Warrior Magazine June 2020

Beloved ECCC English instructor Ovid Vickers passes away

Longtime, legendary, and beloved East Central Community College English instructor Ovid Vickers spent 40 years on the Decatur campus from 1955 to 1995 and taught generations of students to love literature and poetry. He died Monday, March 31, at age 89. A private graveside service was held April 4 at Cedarlawn Cemetery in Philadelphia for the revered Mississippi folklorist, essayist, poet and teacher. Shortly following Vickers death, East Central Community College President Dr. Billy Stewart remembered Vickers as an enormous part of the foundation on which the success of the college was built. “I have often said that the success East Central Community College enjoys today is based on the foundation that was built by those men and women—those legends— who came before us, and Ovid Vickers was certainly at the top of that list,” said Stewart. “Mr. Vickers was a true icon on this campus for over 40 years as an instructor, and he remained an indispensable part of our East Central family during his 25 years in retirement. He excelled in the classroom as confirmed by the testimonies of his former students and his numerous teaching honors, and he was an ambassador for this college outside of the classroom, as evidenced by being one of only eight individuals to ever be awarded the college’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Mr. Vickers touched the lives of thousands of people in a profound way over his lifetime, mine included, and he will be greatly missed. The thoughts and prayers of the entire East Central Community College family are with his wife, Carol, and the entire Vickers family during this difficult time.” Born in Gadsden, Alabama in 1930 and raised in Dodge County, Georgia, he was educated in the public schools of Dodge County, graduating from Chauncy High School in 1948. Vickers was a graduate of George Peabody College for Teachers (now the School of Education of Vanderbilt University) in Nashville, Tenn. He received his bachelor and master’s degrees from Peabody and later returned to earn a Specialist in Education degree. He taught for one year at Rhine High School in Rhine, Ga., before he was drafted into the service during the Korean War, serving as a U.S. Army Infantry School instructor while stationed at Ft. Benning. Vickers joined the then East Central Junior College faculty in 1955 when he was just 24 years old and would later serve as chair of the English Department for many years. Throughout his career, Vickers was not only a teacher, but was also a published poet, newspaper columnist, public speaker, playwright, practicing folklorist, and a collector of antiques. Vickers also choreographed many college musicals, emceed numerous campus events, and greatly influenced the lives of thousands of college students. Vickers’ short stories, essays and poems have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and mainstream media publications such as Southern Living, Mississippi Magazine,

The Texas Review and The Southern Quarterly. Vickers’ poetry is included in two volumes of the University Press of Mississippi’s anthologies, Mississippi Writers: Reflections of Childhood and Youth and the companion volume, An Anthology of Mississippi Writers. His poems illustrate descriptive elements of southern living, from his depiction of young boys coming of age in the outdoors and his father’s remedy for noisy guinea hens to an expressive statement about the terrible costs of the Civil War. His works were included 18 times in the Mississippi Folklore Register printed by the Mississippi Folklore Society, an organization which he co-founded and served for 25 years. From 1982 to 2012, he was a newspaper columnist for The Neshoba Democrat, The Union Appeal, The Scott County Times, and the Times Journal-Spotlight in Eastman, Georgia, his hometown. These anecdote-filled columns, on subjects ranging from his struggle with fixing a flat tire to surviving the heat at the Neshoba County Fair, won multiple

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