It was 35 years ago when a Vicksburg attorney put a lasting mark on his alma mater, Ole Miss. The late Frank Everett’s words are now an anthem for his beloved university.

A recent article in the school’s &#8220Alumni Review” tells of the quote’s roots and gives validity to what most Vicksburg Rebels already knew – the famous words were first spoken here and first published in what was then the Vicksburg Evening Post.

Local attorney Bobby Bailess has a framed copy of part of the quote, coined by his former law partner and friend, in his office. A 1973 Ole Miss graduate and 1976 graduate from the Ole Miss School of Law, Bailess said he recently read in his &#8220Alumni Review” about the quote’s beginnings in his hometown.

&#8220It brings a lot of emotions,” he said.

Everett’s description has been reprinted literally thousands of times. Bronze letters forming the words dominate a wall in the student union. It rattles off the tongues of Ole Miss graduates like Americans recite the &#8220Pledge of Allegiance.”

&#8220There is a valid distinction between ‘The University’ and ‘Ole Miss,’ even though the separate threads are closely interwoven,” Everett said.

He continued, drawing out what Ole Miss meant to him – Ole Miss meaning the emotion and the university meaning the buildings, trees and people. Everett closed his speech with what has become the most recognizable quote pertaining to the University of Mississippi, affectionately referred to as Ole Miss.

&#8220The University gives a diploma and regretfully terminates tenure, but one never graduates from Ole Miss.”

Everett, who died in 1986, received his bachelor’s from Ole Miss in 1932 and his law degree in 1934. While at Ole Miss, the Indianola native was named Colonel Rebel and president of the student body by fellow students. In Vicksburg, Everett worked at Brunini, Everett, Beanland and Wheeless, which is now Wheeless, Shappley, Bailess & Rector and still in the same offices on the top floor of Trustmark National Bank. Bailess said he worked with Everett for five months before attending law school and then again from 1976 to 1979.

&#8220He was a gentleman’s gentleman,” Bailess said.

Everett, also a prominent historian and author of a book on Brierfield, the Warren County home of Confederate President Jefferson and Varina Davis, was at one time president of the statewide Ole Miss Alumni Association and was a member of the Ole Miss Hall of Fame.

In 1971, Everett was called on to introduce the then chancellor of the Oxford school, who was making a speech to Warren County Alumni Association. No record was made of what the chancellor said, but Everett’s words took on a life of their own.

&#8220It is probably the most eloquent statement about the dual personality of the university,” said Robert Khayat, Ole Miss chancellor for the past 10 years, who said he knew Everett through a mutual friend and is a friend of Clyde B. Everett, the attorney’s wife who continues to live in Vicksburg.

It was Joan Bailey Sharbrough, then president of the Warren County alumni, who asked Everett to introduce Chancellor Porter Fortune at the Rivertown Club May 20, 1971.

&#8220The audience sat spellbound with what some lauded as ‘one of the great orations of our time,’” Mrs. Everett says in the story published in the &#8220Alumni Review.”

Mrs. Everett, who was Miss Ole Miss 1933, said Billy Ray, a former sports editor of The Vicksburg Post, asked to have a copy of Everett’s words to put in the Sunday edition. Everett had relied on jotted notes, but rewrote what he had said from memory. The words ran, for the first time, backed by an image of the Lyceum, a building that stands as a symbol for the university.

&#8220Afterward, Joan sent a copy to the university, and it was published in its entirety in the next ‘Alumni Review,’” Mrs. Everett said in the article. &#8220It is still always printed with the Lyceum in the background.”

Khayat said the quote echoes throughout the campus and became more familiar to him when he was researching material for a speech he was to give at an Ole Miss alumni meeting in Jackson in 1975.

&#8220I was a young law professor looking for speech material, and I got into a file and found his speech. That’s when I saw the quote,” he said. &#8220It hit me right between the eyes, and in my speech I said, ‘I think Mr. Frank Everett has best described the university.’”