Simon Elfrink
Sports Editor
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Murray State’s department of journalism and mass communications has spent the spring semester preparing to send off Robert Valentine, who has been an instructor in Wilson Hall since 1974.
Valentine explained his move from New York to Kentucky was not a linear decision. After bouncing around the nation for business opportunities for his father, the Valentines eventually wound up in Bowling Green, Kentucky for a while.
“We got here at the end of my fourth grade year,” Valentine said. “I graduated high school in Bowling Green.”
While in high school, Valentine’s love for communication and speaking emerged when he joined the debate team. Valentine said the success he found competing in high school debates helped him land scholarships to a few colleges but he decided to go with the University of Kentucky.
“That scholarship pretty much covered all the cost, so that was a no-brainer,” Valentine said. “I wanted to go there anyway because they had a terrific reputation. It would be like going to Notre Dame for football, so I wanted a piece of that.”
After graduating from UK, Valentine had his heart set on pursuing a master’s degree. However, Valentine was interrupted when he was drafted into the military, a two-year experience Valentine describes as interesting.
“Generally speaking, it was great,” Valentine said. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I was in there with a lot of guys—19, 20-year-old guys, 17, 18-years-old sometimes—who had never been away from home and hadn’t any college and it was a real eye opener for them.”
After a couple of years in Korea, Valentine returned to UK to reinvest his time into his master’s degree he wanted so badly. He was initially in a history program, but an unexpected opportunity had him thinking of another path.
Upon returning to UK, Valentine was offered a job as the assistant debate coach. Valentine, having enjoyed debating when he was in high school, saw this as a chance to continue to do something he enjoyed with the added bonus of being paid a semester salary. The only problem was the chairman told Valentine he could not take the job with the debate team unless he was majoring in communication. Not wanting to let the opportunity pass, Valentine switched his major right away.
Valentine got a taste of theater in graduate school when he adapted a short story by Mark Twain for the stage. While in Lexington, the young scholar also dabbled in comedy by doing three consecutive April Fools productions on local television. Valentine enjoyed his work in graduate school with the debate team, and he felt good with where he was.
However, shortly after dipping his toes in theater, Valentine’s time in graduate school ran out. While he would have gladly spent another year or so learning and teaching there, the chairman met with Valentine once again to remind him his 18-month program had gone on for three years and it was time to go. Not wanting to leave, Valentine resisted, and when the chairman told him about a job opening in Murray, Kentucky, he could not have been less interested.
“That’s out in the country somewhere; I don’t want to go there,” Valentine had said. “I’m not interested in being a speech teacher. I was thinking I wanted to be a debate coach.”
The chairman persisted and gave Valentine 48 hours to prepare for an oral examination in front of the committee to receive his long-overdue master’s degree. After seeing that it was time to move on to the next chapter of his life, Valentine finally agreed to take the examination.
“I guess I did okay,” Valentine said. “I got the degree. I don’t know how those things [happen]. I’ve been on committees and I’m still not sure how they happen.”
It was only after taking the job at Murray State that Valentine met Robert McGaughey. The two hit it off almost immediately in their shared love for comedy, and before long, Valentine came to see McGaughey like a brother. Valentine said McGaughey went on to become like a member of the family.
“Every Thanksgiving, every Christmas, he was there,” Valentine said. “He came to our house and we couldn’t have it without him, except we had to remember to go get Pepsi. He was a big Pepsi fan.”
Their partnership developed almost as quickly and naturally as their friendship. The two jesters would casually go back and forth with a joke here and there until one day, McGaughey began reciting an old comedy routine that Valentine knew.
“People said ‘Do another one!’ and we said ‘We don’t have another one,’” Valentine said. “That was just an accident. ‘Oh, you should get another one.’ And so we carried on like that. It was like a two-man show. One man would tell a bunch of jokes, then you’d go back to this guy, and then he would get a drink.”
When the director of Murray State’s Summer Orientation caught sight of their impromptu act, he approached Valentine and McGaughey and asked them to be the entertainment for Parents Night at Summer O. After that, the pair were asked to do their show for the kickoff dinner at the Fulton County Banana Festival.
From there, they toured the eastern United States, bringing their comedy all over the region with the traveling name: “The Communicators.” Valentine recalled doing shows in Phoenix, Tampa, D.C., Atlanta, Louisville, Nashville and Chicago, to name a few.
While the goal of making their audiences laugh was of great importance to “The Communicators,” Valentine and McGaughey focused heavily on telling stories with serious undertones so they could always deliver a message.
“A lot of the stuff we used was humorous, but it was built on real research literature about how men and women communicate differently,” Valentine said. “They have different communication purposes and styles, which explains a lot when you’re talking about a business economy when more and more women are moving into the corporate boardroom every day. We could illustrate it with funny stuff, but then people would remember what the substance of it is.”
Valentine and McGaughey did their last show in spring 2019 at Murray State’s Elizabeth College, just several months before McGaughey passed away. When McGaughey died in June, Valentine wrote an article for The Murray State News about McGaughey’s legacy.
Throughout the later years of his career at Murray State, Valentine’s charisma and knack for storytelling landed him an interesting gig as the emcee at a Scottish celebration of the poet Robert Burns. The “Burns Supper” needed someone with natural charm and some enthusiasm that could move the evening’s celebration along, and since Valentine had an incredibly convincing Scottish accent, he decided to go for it. Like with many things he had done in his past, the one-time thing turned into a cacophony of Scottish events featuring Valentine as the emcee.
“I never figured out that I would be going here, and here, and here, and here, and doing Scottish Games and St. Andrew’s Festival, and Burns Suppers and whiskey tastings and highland games and music festivals,” Valentine said. “I didn’t see that coming. All I saw was Monday, when I could take this dress off and be a regular guy.”
Continuing to give back to his Scottish heritage in such a way is something Valentine predicts will help him fill the time he will have at his disposal once he retires. He does not think he will ever stop telling stories and trying to pass knowledge on, even if it is not in a classroom in Wilson Hall. Still, Valentine has come to form a great appreciation for Murray State since 1974, when he first came to teach.
“I have always been struck by the dedication of the faculty to the students and their careers,” Valentine said. “It is really a testament to the faculty that you have outstanding scholars and mountains of published work on the same campus with an army of people who spend so much time with and for the students. I think it’s uncommon, but it has become part of the fabric of Murray State.”
Despite his many years as an instructor at Murray State, Valentine does not see his retirement as a newsworthy event. To Valentine, it is just another thing he has to do, and he has no intention of putting the things he has been doing on hold just because he is ending a particular chapter in his career.
“The question is: what do I do?” Valentine said. “What is it I do? And if I define that carefully enough, I probably won’t stop doing it just because I’m no longer a full-time classroom instructor with Murray State University.”
When Valentine thought about what he wants people to say about him and his time at Murray State, he took a page out of McGaughey’s book and said that he wants them to say that he helped.
“For me, I’m really hopeful that at some point I will inspire somebody, or maybe a lot of somebodies, to tell the story,” Valentine said. “The story that makes a difference for them. People remember stories. We are the stories that we have heard that we remember and that means something to us. I would hope that I have encouraged people to tell that story to the people who matter, because that will change the world.”
