 "Photo: Sam Grenadier")
He seemed comfortable surrounded by half-barren bookshelves in his new office in the Administration building.
A Texas Tech baseball cap sat on his desk behind him, its tags still attached.
One might see this proud southerner - a man who said he was 27 years old when he first got on an airplane - walking toward the Student Union Building with headphones in his ears on his way to have lunch in the food court with students.
Guy Bailey, Tech's fifteenth president who took office Aug. 1, said he has an iPod with about 7,000 songs on it. He said most of them are Western Swing, a genre that runs through the blood of the Montgomery, Ala., native.
"I grew up in the South," he said. "I spent most of my adult life in Texas, so this is like coming home for both of us. We knew we'd eventually come back to Texas."
Bailey spoke softly as he recalled afternoons when his father would relax on the front porch in the sticky Alabama air, playing a steel guitar surrounded by other musicians, some of who were in Hank Williams' first band.
Jan Tillery Bailey, Guy's wife and a Tech alumna with more West Texan childhood memories, was born in Slaton as the daughter of two Tech graduates. She grew up in Lubbock and graduated from Tech in 1974 with a degree in English and mass communications.
The couple said they met while doing linguistics research at Texas A&M University and married in 1993.
"That was the first thing I learned after the minister said, 'You may kiss the bride,'" Guy Bailey said with one gun up. "I learned this."
Jan Tillery Bailey said her mother was the first guidance counselor at Estacado High School in Lubbock. Her father, once a high school athletics coach, opened a sporting goods store, T&D Sporting Goods, on Broadway Avenue across the street from campus.
"He taught every sport there was," she said of her father's career as a coach, which he left to open his own store so he could make enough money to send his daughter to Tech.
Jan Tillery Bailey remembers paying $16 per credit hour as a Tech undergraduate student in the 1970s.
"I can't believe how much it has changed," she said about her alma mater. "There was no covered swimming pool when I was here."
"I remember paying $50 per semester for books," her husband said about his career as a first-generation undergraduate at the University of Alabama, "and that was a lot."
After receiving his bachelor's degree in Alabama, Guy Bailey said he went to the University of Tennessee and received a doctorate in linguistics in 1979.
"My parents were happy I did it," he said. "Most people on both sides of my family didn't go to college, so it wasn't an issue in my family, but they were happy I did it."
At Emory University in Atlanta, where Guy Bailey said he taught and worked on post-doctorate research beginning in 1978, he spent the next three years teaching classes at a local community college in addition to his duties as an instructor at Emory.
But he wanted to buy a house, so he also opened a writing center for extra income.
The busy days in Atlanta paid off, he said, and acquired for him the down payment for a house, which he eventually sold before heading to Texas A&M, where a tenure-track professorship awaited and where he later would meet his future wife.
"He would fill the bed of his truck with graduate students when he went to do linguistics field work - just a truck bed full of graduate students," Jan Tillery Bailey said. "He was a really good teacher in the field."
Guy Bailey said he loves linguistics because it sits at the "intersection of humanities and social sciences."
In 2003, the couple published a study about the dialect of the South - including the terms "y'all" and "fixin' to" - which was featured on the front page of the Nov. 28, 2003, issue of The New York Times.
"We're a boring couple," Jan Bailey Tillery said.
"We're both avid readers," Guy Bailey continued, "so when we're at home we usually have books in our hands."
In his free time, one might find Tech's new president rummaging through the government's findings from the John F. Kennedy assassination, but he said he is interested in all history.
He also began to explain his opinions about the evolution of baseball, but Jan Tillery Bailey shook her head and smiled.
He looked at her and changed the subject.
After a series of different administrative jobs throughout the next few years - including positions at Oklahoma State University and the University of Las Vegas - Guy Bailey went to the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he became provost in 1998.
"A lot of good stuff happened there when I was there," he said about the school's accomplishments as an emerging research university.
On the first day of 2006, Guy Bailey became the chancellor of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, a post he vacated when Tech's presidential search committee came knocking.
Enticed by what he saw as Tech's potential and its emergence as a top-notch university, he accepted the position, officially taking office in August.
"Texas Tech is a great school," he said. "It has great name recognition. This opportunity - that's why I left."
At Tech, the couple said they plan to team up and teach a linguistics course while continuing their research, though they may not have the time to do so until the spring of next year, or at the latest, next fall.
"I don't have any children of my own," Jan Tillery Bailey said, "so, wherever we go, the students become like my children."
Guy Bailey has two children, 24-year-old Jordan, a doctoral candidate at Auburn University, and 20-year-old Brooks, a "good-hearted" guitar player who lives in Montgomery with his mother.
Teaching, Guy Bailey and Jan Tillery Bailey said, provides a continuously updated grasp of what students want and need from their university.
"The students give you a beat," she said. "They don't lie. They don't sugarcoat it for you."
When asked how much influence his wife has on his decisions for the university, Guy Bailey whispered one word: "Huge."
He said he realizes Tech's administration went through some "turmoil" during the last year - namely, the accreditation probation and the past summer's series of administrative resignations and terminations - but the coming months should see Tech's woes "settle down very quickly."
Tech will shed its accreditation probation, he said.
Much of Guy Bailey's plans for Tech involve graduate students and research programs, which he sees as the first step toward improving the university as an overall institution. Tech must enroll graduate students at twice the rate it enrolls undergraduate students.
But increasing enrollment, he said, of both graduate and undergraduate students, is only the first step.
Acceptance standards, Guy Bailey said, must be maintained to prevent the "willy-nilly" enrollment of new students.
Retention, too, must be taken into account.
"I want to recruit you as a student, yes," Guy Bailey said, "but I want you to graduate," hopefully, he continued, within four years.
Another goal of Guy Bailey's, he said, pertains directly to students' wallets.
As students' college debts rise - partially as a result of rising tuition trends - it is important to keep tuition costs at a minimum, he said.
To say that Tech's tuition will not go up in the coming years, he said, would be na've, but maintaining a competitive tuition rate at Tech is a priority because more enrollment equals more state funding.
Dual-credit courses in high school, he said, provide an excellent opportunity for freshman to arrive at the university as sophomores, with as much as 30 credit hours that they earned during high school - another way to save students' money.
Tech Chancellor Kent Hance's goal to increase enrollment to 40,000 students by 2020, Guy Bailey said, not only is feasible, but vital.
"If we don't grow that much," Guy Bailey said, "we're in big trouble, because everyone else will be growing that much."
In the mean time, he said, he is not going anywhere, though there is one trip on his agenda for April: the Bob Wills Day Music Festival in Turkey.
"In April," he said, "you'll find me there."
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