Former Winthrop University professor wrote a memoir about his time at the college

*Editor’s Note: This story was updated on April 7.*

Larry Timbs, a former mass communication professor at Winthrop University, wrote a memoir titled “From the Beak of an Eagle: Memoirs of a Winthrop Faculty Member.” The book reminisces on his time as a professor at the university.

After achieving his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa, he started working at Winthrop University in 1985. Timbs also was the advisor for The Johnsonian up until a year before his retirement in May 2012. After his retirement, Timbs continued to teach part-time at Winthrop off and on until 2017.  

“I always used to say journalism is the 2nd most important industry after ministry. You get a front-row seat to history.” Timbs said in an interview with The Johnsonian.

Timbs loved being a journalist but had decided that it wasn’t what he wanted to do for the rest of his career.

“I worked as a journalist for seven years, and I always use to say that you could only be in journalism for so long before you go and do something else. I always said that I didn’t work seven years but 14 years in journalism because that’s how many hours I worked in a day,” he said. “So that was wearing down on me. So I wanted to stay in it, but I needed less of that grind, so that’s why I became a professor.”

Timbs allows readers see what the college experience is like from a professor’s point of view in his memoir. 

“A lot of things happened during my time at Winthrop, that I just thought I’d document. I thought it’d be an interest to people to just document what it was like here at Winthrop. I guess I didn’t want some of those memories lost, we only have so much time on this earth,” he said. “Things happen to us and we see things, some of those things are worth writing about. It’s just some of the memories that impacted my life.” 

Early in the book, Timbs writes about how he was fired from his position as the advisor for The Johnsonian.

“I got the news via a phone call from Dr. Reel, a colleague of mine, who informed me that he had been told that he was the new advisor of the paper and that Larry Timbs would no longer serve in that role,” he wrote, adding that he didn’t know why he was fired a few days later when he made an error responding to an email.

“I had hit ‘reply all,’ to an email message from an assistant to the president of the university,” he wrote.

Timbs was responding to a message that was sent to him and the student editor about content in the newspaper. 

“The student had written an article that mentioned that the president was receiving a housing “allowance,” of several thousands of dollars to help cover his off-campus living expenses,” he wrote. “The president’s office was upset with the usage of the word ‘allowance’ rather than using another word like ‘compensation.’ They claimed it’d be better to substitute for a more accurate and appropriate word.”

Timbs continued to back the student choice of words and a high-rank employee of the president’s office lodged a complaint email to him and others who argued to threaten to bring a lawyer into this dispute. Timbs took offense to the threats and hit the “reply all,” to the email and wrote, “Go ahead and get your golf course attorney. The paper is making no word change.”

“I kind of let it all hang out. A lot of things happen to people while they’re employed at Winthrop that they don’t want to talk about for whatever reason, Nobody wants to make anyone mad or embarrass anybody. I’m done now, so I don’t have that attachment, so I can speak more freely now,” he wrote.

“I had some of the best students in the world, I’ll never forget them,” he wrote.

Timbs mentions that his most sacred memories at Winthrop were those he spent with his students.

“I learned more from them than they probably learned from me. I hoped I touched their lives in some way. For me it was the students, it was always about the students,” he wrote.

Timbs is currently retired living in Surfside Beach, South Carolina with his wife Patsy and their two dogs and one cat. Timbs dedicated his book to his children, his grandchildren, and students at Winthrop, which you can read now on Amazon.