Quick Facts
Biography
George William Bond (April 6, 1891 – May 14, 1974), an Arkansas native, was president in the first half of the 20th century of two public universities in Louisiana -- Louisiana Tech in Ruston and Southeastern in Hammond.
Background
Bond was born in Summers in Washington County in northeastern Arkansas, to William Elijah Bond (1864-1953) and the former Martha Irene Simpson (1866-1940). He graduated from Cincinnati High School in Cincinnati in Washington County near Fayetteville, Arkansas. Bond served in the United States Army during World War I and attended the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and University of Chicago, from which he obtained a master's degree in 1923.
Academic career
Bond taught in Springdale and Cane Hill, also in Washington County, before he became a superintendent in Bauxite in Saline County in central Arkansas, and a principal in Texarkana. He then relocated to Ruston in 1924 to become an education professor at Louisiana Tech. He served as Tech's eighth president from 1928 to 1936. While Tech president, he continued to work on his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago but resigned from Louisiana Tech before completing his terminal degree.
Just two weeks before he left the Tech presidency, Bond broke the ground for the new $421,000 administration building, known first as Leche Hall after Governor Richard Leche and then renamed for John Ephraim Keeny, the sixth president of Louisiana Tech.The Minden Herald in Minden, Louisiana, reported that Bond left Ruston to enroll in the doctoral program at Columbia University in New York City. From 1944 to 1945, Bond was the acting fourth president at Southeastern in Hammond.
Later years
In their later years, Bond and his wife, the former Mary Elizabeth Bost (1898-1997), a teacher of Latin and like her husband a native of Summers, Arkansas, lived in Searcy and Fayetteville, Arkansas, where they engaged in gardening, travel, and entertaining. They were Presbyterian. He was a member of the Masonic lodge. The Bonds died, twenty-three years apart, in Fayetteville and are interred there at Fairview Memorial Gardens.