University of Mississippi alumni being honored by the Ole Miss Alumni Association for Homecoming 2024 are (top, from left) Robert R. 'Bobby' Bailess, David Ward Kellum, John Maxwell and Mallory McCormack, and (bottom, from left) Suzan Brown Thames, Jon C. Turner and William G. Yates III.
Seven to be honored at Homecoming for achievement, service
by Jim Urbanek
The Ole Miss Alumni Association will recognize seven distinguished alumni with its highest annual awards as part of Homecoming 2024.
University of Mississippi Alumni Hall of Fame inductees for 2024 are: Robert R. “Bobby” Bailess (BBA 73, JD 76), of Vicksburg; David Ward Kellum (BA 80), of Water Valley; John Maxwell (BA 66, MA 68), of Jackson; Suzan Brown Thames (BA 68), of Ridgeland; and William G. Yates III (BBA 93), of Biloxi.
The Hall of Fame honors alumni who have made outstanding contributions to their country, state or the university through good deeds, services or philanthropies.
Jon C. Turner (BBA 78), of Jackson, will receive the Alumni Service Award for service to the university and the Alumni Association over an extended period. Mallory McCormack (MBA 15), of Huntsville, Alabama, will receive the Outstanding Young Alumni Award, which honors graduates who have shown exemplary leadership throughout their first 15 years of alumni status in both their careers and dedication to Ole Miss.
“We are excited for this opportunity to celebrate some of the university’s most successful and notable alumni,” said Kirk Purdom, the association’s CEO. “These inductees stand out both with their career accomplishments and with their service to Ole Miss and their communities.”
The association will host a gala for the honorees at 7 p.m. Sept. 26 in the Gertrude C. Ford Ballroom at The Inn at Ole Miss. The gala and preceding reception are sold out.
Bailess, a Vicksburg native, earned his undergraduate degree in business administration from Ole Miss in 1973 and played linebacker for the Rebels for the 1971-73 seasons. He received his Juris Doctor from the School of Law and was admitted to the Mississippi Bar in 1976.
He has continued to practice with the same firm, now known as Bailess & Rector, in Vicksburg. Bailess is a fellow of the Mississippi Bar Foundation and served as a member of the Board of Bar Commissioners. He was elected president of the Mississippi Bar Association and received the 2009 Law Alumnus of the Year Award and is a past president of the Law Alumni Chapter.
He served as a board member and as chairman of the UM Foundation and serves on the executive committee of the Ole Miss Alumni Association. He was president of the Alumni Association in 2017-18.
Bailess and his wife, the former Natalie Waring (BAEd 73), are members of Crawford Street United Methodist Church, where he has served on numerous committees, as a member of the board of trustees and as chairman of the administrative board.
“I am truly humbled to be included in present company, as well as those previously inducted,” said Bailess. “It is an unexpected and overwhelming honor that is very much appreciated.”
Kellum is director of broadcasting for the Learfield Ole Miss Radio Network and assistant to the athletics director for publicity. As a student, Kellum served as the voice of Ole Miss women’s basketball and baseball programs for local radio station WSUH/WOOR and was a DJ, program director and production director.
After graduation, he continued broadcasting Ole Miss women’s basketball and baseball games and added Northwest Community College sports to his broadcast duties. Kellum was hired by NWCC and Three Rivers Planning and Development District to serve at the WIN Job Center in Oxford as rapid response coordinator and the C2C youth coordinator. He worked there until his retirement in 2021.
Kellum was selected as voice of the Rebels for Ole Miss football and men’s basketball in 1989. At age 30, he was one of just a few play-by-play announcers to do all three major sports in the Southeastern Conference. He also hosts “RebTalk” and is the emcee for Rebel Road Trips and other athletics events.
Kellum has also worked as an adjunct professor in the School of Journalism and New Media, teaching broadcast sales and sports broadcasting as well as helping with the Student Media Center when it was created.
Kellum married Mary Kuehn (BSW 80) after graduation from Ole Miss. He was recently commissioned as a deacon at Pinelake Church in Oxford, and he and Mary serve on the baptismal committee.
“My first association with Ole Miss was living as a child in married student housing,” Kellum said. “Now, some 60 plus years later, I still spend my life on the Ole Miss campus and around the country living my dream as the voice of the Rebels. God has blessed me with a wonderful family, a fulfilling career and an association with a university that is dear to my heart.”
Maxwell lives in Jackson but was raised on a cotton farm near Pickens. He graduated from Ole Miss with a master’s degree in theatre in 1968.
He began touring his one-man play, “Oh, Mr. Faulkner, Do You Write?” based on the life of Noble Laureate William Faulkner, throughout Mississippi in 1981. He has since toured the production to most of the continental United States and 10 foreign countries. Included in this touring was a presentation at the Smithsonian in its Portraits in Motion series, the Bottom Line in New York, the Alliance Regional Theatre in Atlanta and the Empty Space Regional Theatre in Seattle.
Perhaps the most prestigious among his presentations was a partial production as a part of the Cultural Olympiad in Atlanta in 1996. Included in that audience were nine Nobel laureates and President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalyn. He has presented the show at least 1,500 times worldwide.
He has written and produced several monologues and plays based on characters and stories of the Bible throughout much of the Southeast. He has won numerous fellowships in playwriting from the Mississippi Arts Council as well as a fellowship in playwriting from the Tennessee Williams Writing Conference in Sewanee, Tennessee. He has served as artistic director for New Stage Theatre in Jackson and received the 2014 Governor’s Award for Art Excellence.
