Longtime UAB historian Tennant McWilliams was remembered this week for his “unblinking eye for truth” and “infectious enthusiasm for life,” as his friend Howell Raines described it in a eulogy Wednesday, Nov. 1, at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Hoover.

“His wisdom and stories went hand in hand,” along with his “quicksilver personality,” said Raines, former editor of The New York Times, who met McWilliams when they were 15.

McWilliams died on Oct. 23. He was 80. He had recently received a terminal cancer diagnosis, and previously received a kidney transplant, with his wife, Susan, as donor, Raines said.

McWilliams was the son of legendary Birmingham-Southern College historian Richebourg Gaillard McWilliams, who taught his son and Raines at BSC, “a learning center as central to Alabama and as necessary as Harvard to the Ivy League,” Raines said.

McWilliams graduated from BSC in 1965, got his master’s degree from the University of Alabama and his doctorate at the University of Georgia.