June 28, 2023
By Landry Brewer
Loy Simpkins was nonstop.
Like the 10-dollar founding father who excelled and climbed and died young, Simpkins lived like he was running out of time.
According to a story in the October 26, 1954, edition of the SWOSU student newspaper, Simpkins graduated from Elk City High School in 1952 when he was 16—while a college student at Southwestern in Weatherford.
Three years later and barely 19, he graduated from SWOSU.
He was also married and had a child.
The Elk City native was active while at SWOSU, then known as Southwestern State College.
A member of the Southwestern debate team, Simpkins was also president of the campus chapter of Future Business Leaders of America, a member of Alpha Phi Sigma, Beta Tau Beta, and Pi Kappa Delta honor societies, and had leadership roles in the Senate Club.
Despite all his other commitments, he found time to be a member of the National Guard.
Simpkins earned a bachelor’s degree with honors from Southwestern in 1955 with a double major in history and business, and he only lacked two classes for a third major in speech.
After graduating from SWOSU, he began law school at the University of Oklahoma in Norman where he was elected to the honor council.
A mid-year law school graduate, Simpkins joined his father’s Elk City law firm immediately after graduating in January 1958.
The Simpkins & Simpkins law firm opened then in a new two-story office building at the northeast corner of 3rd & Jefferson in Elk City, where Walgreen’s now stands.
Continuing his meteoric rise, Simpkins was admitted to practice before the Oklahoma Supreme
Court in March 1958. Less than two years later, in February 1960, he was admitted to argue federal cases before the United States District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma.
In addition to working with the Beckham County Bar Association—of which he was president— and the state bar association, the young lawyer was active in several local civic and business organizations. Simpkins served as secretary of Elk City Industries, Inc., vice president of the Kiwanis Club, and 1961 president of the Elk City Chamber of Commerce.
Then, in 1965, he took his family to Waco, Texas, and joined the Baylor University Law School faculty where he taught family-law classes.
Not surprisingly, Simpkins was known at Baylor as a runner. He and a colleague frequently went on three-mile jogs.
The result of two years of research and writing, Simpkins published his multi-volume book “Texas Family Law” in 1975.
The Texas Council on Family Relations gave Simpkins the 1983 Moore-Bowman Award of Excellence.
According to a May 2, 1983, Baylor University press release, he won the award for his “tremendous contribution to the Texas Family Code, his book on Texas Family law, his teaching classes on domestic relations and his service as a past president of the Texas Council.”
Simpkins died 121 days later. He was 47.
Baylor University Law School honors his memory by giving the annual Loy M. Simpkins Memorial Award, a scholarship for students making the highest grades in marital property-law classes.
Simpkins graduated from Elk City High School, SWOSU, and the University of Oklahoma College of Law while very young and very busy.
Then he became a very young and busy attorney, then a law-school professor on the run.
Simpkins excelled and climbed, and he did it in a hurry.
Like the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury—also a lawyer and author who died at 47—Simpkins lived like he was running out of time.
He was nonstop.
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