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How do you know when you’re in
love? For Tex, it was the night Polly got
mad and turned their card table on its
side after he told her, “You play like a
blind woman.”
“She wouldn’t see me for three weeks,”
Tex recalls. “I thought I’d lost her.”
But that was just part of Polly’s
personality. She was feisty.
“I loved that she was out there doing a
job that a lot of men wouldn’t do. She
had a lot of guts.”
Those guts got Polly more than glory. She saved lives.
“I’ve gone to heaven. Here’s an angel giving me water,” a wounded
Chinese solider whispered to Polly as she held his head and gave
him a drink of water during one of her flights to Burma.
Today, Tex is 92 and sits in a leather recliner at his home in Fort
Worth. He talks about his life as an army pilot like it was yesterday.
His sky blue eyes sparkle with memories of missions, airplanes
and the two loves of his life. His second wife, Andrea, sits across
the room and strokes Phat Cat’s soft black fur—one of the many
cats the couple has rescued.
Over the years, Tex has given back much of what he’s been given,
endowing nursing scholarships for undergraduate students; a
professorship, currently held by Rhonda Keen, Ph.D., M.N.Sc., BSN
’78 ; and an annual lectureship in nursing at TCU.
Dean Paulette Burns said, “Through the Rankin Endowed
Lectureship we are able to invite the nursing thought leaders
of today, such as Jeanette Lancaster, recent past president of
the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. This past year
Bobbie Berkowitz, dean and Mary O’Neil Mundinger Professor of
Nursing at Columbia University School of Nursing and senior vice
president of the Columbia University Medical Center, an expert on
evidence-based public health nursing practice, was the keynote
speaker at the Rankin Lecture.”
Tex also has endowed a geology scholarship, but has chosen to
make the Harris College of Nursing his priority. Andrea serves
on the Harris College of Nursing and Health Sciences’ Board of
Visitors. That’s how much the couple believes in Polly’s passion
and profession.
“Nursing has so many options to go into,” Tex says. “And now TCU
has a graduate program in anesthesiology. It’s the broadest area
of any profession—it’s just unlimited.”
Tex graduated from TCU in 1940 with a bachelor’s degree in
geology and a spot as captain on the golf team. He retired from
the U.S. Air Force in 1970 as the director of range engineering, a
post which provided support for missile launches to NASA and
helped put Neil Armstrong on the moon.
“The Lord has given me lots. He’s given me a great wife and a great
second wife.”
For Tex, the secret to happiness is simple: “Do what you want to do
and be happy in it; make the silver lining yourself.”
“I have learned somuch fromhim,”Andrea says.“He’s always happy.”
“I can’t carry a tune in a bucket,” says Tex.
“But he sings me a song every day,” Andrea smiles.
For Tex, the secret to
happiness is simple:
“Do what you want
to do and be happy
in it; make the silver
lining yourself.”
Photo by Jon P. Uzzel
Pauline “Polly” Rankin
(Photo courtesy of Andrea
and Tex Rankin)
FEATURES: Cover Story
The Harris College Magazine
- Summer 2012 · 7