Ta Da! Our List of 125 Extraordinary Exes Unveiled

By Tim Taliaferro in Blog on April 26, 2010 at 9:56 am | No Comments

Your May/June Alcalde will be whirling off the presses during the next two days, but while it’s being bound and mailed, get some advance reading material with a look at our cover story.

The Texas Exes’ list of 125 Extraordinary Exes has been unveiled online today, and it is a roll call of some of the greatest achievers to have attended The University of Texas in the school’s 127-year history.

Among those listed are artists, scientists, musicians, inventors, journalists, sports stars, and all-around trailblazers — people who took their UT educations and went on to help improve society.

You’ll see some marquee names, like Walter Cronkite, Dean Ornish, Renee Zellweger, Robert Rodriguez, Lady Bird Johnson, Vince Young, and Michael Dell.

But how about Chris Condit, who founded the Texas 4,000, a team bike ride to Alaska that raises funds for cancer research. Or Joan Darling, one of the first successful female TV directors.

And there are more surprises. John Henry Faulk helped end the blacklisting of entertainers in the Communist-fearing ’50s. Father Justin Sinaites is a monk responsible for one of the most valuable collections of religious manuscripts in the world. E. Donnall Thomas helped take bone-marrow transplant survival rates from little more than zero percent to as high as 90 percent.

It’s fun to scan through and see what kind of company a Longhorn background may put you in.

Given that nearly half a million souls have graduated from UT since its founding, creating a list of just 125 names was a grand undertaking for the Texas Exes staff.

But we don’t claim it to be complete — far from it. We’re expecting many, many more deserving names to be submitted, and we’ll post them online. Key them in here.