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Charles Francis Guittard was born in Austin, Texas and has lived most of his life in Texas, mainly Dallas. He has followed the career path of his father Clarence Guittard who was steered into law school by his father, Francis "Frank" Gevrier Guittard, a teacher and professor of history. However, for the past 40+ years, off and on, in fits and starts, Charles has been quietly researching the life of his grandfather who was pushed out of his parents' Ohio home in 1886, put on a train for Texas, and became a Texan ever thereafter. The initial incentive for the research was 250 family letters from the 1920s which were interesting enough. In 2018 after retiring from law practice, Charles concluded that he might do a "trilogy" on Frank Guittard's life and completed an illustrated poem entitled "A Ph.D.'s Reverie," the illustrations being hand-drawn by a Baylor art student.
In 2019 he published "A Ph.D.'s Reverie: The Letters," which added excerpts from the 250 letters to the illustrated poem and additionally told the contemporaneous story of the fundamentalists' assault on Baylor University occasioned by the 1920s controversy over teaching evolution theories expressed in Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species published in 1859. This second volume of the trilogy also incorporates a number of other pieces into the mix including Frank's 1894 college essay which represented his philosophy of life at age 27, extensive contextual notes, handwriting exemplars, a preface and an epilogue, a timeline for Frank's four family members, and most notably, an account of his arduous pursuit of a Ph.D. in history at Stanford in the 1920s as the oldest student in the classroom, if not on campus.
The third volume of the trilogy, I WILL TEACH HISTORY, the Life & Times of Francis Gevrier Guittard, Professor, Baylor University--for which Charles commenced research in 1978, was published in September 2022. IWTH is dedicated to the Baylor Department of History and acknowledges the assistance of many Baylorites of different eras and generations.
Charles' most recent work entitled THINKING THINGS OVER, The Reflections of Two 80-Year-Olds, was published in February 2024 and features three memoirs written with his wife Nancy Davis Labastida related to growing up in Dallas Texas plus a fantasy of an imagined final judgment day.
Charles has several other projects currently under consideration including one with the working title: THE MEMOIR OF AN ENGLISH MAJOR.
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