In Fond Memory of Max Garrott

Last month I wrote (here) about my father-in-law, who was born 110 years ago in May. This post is about Max Garrott, an esteemed friend and missionary colleague, who was born on June 20, 1910.

Previously, I have made blog posts about two good missionary friends and colleagues at Seinan Gakuin University, Calvin Parker (1926~2010) and Bob Culpepper (1924~2012). This article is about the man I always called Dr. Garrott, a man I respected greatly from the time I first met him until his death less than nine years later. 

Meeting Max

June and I had the privilege of attending the Eleventh Baptist World Congress, which met in Miami Beach, Florida, in June 1965, just a year before we were appointed missionaries to Japan. Dr. Garrott, his wife Dorothy, and his youngest son Jack were there, back from Japan for a missionary furlough, as it was called then.

I was impressed with Dr. Garrott at that first meeting. Then we saw him and Dorothy again in 1967, the year after we arrived in Japan. On our way from Tokyo, where we were in language school, to Fukuoka, where we were planning to move the following year, we spent a night with the Garrotts in their home in Kokura.

Contact with Dr. Garrott was then quite limited until he became the Chancellor of Seinan Gakuin in April 1973, where I had been a university faculty member since September 1968.

Max’s Brief Bio

William Maxfield Garrott was born in northeast Arkansas, the son of a Baptist minister. A precocious child, he graduated from high school at the age of 14 and Hendrix College in 1929 when he was 19. Five years later he had finished his undergraduate and doctoral studies at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Dr. Garrott arrived in Japan as a missionary on 9/9/9. The year was Showa 9 according to the Japanese calendar, the ninth year of Emperor Showa, known in the West as Hirohito. It was 1934 by the Western calendar. Before long he began his work as an educational missionary, mainly teaching New Testament and Greek.

Just before Christmas 1938, Max and Dorothy Carver, who had served as a Southern Baptist missionary to Japan since 1935, were married.

After April 1941, Dr. Garrott was the only SB missionary remaining in Japan, and soon after the Pacific War began he was interned until he was able to leave Japan in June 1942. In October 1947, Max and Dorothy arrived back in Japan with their three children at that time.

Seinan Gakuin, founded in Fukuoka City by Southern Baptist missionaries as a boys’ school in 1916, elected Dr. Garrott as the sixth Chancellor in 1948. Seinan Gakuin University was established the following year, and Dr. Garrott was chosen to be the first president. He held both offices until 1952.

Then after ten years as Chancellor of Seinan Jo Gakuin (1962~72), the girls’ school started in Kokura by Southern Baptist missionaries in 1922, Dr. Garrott was elected in 1973 as the 11^th Chancellor of Seinan Gakuin. He served in that position until his untimely death in June 1974, just a few days after his 64^th birthday.

My Fondness for Max

Since Dr. Garrott was 28 years older than I, and five years older than my father, I thought he was a rather old man in 1973~74 when I was 35. I remember saying that year that when I got to be an old man in my 60s, I hoped I would be like Dr. Garrott.

I admired him in many ways: he was a devout disciple of Jesus Christ; he was a scholar; he had a sharp and inquisitive mind; and he was deeply interested in the physical as well as the spiritual needs of individual people and of society as a whole.

Indeed, I hope that to some degree I did become, and am, the sort of “old man” such as I thought Dr. Garrott was. At any rate, even though it has been 46 years since his death, I remember him with great fondness today on the 110^th anniversary of his birth.