Distinguished Alumni Awards

2012 Distinguished Alumnus

Roy Quillin Minton

Former student Roy Quillin Minton came to Schreiner Institute as a midterm cadet in 1949, at least in part, he said, “to straighten up my act.” Even though a cousin had attended Schreiner earlier, it was just a little curious that Minton ended up on the Schreiner Institute campus.   

“I was raised in Denton six blocks from the North Texas State College [now University of North Texas] and I had gone to grade school and part of high school there,” Minton said.   

Maybe it wasn’t so curious, after all. Minton seems to have had an idiosyncratic—but nonetheless successful—approach to his college education.

“I came to Schreiner midterm because I had taken off from school for the fall term,” he said. “I did that all the way through college. I’d take off the falls and go to college in the springs and summers.”
    
Schreiner wasn’t his first introduction to the Texas Hill Country. His family spent summers between Ingram and Hunt at Camp Waltonia, which has been owned by the Secor family since 1923.
    
“You could say I grew up there,” Minton said. “That’s one reason I came to Schreiner Institute; I love that area.”   

Minton still spends part of his summers at Waltonia.
    
During those semesters off, Minton worked for a Houston law firm and flew planes. He got his private pilot’s license when he was 17 and “just sold my last airplane a few years ago.”
    
Not surprisingly, Minton joined the U.S. Air Force after leaving Schreiner. After his tour of duty as a USAF pilot and marrying his wife Barbara, he served in the Texas Air National Guard at Hensley Field in Dallas from 1956-59 as Flight Commander Captain. He received a B.A. degree with honors from NTSC in 1958. In 1961, The University of Texas School of Law awarded him a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree. He graduated a member of Phi Delta Phi International, one of the oldest legal organizations in the U.S.
    
“I worked as a clerk during law school,” Minton said, “and I just never got out of town.”
    
He still works for the firm he started with the late Perry Jones, now Minton, Burton, Bassett and Collins. His sons, Perry and David, are attorneys with the firm as well.
    
Minton is a litigator who has taken on cases across the legal spectrum, including a number that involved Texas politicians, such as Ann Richards, Bob Bullock and Bill Clayton.
    
“I’d like to think it’s my outstanding abilities as an attorney that brought all those politicians to me,” Minton said, “But I think it might have been my location.”
    
The firm is located two blocks from the Capitol in Austin.
    
Minton—along with the other attorneys in the firm—has been named among the Best Lawyers in Texas by Best Lawyers in America, the “oldest and most respected peer-review publication in the legal profession” (www.bestlawyers.com). Texas Monthly has named him a Super Lawyer six times.
    
“I appreciate that stuff,” Minton said. “But as you get older, well, people have to decorate someone.”