On eve of Maryville College Scholarship Dinner, the Fergusons reflect on endowment of a legacy
Nov. 6, 2024
It’s a good thing Sam Ferguson ’70 is such a people person, because wherever he goes, folks recognize his wife and want to talk about her.
Now, Sam wants to make that admiration a permanent part of the Fergusons’ legacy at Maryville College through the establishment of the Dr. Penny B. Ferguson Scholarship.
Dr. Penny Blackwood Ferguson ’69, it’s safe to say, is a Scot who’s had a profound impact on the community in which she lives and the vocation in which she’s worked, and wherever the couple travels, people know her. After having a ringside seat to her impact for the more than six decades the couple has been together, Sam has three goals for the scholarship:
1) To contribute to the advancement of women in the workplace;
2) To ensure the legacy of Dr. Ferguson’s work carries on for years to come; and
3) To recognize the outstanding contributions one Maryville College alumna has made on so many who consider her one of the biggest influences in their lives.
It’s one of a number of privately funded scholarships and endowments that will be celebrated on Nov. 14 at the Clayton Center for the Arts at the annual Maryville College Scholarship Dinner, where donors and scholarship recipients are brought together for an evening designed to acknowledge those who, in the words of MC founder Rev. Isaac Anderson, continue to “do good on the largest possible scale.”
But while Ansley Hoard ’28 will be recognized as the inaugural recipient of the Dr. Penny B. Ferguson Scholarship, the Fergusons themselves won’t be able to make it.
They’ll be in the Caribbean … and chances are good, Sam added, that he’ll hear a familiar refrain in the most unlikely of places.
“In a line in Brazil … in any airport … Prague, Paris, Germany, Sweden … I can’t take her anywhere without somebody knowing her!” he said. “‘Dr. Ferguson! Dr. Ferguson!’ She gets emails and messages almost daily from people all over the world that she’s had an impact on during her career. She’s just touched so many people.”
A home and a head start
The scholarship is also designed to be a reflection of their deep and abiding love of Maryville College. While they met as Maryville High School students, they knew shortly after their first date that they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together. Sam graduated from high school in 1965, Penny in ’66, and three years later, she had her degree in English. Sam took another year, but throughout their undergraduate careers and the jobs they found afterward as educators, they shared in every success and met every challenge as a united front.
“When we came to the College, we both played tennis, but there was no female tennis team, so Penny played on the men’s team,” Sam said. “You had to be good enough to play on the men’s team, but she and another lady were, and so we played tennis together. We were both English majors and wanted to start planning for a future, so we started a joint savings account at the bank. When we would receive (financial) gifts for Christmas or other occasions, it would go straight into our account, so when we actually got married, we had a bank account with startup money.”
Marriage, however, depended on a job for the first to graduate, and that fell to Penny. Although she would go on to teach junior-level English at Maryville High School for 54 years, she started out teaching summer school English at the now-closed Everett High School. And while Sam originally started out in Pre-Pharmacy, he was convinced by Penny to follow a similar career path.
“I like to say I majored in tennis, cards, ping-pong and basketball,” Sam joked. “But Penny suggested I could do what she was doing, so she helped me figure out my courses, and I went to my advisor, Dr. (Elizabeth) Jackson, who was in the English Department at the time. I told her what I wanted to do, and she said, ‘You can’t do that; that’s out of order!’
“And I told her, ‘Well, Penny said it would work,’ and Dr. Jackson loved Penny. Everybody loved Penny, and so Dr. Jackson just said, ‘Well, OK then!,’ and signed off on it. And that’s how I got my teaching credentials.”
He completed his student teaching at Everett High School, and after graduation was determined to teach junior-level English there … but there were no open positions at the time. Instead, he went to work for Penny’s father, Leland Blackwood, selling insurance. He obtained his real estate license during that time as well, providing the Fergusons with another future income stream that has made retirement on a teaching salary one that affords them the luxury of travel.
Those were halcyon times for the couple, who remain as in love with one another today as they’ve ever been. She grasps his hand, he rubs her back, and the unspoken communication between them in the way they look at one another is the stuff of classic romance novels.
Penny became the tennis coach at Maryville High, and Sam started a team at Everett. They occasionally competed with one another, but even then, their students recognized that the Fergusons came as a package deal, and still do today: When Penny was asked to serve as an adjunct instructor of English in the Division of Languages and Literature a few years ago, Sam accompanied her to every class. Originally, he served as her chauffeur and gopher because Penny was recovering from surgery, but it didn’t take long for Penny to encourage him to chime in and help teach.
“She taught one dual enrollment class and one first-year English class, and I started out just carrying stuff for her,” Sam said.
“But I’d never seen him in action, so after a little while, he just participated — and it was wonderful,” Penny added.
Like all Scots who understand the calling to “do good on the largest possible scale,” they didn’t just teach; they befriended the students in their course and showed up at volleyball, football and basketball games to support the student-athletes in their classroom. It helps, of course, that they live nearby in the historic College Hill neighborhood, and usually go for walks on campus multiple times a day.
“We told the students, ‘Like it or not, you’re under the Ferguson umbrella,’” Sam said. “Because once you’re one of ours, it just goes on.”
Ensuring a legacy lives on
Now, Hoard is one of “theirs.” The scholarship has only a few requirements: The recipient be female, enrolled as a first-year student at Maryville College; and reside in Blount County, Tennessee. Hoard checks all those boxes: A graduate of William Blount High School, she’s had her eyes on MC since middle school, she said, and her work in high school was designed to get her to Maryville College, where she’s majoring in English Literature and minoring in Writing/Communication. She plans to work in publishing or perhaps journalism, she says, and the Dr. Penny B. Ferguson Scholarship has helped make it possible.
“The main dilemma I was facing when first applying was trying to figure out how I was going to financially afford the tuition and expenses, but this scholarship has helped undercut the cost,” she said. “Maryville College has been everything I hoped it would be. I love all of my classes, and the community is very inclusive. I am currently the poetry Editor for Impressions, Maryville’s literary magazine. I am grateful to have a staff position, especially as a first-year student. When applying for the position, I was told that they don’t hire freshmen for staff positions, so I was very surprised to receive the acceptance email.”
To help a young woman break such barriers — that’s exactly the sort of accomplishment the Fergusons want their endowment to fund.
“We have two girls (Laurie and Julie), plus my amazing wife, and one of our daughters was a rising star in the corporate world who moved to Manhattan and found that there was just a glass ceiling for women, and that’s the reason she went back to school to get her MBA,” Sam said. “We want to help break those glass ceilings. And the endowment is a way of recognizing that my wife is a fantastic teacher and a wonderful person.”
When her retirement was announced in Spring 2023, The Daily Times newspaper covered the monumental occasion with a lengthy news-feature. Colleagues, former students and area parents gushed about Penny’s influence, but the opportunity to give back, she said, may have meant more to her. A multimedia decade museum, put together through a collaboration with the History Department, is one that comes to mind, as well as the four volumes of Blount County history put together by students and sold in the old Proffitt’s Department Stores. Perhaps the most meaningful, she added, were the family histories she encouraged her students to put together to sharpen their research and writing skills. The parents of one former student who passed away included that family history project as part of the funeral service, and Penny can’t stop the tears when she recalls how much the family members told her it meant to them.
Funding the endowment for a future Maryville College student is a way of ensuring that there will always be women who have a similar impact on young people in the community. After all, there’s not a day that goes by when Dr. Ferguson isn’t reminded of her role in shaping the lives of so many.
“I can’t go anywhere without people stopping me to say how much I influenced their life or career,” she said. “To feel that I had an impact on future generations is very important to me.”