“Graduating with a master’s degree in theatre from Ole Miss gave me the opportunity to make a living doing what I love to do,” Maxwell said. “I owe Ole Miss a debt impossible to repay.”
Thames’ volunteer career with the University of Mississippi Medical Center began in the early 1980s, when she led a fundraising campaign for the state’s first stand-alone pediatric cancer clinic. She established the first support group and fundraising entity, Friends of Children’s Hospital, and was its inaugural president and its chair for 20 years.
She also chaired the capital campaign to build Batson Hospital for Children, which opened in 1997. Thames served on the UMMC Capital Campaign Committee for the $101 million Kathy and Joe Sanderson Mississippi Children’s Hospital, which opened in 2020. She also serves as chair of the advisory board of the Memory Impairment and Neurodegenerative Dementia Center at UMMC.
Her efforts at UMMC led friends and family to endow the Suzan Brown Thames Chair in Pediatrics, the first of its kind, with $2.1 million in contributions.
For 34 years, she was a speech pathologist and audiologist working with patients at the Jackson Ear Nose and Throat Clinic. Besides her Ole Miss degree, Thames also earned a master’s degree in speech pathology and audiology from Tulane University and received a fellowship from the University of Wisconsin in behavioral disabilities.
Thames has served on several organizational boards for the university, including the UM Foundation, Ole Miss Women’s Council and the executive committee of the Ole Miss Alumni Association. She was the 2015 recipient of the Ole Miss Alumni Service Award. Thames was chosen as Volunteer Fundraiser of the Year by the National Philanthropy Association in 2011.
“Ole Miss and our Medical Center have enriched my life in every dimension by providing meaningful purpose, exceptional opportunities for learning and magnificent relationships beginning as a student and continuing today as a volunteer,” Thames said. “I am genuinely grateful for this honor and the lifelong encouragement that the Ole Miss family has instilled in me.”
Yates is CEO and president of The Yates Companies Inc., a nationally recognized construction firm. Under his leadership, Yates has grown to more than 20 offices in over a dozen states from California to Maine.
At Ole Miss, he earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration, graduating summa cum laude. He was a Hearin-Hess scholar and a Taylor Medalist. Yates also earned a master’s degree in construction management from Arizona State University and is a CPA.
Yates is a member of the boards of directors of the New Orleans branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Trustmark National Bank and the Mississippi Economic Council. His former directorships include the Ole Miss Alumni Association, the Millsaps College Board of Trustees, the UM Foundation, former chair of Mississippi Associated Builders and Contractors and former chair of the United Way of South Mississippi. He was also a member of the Governor’s Commission for Economic Recovery during the COVID-19 response.
In 2024, Yates was named one of Mississippi’s Top 50 Most Influential Leaders. He also has received a Hope Award and a United Way of South Mississippi’s President Award and was inducted into the Roland Weeks Hall of Fame Outstanding Community Leaders Class of 2010.
“Ole Miss has had a very positive impact on my life, and I am thankful for the opportunities it has afforded me,” Yates said. “It is an honor to be recognized and especially with such a distinguished group.”
Turner is a retired partner from the Jackson office of BKD/Forvis, where his public accounting experience with several firms spanned more than 40 years and multiple industries. He is a member of the Mississippi Society of CPAs and won the 2013 MSCPA Public Service Award for his community and statewide civic involvement.
A Belzoni native, Turner began his career with the international accounting firm of Peat Marwick Mitchell, now KPMG, in Jackson. He then joined a local firm that later became Smith, Turner & Reeves, which grew into one of the state’s three largest CPA firms. After serving more than 20 years as managing partner, Turner guided the 2008 merger of his firm and two other Mississippi CPA firms with BKD, garnering him the title “father of BKD Mississippi.”
Turner is a past president of the Ole Miss Alumni Association and has served multiple terms on the boards of the UM Foundation and the UM Athletics Committee. He served as a co-chair of the Ole Miss First Campaign and on the steering committee for the campaign to construct the Inn at Ole Miss.
Turner was a co-founder and president of the Rebel Club of Jackson and later served as president of the Central Mississippi Alumni Club. He has been active as an adviser to Kappa Alpha Order and was awarded its highest honor, the “Knight Commander’s Accolade” by the group’s national organization and honored as “Alumnus of the Year” by the active chapter, who later named the award for him.
“Ole Miss truly is a family and the campus and Oxford have remained a hub for our extended family through the years,” Turner said. “Ole Miss is very much a part of who I am and is a large piece of our family fabric. And as the Alumni Association is the glue for that fabric, I am deeply honored to receive its award for serving the university.”
A Mississippi native who grew up in north Alabama, McCormack earned an MBA from the university in 2015. She then continued her career in government contracting, focusing on program management, and is a program manager for Saab Inc.
McCormack is a 24-year childhood cancer survivor and has worked with organizations such as Livestrong, the American Cancer Society and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society to raise money and lobby for cancer research funding.
She is also on the board of directors and has served as president for Christmas Charities Year Round, a local charity in Huntsville, Alabama, that provides free services and goods for economically challenged citizens. She is also a member of Women in Defense, a national organization that supports the advancement and recognition of women in all aspects of national security.
McCormack served on the Ole Miss Alumni Association board of directors from 2019 to 2021 and has been president of the Rocket City Rebel Club in Huntsville since 2015. She and her husband, Cody, are charter members of eMpower, a component of Vaught Society that supports Ole Miss women’s athletics programs.
“Ole Miss is so much more than the degree I received; it is a special place with incredible people that have helped shape who I am today and continue to challenge me to think bigger and never stop learning,” McCormack said. “Being awarded the 2024 Outstanding Young Alumni Award means more than words can say.”
