 1975, he was one of five professors who began the Ozarks Studies Program, which resulted in many publications and films. He was principal narrator in a feature-length film titled Just That Much Hillbilly in Me which was aired many times on public television, including nationally. Along with Drs. Robert Gilmore and Robert Flanders, he coedited OzarksWatch Magazine during 1991-2, then served as editor until his retirement in 2001. For that publication, he wrote numerous articles about Ozarks land and life under his own name and, as an unidentified writer, numerous articles titled the Mullinix Papers. Those articles stand as perhaps the most intimate and honest glimpses into the realities of Ozarks life. On a more academic level, during planning stages for The Mark Twain Encyclopedia, he secured several topics for his own responsibility. He wrote and published two of them and found outstanding graduate students to pursue all others. He shepherded the graduate students through research and writing to their first publications.

During his thirty-five-year teaching career, he was proudest of his development of the course in Mark Twain, filled every semester it was taught, to overloads. He believed that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to be the greatest American novel ever written, in spite of its many faults, because, a century before any other notable writer took up the subject, Mark Twain tried to show Americans the stupidity and blindness not only of slavery, but of white superiority itself.

He is survived by his wife of 32 years, Susan Schneider Holliday, son Samuel Matthew Holliday (Stephanie), Springfield; son Luke Henry Holliday, Rolla, MO; daughter Eva Marie Holliday, Los Angeles, CA; 4 grandsons, Mason and Benton Holliday, Devyn Knisley, and Connor Dalan; sister-in-law Helen Holliday; father-in-law Henry Schneider; brothers-in-law Dr. Mike Schneider (Karen) and Monty Schneider (Kristin); numerous nieces and nephews, including Dr. Mark Saladin, whom he helped raise and thought of as a son; former daughter-in-law Whitney Steele Holliday, and more cousins than he can remember, but all greatly loved.

Don was preceded in death by his parents, Schley and Mabel, three brothers: Gerald (Welcome), Loy Joe, J. C. (Barbara), sister, Marilyn Saladin, and granddaughter, Sophie Jane Holliday.

Visitation will be from 1:00 p.m.-2:00 p.m., Saturday, September 7, 2024, at Adams Funeral Home, Nixa, Missouri.  A Funeral Service will follow visitation at 2:00 p.m.  Burial with full military honors will be at Gobbler’s Knob Cemetery, Hollister, Missouri at 4:00 p.m.