Gordon Thomas, an alumnus and retired director of creative services for the University, was given the task of sculpting the statue of Sam Rayburn for the new Sam Rayburn Student Center.
When Thomas was asked to take on task of completing the Sam Rayburn sculpture, he said he was honored and excited.
“I think it’s great to have a statue in his honor because he is such a noted graduate of the University and the longest serving speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States. I’m grateful to have been chosen for it,” he said.
Thomas started working on the statue by doing research on Rayburn.
“To do a good statue you need a lot of reference material,” he said. “You need a lot of pictures and history on someone to see just how they look and how they should be captured.”
To execute his vision, Thomas started by visiting the Sam Rayburn Library and Museum in the late speaker’s hometown of Bonham. He looked at many photographs and dug into Rayburn’s past to come up with a proper design for the statue.
The sculpture depicts Rayburn holding a gavel in one hand and pointing with the other hand, as he would have done in performing his duties as the speaker of the House of Representatives. The statue will also have Rayburn standing behind the speaker’s rostrum.
Thomas received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Texas A&M University-Commerce. He spent time pursuing various careers in radio, advertising and technical illustration. After a number of years, he returned to the University as an employee and became the director of creative services.
Thomas began his sculpting career while an employee of A&M-Commerce. He approached Dr. Jerry Morris, then president of the University, about the possibility of sculpting a statue of William Leonidas Mayo, founder of A&M-Commerce formerly East Texas Normal College.
“I thought it’d be good to have a statue of Mayo for the University since he was the founder, and I wanted to see if I could do it,” Thomas said.
The Mayo statue is not the only one that Thomas is credited with. He also carved the sculpture of Audie Murphy, World War II’s most decorated soldier, which stands in front of Greenville’s American Cotton Museum.
The statue of Sam Rayburn is near completion. Thomas has finished forming it in clay and has sent it to the Hoka Hey Foundry in Dublin, Texas, to be cast in bronze. Once the new Sam Rayburn Student Center is complete, the statue will be installed.
“It took the work of a lot of others to get this statue done,” Thomas said. “I’m just grateful to the University and all of those people for helping me complete this important project.”