Those who knew Thomas S. Frentz (Tom) should not be surprised that he authored his own obituary.
Like Tom, it is witty, erudite, and captures just a bit of his spirit as Coyote, The Trickster, who cared for people, listened with empathy, but also tried to put them off of center — just a bit — especially if they were in positions of authority. Yet, perhaps as a surprise to some, it is more than a little self-effacing.
He wrote:
“I died today. Well, not really “today” or I wouldn’t be writing this myself, right? For a long time, I figured this would be a first, somebody writing his or her own obituary, but I’ve since learned that this is no big deal, that lots of people have written their own obituaries — probably to ensure getting it the way they wanted it.
So where to begin? Well, I was born a Sagittarius on December 3, 1938, and I died on August 6, 2026. As the only offspring of Josephine Louise and Theodore Gates Frentz, I was the best and the worst they had to offer. I spent my childhood and adolescence in Oshkosh, Wis., where I did school, hunted and fished, and thought about girls.
I graduated from Oshkosh High School in 1957, and like Ulysses S. Grant at West Point, failed to distinguish myself at either end of my class. I got my B.S. (no, it actually means “Bachelor of Science”) in American Institutions from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1961. I then enlisted in the Army (the draft was still on as some of you may recall) and spent the next two and a half years teaching “Speech” at the Army Defense Information School in Fort Slocum, N.Y. From there, I went back to the University of Wisconsin in 1964, earned my M.A. in Speech in 1967, and my Ph.D. in Communication Arts in 1970.
Then began my wonderful odyssey of authority issues and academic failures. My first job as an assistant professor of Communication at the University of Southern California began in 1970, and lasted, both there and in my first marriage, until 1975. I then headed to the University of Colorado in 1976, and where I hung on until 1983. While in Boulder, I married my wife of almost 24 years, Janice Hocker Rushing, who was also a professor of Communication. In 1985, we moved to the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where I finally got my act together enough so as not to become a three-time loser. Actually, the record will show that over my rather checkered academic career, I became a reasonably successful teacher, a valued mentor to many, and a nationally recognized scholar to those who read our journals.”
And so, though Tom’s recollection covers the where-and-when of his academic career, he fails to note what an eclectic and creative scholar he became over the course of 50 years. Blessed with relentless curiosity, a quick mind, and a gift for writing, his scholarship ran the gamut from classical rhetorical theory and criticism to the study of film, ethnography, and myth. Along the way, he worked with numerous co-authors, including many students, graduate and undergraduate, whom he mentored both scholastically and in the “ways” of the academy.
All told, Tom authored or co-authored three books (four if you count his first textbook focused on research and oral communication while serving at the Army Information School), multiple book chapters, literally dozens of journal articles, and close to 75 national and regional convention papers. He also served in an editorial capacity at many of the leading refereed communication journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Speech, the Eastern, Western, and Southern communication journals and Communication Quarterly.
In 1994-95, Tom served as president of the Southern States Communication Association. In 2006, he was named master researcher by the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas. The following year, the Rhetoric and Communication Theory Division of the National Communication Association named him Distinguished Scholar of 2007.
Were you to ask Tom what he felt his most noteworthy scholastic achievements were, he would reply: “I teamed up with Thomas Farrell, followed by Janice Hocker Rushing, to broaden the field of rhetoric and communication in two ways. With Farrell, we brought rhetoric from public address, turning it inward to subtle forms of interpersonal communication with our language-action theory. My work with Hocker Rushing embraced film as an important extension of public address — turning outward to movies and culture.”
Known for his superior pedagogy in the classroom and mentorship, Tom was honored by the National Communication Association for his teaching and mentoring in 2011. He was elected to the Honors Golden Key Society in 2005, received the “Michael M. Osborn Teacher-Scholar Award,” from the Southern Speech Communication Association in 1997, and the Teaching Excellence Award from Lambda Pi Eta, the official communication honorary, in both 1986 and 1990.
Turning to the subject of death, Tom threaded his scholarly focus on Carl G. Jung’s psychoanalytic theory into his auto-obituary to illuminate his thinking about what happens when we die.
“Okay — time to speculate on where I might have gone.
In contrast to what a few naive souls may believe, I am definitely NOT in Heaven sitting next to Yahweh playing beatifically on some harp. And despite the wishes and expectations of many others, I am also NOT in Hell up to my nostrils in boiling ferret feces for eternity. The Bible “sort of” got it right with its “ashes to ashes, dust is to dust” metaphor, but depth psychologist, C. G. Jung, came a lot closer. He said that we live in the CREATURA, the conscious world of distinctions and differences, where one crucial difference is that we imagine ourselves to be separate from every other person and thing, and to have an individual self-sense that is somehow preserved when we die as our immortal “soul” (Plato was big on this idea too). But really, when we die, Jung said, we go back into the PLEROMA, the firmament before Yahweh went to work on it. Now what’s so scary about the PLEROMA is that “there’s no there there,” meaning that there is no differentiation between or among anything — everything is the same as everything else, and that means, among other things, that our imagined individual self-sense (or soul) dissolves back into this universal soup. Now that, friends and neighbors, scares the Heaven and Hell out of me — although it really shouldn’t because I think that happens to all of us temporarily every night when we fall asleep. My material remains, a box full of ashes (you know, the “ashes to ashes” bit), will be roughly divided in half, hopefully by some disinterested other with an accurate drug scale. One half will be buried next to Janice in the Tin Cup Cemeta/ ery (the folks in Tincup spell words in various ways) in Tincup, Colo., while the other half will be Monica’s to do with what she will.
Now I have been lobbying of late for a more creative use of Monica’s half of me. I “think,” but am not an expert here, obviously, that if my ashes were mixed with the right amount of liquid and a binding agent, they could be fashioned into a small likeness of me. And then, rather than be hidden away in the darkness of some ugly urn, my better (or worse) half could spend each day and night staring at Monica and any others that might be within my field of “vision.” So that’s who I was and where I have been, and this is who I am, no more and where who I am no more might be now. You may see things differently, of course, but you know what? Neither one of us will ever know for sure, and therein rests the eternal mystery of all this life and death business.”
In the end, Tom Frentz was more than just the sum of his vita. He was an altruistic man, who quietly supported a number of charities, including the Peace at Home Family Shelter, KUAF and The Hearts Project Foundation, which he co-founded in 2025 with his beloved wife, Monica, to honor those lost to Covid. For more than 30 years, Tom was a steadfast supporter of the Tibetan Children’s Education Foundation, sponsoring more than 25 Tibetan children in exile.
Tom was also a great friend and a delightful conversationalist. In the end, after a courageous but ultimately unsuccessful bout with cancer (his second), he and Monica decided to enter hospice care, where Tom could draw his family and his many friends around him in his beloved home in the Ozarks. He was able to spend time with his son, Mark, Mark’s wife, Rhonda, and his granddaughters, Mya and Mackenzie, before passing.
In lieu of flowers, Tom requested that charitable gifts be made in his memory to The Hearts Project Foundation 501(c)(3). Mail checks to The Hearts Project Foundation, P.O. Box #629, 12 W. Dickson St., Fayetteville, Ark., 72701.
A Memorial Service will be held on Mt. Sequoyah in Clapp Auditorium at 4:30 p.m., followed by reception in Millar Lodge, on Sunday, October 18, 2026.