But if you know LeRoy “Gene” Hambrick, you know he marches to his own drummer. Or, as he recently noted in something I’ll explain later, he’s grooved along to the disco song, “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now,” which topped the charts in the late ‘70s.
Once at Earlham, Hambrick decided he was going to walk on to both the tennis and the basketball teams. And like the song said:
“If you’ve ever been held down before I know you refuse to be held down anymore.”
He made his mark in tennis as soon as he showed up.
“That first week they had a ladder you had to work your way up and I beat almost every upperclassman, and they said, ‘OK, you’re on the team!’” he said.
His first two fall seasons for the Quakers he was undefeated. He played No. 1 singles in three of his four years in college and won All Conference and All District honors.
Back then, Earlham basketball was coached by Del Harris, who would go on to coach the Houston Rockets, Milwaukee Bucks and Los Angeles Lakers and today is in the National Basketball Hall of Fame.
“I remember walking up to Del and asking if I could just be on the JV team so I could stay in shape for tennis,” Hambrick recalled.
Although just under 5-foot-8, he said he could dunk and by the time he was a junior, he was the Quakers’ starting point guard. The team went 21-9 and won again the following year as well with him guiding the offense,
Today, Hambrick is in the Earlham Athletics Hall of Fame.
And the Quakers tennis teams play their matches at the Gene Hambrick Varsity Tennis Center.
Yet, current Earlham students don’t seek him out because of his athletic past — many likely don’t even know about it — but instead gravitate to him because of the way he engages them, guides them and challenges them when it comes to their academic pursuits.
An effervescent 73-year-old with an easy laugh and hard to repress positivity, Hambrick is the Senior Executive Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Creativity at Earlham and he also teaches an advanced business class.
He lives in Englewood with his wife of 51 years, Sonsee, who’s also an Earlham alum.
One person who knows him well is Kevin Klose, the retired Associate Vice President for Institutional Advancement at Earlham, who lives in Washington Township:
“Gene is one ‘of the most inspirational, accomplished and nicest people I have ever known. He’s just one of those guys, when he walks into a room, the room brightens up.
“He’s a glass half full kind of guy and he plays an invaluable role in the lives of the Earlham students. He just pushes hard for them all the time.”
Hambrick’s efforts at Earlham always go back to one thing: “It is all about the students.”
He said he has an open-door policy at his second-floor office in the Landrum Bolling Center on campus:
“Students can come in anytime to talk, and I’ll listen. At times I’ll give advice and sometimes it may require some tough love. But at the end of the day, I’ve had good relationships with the students no matter where I’ve been.”
And that includes the University of Dayton, where for three years just over a decade ago, he was an adjunct business professor along with a national fundraiser for the school.
Wherever he’s been, he’s embraced all students, regardless of their course of study or where they are from.
And at Earlham, they could be from almost anywhere in the world.
Although there are just over 600 students at the school, they come from over 50 nations, Hambrick said. And for a long time, some 70 percent of Earlham students would spend at least a semester studying abroad.
Those international connections are evident when Hambrick gives you a tour of his office.
“Come on, I’ll take you down memory lane,” he said with a grin.
More prominently displayed than a couple of the sports photos from his playing days are the gifts from around the globe he’s gotten from students and colleagues.
A large fan that bears the bald and bearded image of a famous Taiwanese monk hangs on one wall; while on another, a well-known bridge in Tokyo graces artwork given to him by a Japanese student at UD.
There are mementoes from Armenia, Bangladesh, Palestine, Netherlands and Vietnam
There are Russian nesting dolls and tiles from Portugal and an amulet from Turkey, a gift from an Earlham field hockey player, that is supposed to attract negative energy and bad luck from the room until it fills and breaks.
It’s intact.
Students appreciate Hambrick because he often pushes them to possibilities they never realized they could achieve.
That was especially the case in 2016 when four students, supported by Hambrick’s center, were awarded $1 million in start-up capital after winning the Hult Prize, the world’s largest student competition for social good.
Sponsored by the Hult International Business School and the Clinton Global Initiative — with an aim to create and launch the most compelling social business ideas — the competition attracted 25,000 applicants from 150 nations.
The Earlham project — called the “Magic Bus” — was created by four students: Iman Cooper, Sonia Kabra, Leslie Ossete, and Wyclife Omondi.
Their project — which met the Crowded Urban Spaces challenge issued by former president Bill Clinton to double the income for 10 million people by 2022 — involved a text-message based ticketing service accessible from inexpensive mobile phones to standardize bus fares and reduce wait times for city buses.
“They took the $1 million and launched their idea first in Kenya,”” Hambrick said. “They just got another $1.3 million in seed capital and another large amount from one of the largest venture capitalists in the world who’s from Australia.”
“They are going to get the Distinguished Alumni Award here in the fall.”
Opposites attract
Hambrick’s father — also Leroy, but with a small r — was a bigger than life figure.
He coached football and baseball at Clark College in Atlanta — where he’s in the Hall of Fame — and he was the first black official to work an integrated high school state championship game in Georgia.
