Whatever it is that enables an instructor to inspire students, Dan Moore seems to have it.

FOR THE LAST several years, retired Oxford College physics instructor Dan C. Moore ’37Ox-’40G has threatened to skip Oxford’s annual reunion weekend held in April.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to go,” Moore, who turned eighty-four in May, told Emory Magazine earlier in the year.

But sixteen years after leaving the faculty, Moore knows his former students will be looking for him, and every year they find him.

“The whole day Dan is surrounded by students, many of whom have gone on to be doctors, having gotten their math and physics from him,” says Oxford Dean William H. Murdy, who retired this summer.

Whatever it is that enables an instructor to inspire students, Moore seems to have it.

“Our youngest daughter went to the Atlanta campus as a freshman and was having trouble in math,” remembers Bond N. Fleming ’33C-’36T, dean of Oxford College from 1966 to 1976. “I said I’d ask Professor Moore if he could give some coaching. Becky said she learned more math in three sessions with him than she learned from the [teaching assistant] the rest of the quarter.”

Moore taught math at Emory from 1940 to 1942, served in the Pacific as a U.S. Army captain through 1946, then taught at Emory’s Valdosta campus until it closed in 1953 before spending the next thirty years at Oxford. He met his wife, Noellene, in 1950, when she was a student at Georgia State Women’s College.

Moore’s career at Oxford brought repeated recognition for his skills in the classroom. In the late 1950s, students dedicated yearbooks to him. In 1985, Henry Nipper ’58Ox-’60C, assistant dean of admissions at Creighton University, dedicated a chemistry book to his former professor.

Upon his retirement in 1983, Oxford administrators dedicated a conference room in his honor in Seney Hall. The Dan C. Moore Honor Fund raised money to renovate Pierce Hall, and a Dan C. Moore Scholarship was established. Moore received the Association of Emory Alumni Award of Honor in 1985.

Moore’s legend is so great that to this day students are convinced he played the part of Emory spirit Dooley at Oxford College social events. “We had three formal dances a year, and Dooley would make an appearance,” says Harry Yeomans ’65Ox-’66C, “and every time a cop would come and pick [Moore] up. Well, I had a car my second year, so we followed them one time to see if he’d come back as Dooley, but we never figured it out. He may not own up to it, but if anyone could emulate the spirit of Emory, it would have been Dan Moore.”

Moore offers little evidence either way. “There was some talk of me and Dooley but there is no proof. On several occasions Dooley would give me a call letting me know he was coming.”—G.F.