Thomas Boyd didn’t learn how to read until he was in Lufkin High School in 1948. It was then his teachers found out he had dyslexia. Due to this, Tom, as friends and family called him, grew to love playing outside rather than staying at school.
Seeing he wasn’t learning very much, his mother read to him and taught him about language through poetry and storytelling.
“This was the (academic) secret to Tom Boyd. His inability to read until he was in high school forced him into memorizing,” Barbara Boyd, Tom’s wife, said. “Then he became a master storyteller.”
Later on, Tom became an OU philosophy and religious studies professor, a public speaker, writer, preacher and a very well-loved member of the OU community.
On Feb. 13, Tom died from Parkinson’s disease at the age of 90. A memorial service is scheduled for March 23 at the First Presbyterian Church in Norman, a place where he and his wife used to preach.
Family members and colleagues reflect on Tom’s life and the many achievements he accomplished. A loving father, an affectionate husband and an esteemed colleague who never stopped caring for others.
Tom had a very positive childhood, Barbara said. He had a special relationship with his parents and was close to his two brothers.
“This family was so full of laughter,” Barbara said. “They laughed and told stories. They would fall on the floor and roll.”
His family lived in Nashville, Tennessee, until Tom was 13. He moved to Texas for a year to live with his grandparents while his dad built a house in Lufkin, Texas, where he would live until he went to college.
At the age of 15, Tom started preaching. Raised in a Nazarene household, Tom was always drawn to religion and philosophy.
While the Nazarene religion prevented him from doing activities such as going to the movie theater or playing games like dominoes, Barbara said this environment never affected Tom.
“I asked him if that scarred him many times,” Barbara said. “The reason why it never scarred him to be reared in such a conservative environment was because his parents were so loving, … (their) world was full of bike rides and picnics.”
After graduating high school in 1956, Tom moved to Oklahoma to attend Bethany Nazarene College, now known as Southern Nazarene University, where he earned his bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1960 and later his master's at OU in 1962.
After getting his master's, Tom was part of a one-year philosophy fellowship at Yale University, which Barbara said changed his view of religion. Having been raised with more conservative views, Barbara said, after attending Yale, Tom began to call himself a “bleeding heart liberal.”
At Yale, Barbara said he was put in the hands of some of the world’s best philosophers, which turned his world upside down as he questioned a lot of his own beliefs.
“(Tom) began to behave very differently and think very differently,” Barbara said. “During that time, he realized he could no longer be a Nazarene.”
As a very religious man, Tom began to look into a more open-minded and liberal denomination and chose the Presbyterian religion.
After his fellowship at Yale, Tom attended Vanderbilt University and got his doctorate in philosophy of religion in 1973. He also became ordained as a Presbyterian at Vanderbilt.
Tom started teaching philosophy at OU in 1969, while he was still working on his dissertation for his doctorate.
As Tom was used to public speaking due to his preaching, Katrina Boyd, Tom’s daughter and a film and media studies professor at OU, said his philosophy classes were very popular and dynamic. As time passed, the number of students kept increasing in his classes to eventually having 400 students in his Introduction to Philosophy course.
Tom first married in 1955 to Beverly Walker and divorced in 1975. They had two children, Katrina and Timothy “Kyle” Boyd.
Growing up, Katrina said Tom was very popular among students who would always come up and talk to him.
“I’m a professor now. Students will come up and say, ‘I had your class, I enjoyed it.’ But with my dad, they’d come up (hold out their hand) and say ‘Dr. Boyd, you’ve changed my life,'” Katrina said.
When she was a kid, Katrina said Tom was a movie fanatic and would take her to the movie theater every Friday night.
“My dad grew up very strictly in the Nazarene church and was not allowed to go see movies at all. He didn't see his first movie until graduate school (when) he was in his 20s,” Katrina said. “My parents had been so censored that they didn't censor us very much.”
Because Tom was a philosophy professor at the time, Katrina said Tom would find any interesting detail about the movie they watched on Fridays and use it for his lectures to keep his students engaged with the class.
Tom could talk about anything in his lectures and keep his students engaged. Barbara said Tom’s classes were casual and he made an impression on everyone, often teaching in a pair of blue jeans, a jean jacket and bingo boots.
Barbara and Tom's relationship started in the summer of 1979 when the two saw each other during a 4th of July party, which also happened to be Tom’s birthday, something that Barbara didn’t know at the time.
“We ended up in a conversation. I was supposed to be the host of this party. It was between 11 (p.m.) and midnight when I looked up and there was nobody left from the party,” Barbara said. “Everybody was gone. I never even knew when they left because Tom and I were so engrossed in this conversation. … That was the beginning”
The couple married in May 1980 and were married for 44 years.
Barbara said they had a very happy marriage. The couple would go on hiking and backpacking trips during the summers and talk to each other for hours, always in the company of each other. Barbara said those were some of the things that made their marriage stronger.
“A lot of people over the years say, ‘How are you and Tom doing this? What makes y’all able to click like that?’ And it is talking,” Barbara said. “I think that's what built such a strong marriage because we could just talk about everything, and we did. We had all the romance and all the love.”
Barbara said they decided to not have kids because she and Tom each had two kids from their previous marriages. This didn’t affect them or their family dynamic, she said, as the couple treated all four as their own.
