From Rachel Childress:
On Tuesday morning, July 15, 1975, my father and I left our home in Louisville, Ky for the University of Kentucky. It was my day to officially become a student and register for classes. One of the benefits of being in the Honors Program was small group advising conferences, rather than the massive lines of freshmen waiting to turn in their computer punch cards.
I travelled up the elevator in the Patterson Office Tower and entered a small conference room with half a dozen other Freshman Honors students. I can remember what I wore that day, but I remember only two of the other students – both boys! I reported later that I met one boy who was really cute and another who was really nice. The nice one would become my husband three years later. My mother loved to tell people, “Rachel went off to college and married the first man she met.” Though technically true, it was not that simple!
Basil “Bazz” Childress was the “nice one”. His report to his parents was that he had “met a girl he wanted to get to know”. His mother shared that he told them he had “met the girl he was going to marry.”
Bazz and I were in two classes together the first semester. One was Chemistry (wink!), which was held in a huge classroom. The other was our Honors Colloquia – a small class taught by Dr. Robert Rabel. I had him all three years in the program. (I took extra hours and summer classes so I could graduate in three years.) This was the class where our romance really started.
In the Colloquiums, Dr. Rabel introduced us to classics and ancient history. After a study trip to Greece and Turkey in 2001, I emailed Dr. Rabel to thank him for what he taught me: foundations for other types of learning – not just knowledge but new ways to analyze and think about the world. He made it interesting and relevant.
I did not expect Dr. Rabel to remember us after so many years… but he did, in great detail – including an article he saw in the local paper reporting a tornado in 1986 which had destroyed our home. We did not know it at the time, but we were in the first class he taught at UK, right after graduate school. He was pleased that his “class may have played Cupid” and said, “I watched you fall in love in my class.”
Dr. Rabel’s teaching style encouraged open discussions, challenging conversations, engaging material, and freedom of thought. Indeed, sitting comfortably around a table in that small group setting, with those conversations, Bazz and I found not just an incredible education but a deep and abiding love. Rachel Smith Childress
Rachel and Bazz raised two incredible daughters. They were married almost 34 years before he died in 2012.