If you were on campus in the ’70s and ’80s, you surely noticed Richard Swanson, P ’82 walking to class, a head above everyone else.

The distinctively lanky professor with a PhD taught in the Math Department. He also loved challenging students to games of O-U-T on the basketball court.

“I eventually beat them all, much to their dismay,” recalled Swanson, who died in June at age 90.

After serving on the Bentley faculty for 25 years — four when his daughter, the late Faith Swanson ’82, was also on campus — he checked his investments and decided to retire. His new role seemed custom made: a first-person living historian of Abraham Lincoln.

To quote the statesman from Illinois: “Whatever you are, be a good one.”

Swanson had always been shy, often finding it difficult to speak before an audience — except when impersonating the 16th president. As his Lincoln knowledge and beard grew, so did his confidence. By 1991, the hobby sparked by Carl Sandburg’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography was a many-faceted second career. Swanson donned his specially tailored suit dozens of times a year at schools, libraries, museums and more. He also created numerous pen-and-ink illustrations of Lincoln’s life — enough, along with corresponding quotations, to fill a book. He published That Reminds Me of a Story in 2016, the same year his artwork was on exhibit in the public library of his hometown, Wellfleet, Mass.

In his last year, Swanson was working on a memoir of his wartime service in Korea. He hadn’t portrayed Lincoln in a few years, but he kept the beard and a great fondness for Bentley. In a generous act to benefit student-athletes, Swanson made an estate plan to create scholarships for members of the men’s and women’s basketball teams.

“Any help that I can give to the success of others,” he said, “I give gladly.”