Katrina said she and Tom had a great relationship. Even though her parents divorced when she was nine, Katrina said she would visit Tom and Barbara during the summers or throughout the year via train or airplane. She said she immediately felt a part of their renewed family.
After working in the department of philosophy for 29 years, Tom decided to retire in 1996 when Barbara was offered a position as a head of staff pastor at a church in Aurora, Colorado.
The couple lived in Colorado for five years and moved to New Mexico for another year.
In 2002, then OU President David Boren, called the couple to come back and help develop the university’s religious studies program, with Barbara as the director of outreach and Tom lecturing and attracting students to the program.
“Tom and Barbara were kind of the godparents,” Thomas Burns, OU sociology professor and family friend, said.
Burns met Tom at a faculty meeting in fall 2002. During that meeting, Burns said there was a disagreement among several of the members, but realized he and Tom were on the same side and shared the same points.
“I just felt his spirit and his energy and I thought, ‘Who is this guy?’” Burns said. “I stuck around after the meeting and introduced myself, and we started talking and getting acquainted for probably two hours.”
The two started what would be a very long and beautiful friendship. Over the years, Burns and Tom wrote several academic articles together and saw each other regularly until becoming best friends.
Burns said Tom’s classes were very popular and saw how he acted as a mentor for several of his students. He said he was one of the most prepared and engaging professors he has seen.
During his teaching career, Tom received nine teaching awards, including the Oklahoma Award for Teaching Excellence in 1996 and the David Ross Boyd Professor Emeritus of Philosophy. Tom wrote several articles and book chapters where he focused on religion and culture, including his book “Lusting for Infinity” in 2015 and “Where Wild Rivers Meet,” a fiction novel he co-authored with Barbara in 2020.
Tom also participated in the 2013 TEDxOU and the 2016 “Last Lecture” series, in which OU community leaders had the opportunity to reflect on their life lessons.
During this time, Tom preached at the First Baptist, First Christian, First Presbyterian and Memorial Presbyterian churches in Norman and almost all ministries on campus. He also preached in other states such as Arkansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Hawaii and many others.
Burns said he attended Tom's sermons several times and pointed out the emotions Tom brought to preaching.
Barbara said he was a very active, passionate and well-delivered preacher.
“Tom was a giant personality. When he preached, he made you cry, he made you laugh, he made you think. You walked out with a moral lesson, there was no sermon he ever delivered that didn’t have a moral lesson in it,” Barbara said.
Tom and Barbara worked in the religious studies program for 11 years and retired in 2013 when they were 80 and 67, respectively. The couple moved to New Mexico where they lived for five years, before Tom’s Parkinson’s disease progressed.
“I'm glad that I made that decision because, if I kept on working, by the time I retired, Tom would have already been sick and we wouldn't have ever had those years to ourselves out our beloved mountains,” Barbara said. “I'm grateful it worked out that way.”
Barbara said Tom started showing small symptoms when he was in his 60s, but the couple didn’t pay attention to it until he was in his 70s, when they decided to get him a neurologist.
Barbara said they saw four different neurologists from his 70s to his 90s and his Parkinson's remained undiagnosed.
The couple kept backpacking and hiking, and while Tom still showed symptoms like vertigo or tremors, Barbara said she thinks the physical activity helped him as a form of physical therapy for the disease they didn’t know he had.
It wasn’t until, at 88, Tom went to the hospital for aspiration pneumonia and a bowel blockage that he was finally diagnosed and told he was in the fifth, and last, stage of Parkinson’s disease.
The couple then decided to go back to Norman, where Katrina and all of his friends were.
Barbara said she always tried for him to keep doing physical activities and made sure he kept moving.
“We've got bicycles, and then he took a bad fall. So we got rid of those bicycles and got those recumbent bikes. We rode recumbent bikes for a couple of years,” Barbara said. “We had to quit backpacking. So what do we do? We started walking trails. Then when he began to stumble on trails, we stopped that and we found trails that were paved, and we just kept walking.
“Even when we moved here in Norman, … we would walk in this neighborhood and he literally pushed his walker around this block as long as he could, and then he just couldn’t do that.”
Barbara said even on the days he wasn’t feeling well, Tom kept trying to get out of bed and participating with his family and friends.
Barbara said Burns went to their house every Sunday and visited Tom, where the pair would talk for hours. She said the two had a true friendship and considered them soul brothers.
After two-and-a-half years, Tom died on Feb. 13 after he contracted pneumonia. Barbara said it was their positive attitude and desire to keep living that gave him a long and very happy life.
“He was very loving, kind and generous with people,” Katrina said. “He would sit down and talk to anyone who approached him and give them his full attention.
Burns said he would love people to remember Tom as a peaceful warrior who brought out the best in people and knew how to find goodness in anyone he met.
Tom's greatest achievement, Barbara said, was the legacy he left in the hearts of all the students, friends and audiences who got to meet him. It was his uniqueness and the love trail he had left behind.
“He was probably the most engaging, warm, authentic human being that I've ever known. Most folks say that's their experience of Tom,” Barbara said. “It didn't matter their religion. It didn't matter their color. It didn't matter their gender preference. He counseled a lot of students when he was a professor. Why? They always knew that they could go to Dr. Tom Boyd."
Tom is survived by his wife, Barbara; his two children, Kyle and Katrina; his two stepdaughters, Heather Ford and Jennifer Pool; and his eight grandchildren.