0.8 Lowell collins, 1924-2003  (Page 2/3)

My father and others that worked there at the time were saying, you know, that we should look at Cranbrook and take it as a model for accreditation and expand and become more of a serious school that’s accredited, so I remember my father’s battles that he fought for accreditation and for it to be taken seriously—and for them to have a tremendous training system there. My father amassed people like David Parsons and Richard Stout (who he gave his first job to) and the whole litany of what later became the Rice and U of H backbone of their faculties. These all came out of his early mentorship and his deanship, where he tried to build the Houston Museum School to be formidable. He was a very fine teacher from my recollections of that period.

Students, colleagues, and friends

John Berry, who later became a neurosurgeon, was the first of many students my father had. I have early memories of John coming to live with us for a summer because my grandmother on my mother’s side had taught John in Tyler and sent him down to work with my father. I remember other people that came to him both at Glassell (the Museum School) and also later. He had people, such notables as Dan Mitchell Allison, John Sturtevant, Curry Glassell and the Cooley daughters.

My father also had a non-stop grouping of friends which were people like Jack Boynton, like photographers, who had been best friends of his at a very early age, photographing the arts of Houston. I remember Charles Schorre

When he passed away, my wife Gail Collins, whom he loved dearly, gave a life celebration for him in the gallery. We had 600 people show up that day, and my choked-up sentiments really weren’t well-organized. I’m afraid I didn’t eulogize him very well, at least not as well as he deserved. All of these people who had been students of his that I had no idea that had been students came up later that day to say what my father had meant to them and the things that are written in that book really made me realize that was only the tip of the iceberg. Since [his death]we’ve seen countless, just thousands of people calling and saying, “Well I’m going to need Lowell to appraise something; he was my old teacher.” So I’ve had a continuing history lesson on what he meant to so many people as the dean of Glassell and as a continuing passionate person in art.