Boren statue to be unveiled OU president recalls urgency to begin the project long ago
NORMAN — The University of Oklahoma will unveil a statue of retiring President David Boren on his 77th birthday Saturday. The younger, leaner version of OU’s 13th president appears just the way the benefactor wanted it.
Boren said his friend and OU supporter Edward L. Gaylord, the late editor and publisher of The Oklahoman, insisted the statue be sculpted sooner rather than later. Gaylord led the fundraising drive and made a major contribution to it, Boren said.
“There was always a running joke between Ed Gaylord and myself about my constant battles with my weight. I’d been on a diet and I had lost like 35 pounds, so he said ‘I want to get your statue made right now.’”
Boren asked why? “And he said, ‘Because you’re going to gain all this weight back and we want to get a statue of you when you’re thinner.’
“He just got such a kick out of that because he teased me constantly,” Boren said.
The OU president agreed to pose for the statue, but didn’t want it put out on the campus while he was still in office.
“I’d feel very strange about that, walking by a statue of me,” Boren said.
Paul Moore, OU artist-in-residence and professor of figurative sculpture, sculpted Boren standing, clothed in a presidential gown and medallion, holding a book.
Two identical statues were completed in 2012, OU officials said. One for the OU Health Sciences campus in Oklahoma City and the one that will be unveiled at 11 a.m. Saturday in a garden west of Oklahoma Memorial Union.
“I felt like I was close
enough to retirement that that would be OK,” Boren said.
He admits he sometimes talks to the statue of his mentor George Lynn Cross, OU’s seventh and longest-serving president.
The statue of Cross in a seated pose is just outside Evans Hall, where the president’s office is located, so Boren passes it frequently.
Many on campus will pass Boren’s statue daily as they come and go from Oklahoma Memorial
Union.
The unveiling ceremony will be moved inside the union if the weather doesn’t cooperate.
Gaylord did not live to see the installation. Boren said he was privileged to give the eulogy at Gaylord’s memorial service 15 years ago this month and at the service for Edith Kinney Gaylord, the publisher’s sister who died in 2001.
As both OU president and a politician, Boren said his relationship with Gaylord was wonderful and honest.
“The basis of our relationship was we were very candid with each other. If he didn’t like
something I did, he let me know it,” Boren said. “Sometimes our candid discussions ended in arguments.”
But Gaylord rarely tried to tell him what to do.
“Very few calls. I think people had the image that he probably called out politicians all the time and said, ‘Here’s how I want you to vote,’ and things like that. Very seldom did that ever happen,” Boren said.
“Occasionally, I got a front-page editorial that was not positive, although I got some that were, and endorsements.
“I think I was one of the first Democrats that the paper ever endorsed.”