A prof of note

It could be a script for a Frank Capra movie circa 1940: It’s Christmas Eve, and a curmudgeon is driving a truckload of toys. He doesn’t like Christmas, has a W. C. Fields-like attitude toward kids, and hates to drive, especially long distances. Nonetheless he has bowed to the pleas of a charity group and is taking his pickup truck loaded with toys to an orphanage 65 miles away. The director of the children’s home with the Hollywood-appropriate name of Happy Hills Farm tells the bah-humbug volunteer, “Oh, man, that’s a nice pickup you’re driving. I wish I could find one like that for the farm. Ours is broken down.”
“It’s yours,” says the owner, tossing the keys to the startled director and hitching a ride home with another volunteer.
The scene isn’t fiction.
“They needed a truck, so I just left mine there,” said Allan Saxe, a political science professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, explaining his spur-of-the-moment gift of 20 years ago as matter-of-factly as if he’d left nothing more than a pen from his pocket that someone had admired.

Read the rest of writer Betty Brink's terrific story in Fort Worth Weekly.