Remembering Don Woolley (1932-2005)
by Dr. Ron Farrar

He had retired several years ago and some of the newer faculty won't know who he was. Come to think of it, some of us who worked with Woolley didn't know much about him either.

Woolley taught photojournalism. He never called it nonverbal communications or imaging or anything else but what he felt it was--using words and pictures to report the news. He taught it thoroughly and taught it well. He was irreverent about most everything else, but never irreverent about photojournalism.

Woolley taught at good universities--Iowa and Missouri and here--but he never became, in the usual sense, an academic. He never attended an AEJMC meeting or wrote a scholarly paper or engaged in self-promotion (subtle or blatant) or punched the tickets the rest of us felt we had to punch to get ahead.

Deans sometimes lost patience with Woolley. One angrily told him he "just wasn't a team player." Woolley, not much impressed with the direction the Team was headed at the time, probably felt he was being complimented.

There was, of course, another side of Don Woolley, that of a caring and totally decent man. Our colleague and friend Bill Brown got to see that side. Bill, who lives alone, took a bad fall on an icy step and was immobilized. Without being asked, Woolley became nurse, transport, and runner-of-errands for weeks. That's one case. There were more.

Those of us who had lunch with Woolley every now and then got a glimpse of that other side too. At his favorite watering holes, notably Yesterday's and the Mousetrap, Woolley was a celebrity, respected and held in genuine affection by a wonderful cross-section of Columbia--waitresses, physicians, company presidents, short order fry cooks. Few of us enjoyed a wider, deeper circle of friends. Or a more loyal, more grateful, cadre of former students.

Some months ago Woolley moved to Nashville, His wife Deb, a successful businesswoman, had become executive director of the Tennessee State Chamber of Commerce. Woolley didn't complain about being uprooted from the friends and the comfortable new house he had here. Instead he continued writing his newspaper column for a publisher friend in Massachusetts. The column is witty and upbeat and first-class. Woolley was as good with words as he was with pictures, which is to say very good indeed. And he was making new friends in Nashville.

Tonight, a great many toasts will be hoisted to the memory of Don Woolley--a good man whose personal and professional values were, in their own way, far better than most.

Professor Woolley dies at 73
by Lisa Michals - The State
USC journalism students once had to hunt down their final examinations before they could take them because their photojournalism professor, Donald Woolley, arranged for the exams to be dropped from a helicopter. Noted for his surprising creativity, Woolley will be remembered most for his deep devotion to photojournalism. Read more>>

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