Draft:H. Hardy Perritt

H. Hardy Perritt was a college professor, an officer in the United States Navy, and headmaster of a private school. He was born on a farm near Wesson, MS, in 1918, the youngest of seven children of Franklin Sharbrough and Blanche Bagley Perritt. Educated initially at Copiah-Lincoln Junior College, he graduated from LSU, where he roomed with Russell Long, a future United States senator, and where he met his future wife, Margaret Floyd. His studies were interrupted by service in the United States Navy, beginning as a yeoman and then commissioned as an ensign. He was assigned to command a USN radio direction-finding station aimed at locating German U-boats in Belem, Brazil and returned to the US after the war's end. He was appointed to the faculty at the University of Virgnia, where he served as debate coach. Moving to the University of Florida to complete his PhD under the direction of Dallas Dickey, his major professor at LSU, he was immediately called into active duty for the Korean War. He served two years at the Naval Security Group in Washington, and then returned to Gainesville where he completed his PhD while directing the English Language Institute, a program aimed at teaching English to foreign students. In 1956, he was appointed assistant professor in the speech department of the University of Alabama, and in 1959, left the university to become headmaster of Birmingham University School in Birmingham, AL ("BUS"). He made the academic program more rigorous, raised money for a gymnasium, and hired Olympic athlete Phil Mulkey, who went on to create a program that made BUS Alabama state champions in track. He left BUS in 1962 and thereafter taught at Miles College, Ogelthorpe University, and Tyler, Texas, college. He died in 1985.

References

Southern Speech Journal Winter 1955 vol. 21 Iss 2

H. Hardy Perritt, Linguistics: A Lambient Glance, 26 Southern Speech Journal 279 (2009)