“He was officiating in the days of segregation and right after, and he told stories of going to these small towns in Georgia and the police meeting him at the city limits and taking him to the game, then escorting him back out of own afterward,” Hambrick said.
Hambrick’s mother, Edith Arnold (Hambrick) — went to Spelman College and then Atlanta University, where she was enshrined in hall of fame for tennis.
Growing up in Atlanta, Hambrick said he went to segregated schools until the 10th grade when he entered Marist School, then a Catholic, military, all-boys school. He played four sports there but was being considered for his academics by schools like Earlham, Wittenberg and Hiram.
When he visited Earlham, he said he “fell in love” with the place.
His first week at the school, the romance became much more real when he met Sonseenahray Cumbee, a fellow freshman from Kokomo, Indiana, whose name, he said “means Morning Star in Apache.”
For him it was love at first sight. For Sonsee, as she is known, it was not.
“But I have a persona where I’m a sales guy,” Hambrick said with a grin. “I can adjust to the target audience.”
With he and Sonsee, he said it was a case of opposites attract. But they soon became boyfriend and girlfriend, were together all four years at Earlham and sophomore year they were named the school’s Homeconming King and Queen.
“She was the first African American Homecoming Queen at Earlham,” he said with a smile as he studied a photo of them from back then. “She still looks the same today.”
They married the day before their 1973 commencement.
A couple of years later they had a daughter — also named Sonseenahray, but known as Ray — and she’s now a company executive living in Chattanooga, Tenn.
Hambrick graduated from Earlham with a degree in sociology and planned to be a social worker until he said Sonsee urged him to pick a different career path.
“She told me I’d be a terrible social worker,” he laughed. “She said I had no patience.”
He said she suggested business and so, with a quick career makeover, he landed a job with Corning in upstate New York.
He started out in recruiting, moved to labor relations, then became a shift foreman on the plant floor and eventually went into human resources.
After picking up his MBA at the University of Virginia, he held various top sales jobs at Corning and then the company began sending him to Asia to teach marketing.
After nine years travelling to Japan, Korea, Thailand Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, he moved to Mexico City for three years before running Corning’s international consumer products division.
With the travel and stress of the job taking a toll, he retired at 47.
He and Sonsee ran their own company for three years and then he returned to Earlham as a fundraiser, as was Kevin Klose.
Hambrick took a similar job at Carnegie Mellon and then spent three years at UD, before returning to Earlham a decade ago.
He was critical in the launch of the Center for Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Creativity, which helps students apply their liberal arts educations to real world involvement and employment.
When he returned, he set up a free youth tennis program — with the help of the United States Tennis Association (USTA) — for the Amigos Center, which focuses on Richmond’s Latinx community.
Hambrick and others not only teach youth, ages 6 to 16, tennis skills, but the program gets participants physically active, promotes healthy eating and builds self esteem
The old courts on the Earlham campus were refurbished, thanks to a financial commitment by Richmond restaurateur Jesus Melendez, the owner and founder of the popular El Bronco and El Rodeo eateries.
Several teenagers who have come through the Amigos program have made the Richmond High tennis team and some have experienced postseason success with the Red Devils.
“Every Saturday out here you’ll find 70 to 100 kids taking part,” Hambrick said. “And recently the USTA gave the program an award for its impact in the community.”
‘A hidden gem’
Before leaving the office and taking me on a tour of the campus, Hambrick stopped in the lobby to show the mural — “From Campus to Cranes” — done by Earlham grad Katie Yamasaki.
It depicted the experience of her Japanese relatives and their fellow detainees in American internment camps during World War II.
The touching work concluded with a campus scene of Earlham College in the upper portion of the final panel. It was a tribute to the many Quaker individuals and institutions that worked to liberate detainees, including 1946 Earlham grad Grant Noda, whose financial gift to the school funded Yamasaki’s mural.
Earlham has been at the forefront of social consciousness since it opened in the mid-1800s and became just the second college in the nation (Oberlin was first) to admit women.
Today — even though Hambrick said only about 3 percent of the student body is Quaker — much of Earlham’s unique spirit remains.
He rightly calls the school “a hidden gem.”
He drove me to another section of the 800-acre campus and showed off the sports facilities, many funded by 1973 grad and former Quaker baseball player Randy Sadler and his wife, Melissa.
“We have some of the best Division II facilities there are,” Hambrick said.
Each year the student body votes for who it wants as the baccalaureate speaker for the graduation ceremony and this past May, Hambrick was chosen to give the address.
“Remember the disco song ‘Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now?’” Hambrick asked with a smile. “I started with that. It was before the students’ time, so we played it and people were clapping.
“That was the theme: Nothing could stop this class.
“They’d been through COVID. With all the crap going on in the world, all the politics and different thoughts — we have students from 50 different countries and 48 states — they navigated all that and stayed together and graduated.
“Then I closed with the Langston Hughes’ poem ‘Mother to Son.’
“By the end the crowd was rockin’, and I heard one parent say ‘Amen!’ "
He got a standing ovation.
“I ended by just telling all of them to keep on climbing, keep on striving.”
More than disco or Hughes, that was pure Gene Hambrick.
It worked for him at Earlham over 50 years ago and it still works for the students who come through his open door today.
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