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Issue: Spring 2018 | Posted: June 1, 2018

Never the Protagonist

Through Comedy and Tragedy, the Drama of Craig Dismuke's Life Has Unfolded According to God's Sovereign Plan

By Tim Ellsworth ('96)

“ALL OF US WHO ARE WORTH ANYTHING, SPEND OUR MANHOOD IN UNLEARNING THE FOLLIES, OR EXPIATING THE MISTAKES OF OUR YOUTH.” – PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Picture Craig Dismuke as a senior in high school. He’s at Union during the summer for the Rising Senior program, where he sees some of the McAfee apartments under construction.

Hmm. There’s a forklift, he observes. I wonder...

He finds the keys in the ignition. He fires up the forklift and sets out on a joy ride across campus.

Somehow Dismuke still got admitted as a full-time student to Union.

Now picture him as a Union freshman. It’s the chapel hour, and the G.M. Savage Memorial Chapel is full of students. A friend of Dismuke’s has a cow costume, which he dutifully adorns, while Dismuke dresses up in overalls and a hat, like a farmer. In the middle of the chapel service, outside the large windows of the chapel where everyone can see, Dismuke’s friend in the cow costume rushes by, with Dismuke in full farmer gear hollering and racing after him.

An English major at Union, Dismuke’s early collegiate years were certainly full of comedy, with stories like this and many others. Ask anyone who was one of Dismuke’s contemporaries, and chances are they’ve heard a story about his hi-jinks and exploits.

Dismuke appears as a guest on CNBC March 7, 2018.

Charles Fowler, who was Union’s vice president for student services during part of Dismuke’s time at Union, says Craig was a fun young man who had an extra dose of mischief in him.

“He was well acquainted with the judicial process at Union,” says Fowler, now the senior pastor of Germantown Baptist Church. “I’m surprised he didn’t become a lawyer because he was so familiar with the judicial process at Union.”

But Dismuke’s story is more than just comedy. There’s an abundance of tragedy as well, from the early failures in college, to personal health issues, to an even greater challenge his family faced with the brain tumor diagnosis in his youngest son. The man who faced those later adversities was a vastly different person than the youth who once released a skunk in the men’s commons.

Despite the early indications, which suggested that success for Dismuke would be elusive, he matured and persevered. He’s now the executive vice president and chief economist at Vining Sparks, an institutional broker/dealer in Memphis. He makes regular appearances on Fox Business, CNBC and Bloomberg to talk about the state of the nation’s economy and where it’s headed.

“When he was a sophomore, his mother would not give him money directly,” recalls Stephen Wilks, one of Dismuke’s close friends at Union. “She gave it to his roommates, and they had to dispense it as needed. And now he’s in charge of millions of dollars of other people’s money.”

Through it all, Dismuke is quick to deflect any credit to his own personal ability or skills.

“My life isn’t a success story about me,” he says. “I don’t want it to be portrayed that way. I’ve been allowed a certain amount of worldly success by a sovereign God. And to do that, I’ve had to work harder than my peers every day of my career because I chose not to in college.”

The bigger story on display in Dismuke’s life is one that he says illustrates the depths of man’s depravity and the persistence of God, the hound of heaven, who pursued him graciously and relentlessly. It illustrates what Dismuke calls “the inherent trials of life in a fallen world and the unfailing love and presence of God.”

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“A MAN CAN’T SOAR TOO HIGH, WHEN HE FLIES WITH HIS OWN WINGS.” – WILLIAM BLAKE

Dismuke’s family moved around a lot during his childhood. He was born in Florida and lived in Louisiana, Michigan and Texas before settling in Oklahoma, where he graduated from high school in 1992. He wanted to attend the University of Florida, but his dad Keith, who majored in chemistry at Union, wanted Craig to follow in his footsteps.

Craig’s high school was large, with about 2,500 students, and Dismuke described himself socially as “a little bit of a loose cannon.” Keith thought the structure of Union would be good for Craig. Keith had a good experience at Union and valued the Christian academic environment, so he pushed. Craig reluctantly acquiesced.

Moving from Tulsa to Jackson proved to be a difficult adjustment for Dismuke. Back in the early 1990s, a large percentage of the student body was from West Tennessee, and most of them went home on weekends. Sometimes Dismuke felt alone during the weekend exodus.

“I thought I was the farthest from my house of anybody there,” Dismuke recalls.

Unfocused. That’s how Dismuke describes his early days as a Union student. He didn’t have a career path laid out. He didn’t have an academic track that he was pursuing.

“I was going to school, really, because that’s what my father and mother ingrained in me – you go to college when you’re done with high school,” Dismuke says. “That was basically it. And so I get there, and for the first time in my life, I’m living by myself and don’t have parents around. I’m in the process of experiencing freedom and just getting to do whatever I wanted. I made a lot of poor choices.”

His priorities were social events, friends, relationships and having fun. Intramurals were more important than coursework. He began as a chemistry major, but the chem labs conflicted with intramural football, so he often skipped them before dropping the chemistry major entirely.

Dismuke, front row middle, pictured with other Sigma Alpha Episilon officers from the 1996 Lest We Forget yearbook.

Dismuke’s wild streak often ran afoul of the Union rules. Breaking them was exhilarating for him, so that’s what he pursued. His grades reflected the poor choices he was making. At the end of the first semester, his grade point average was 0.5.

Keith was clearly not happy with his son’s performance. Craig assured his dad that the fall semester was a onetime aberration, and that he’d get his act together. He attended January term and got his GPA up a little bit. The spring semester brought further improvements and ended with Dismuke’s GPA at 1.9.

His dad made Dismuke come home for the summer, attend junior college and work cleaning oil rigs—a hot, dirty and miserable job.

“It was 110 degrees every day, it seemed like,” Dismuke says. “I would come back at the end of the day and had oil all over me. I got that Lava soap that was real gritty, and I would wash my face with it, and my face would get all scratched up. My hands were all scratched up. It was serious manual labor.”

Convinced that Dismuke was more mature, Keith allowed his son to return to Union for the fall. That semester he began dating Ashley Jones, a freshman at Union who was unaware of his less-than-stellar reputation on campus.

One day in the cafeteria, Ashley noticed Craig staring at her from across the room.

“Apparently, that was how he was sending out his, ‘Hey, I want to meet you’ kind of vibe,” Ashley says. “I guess it worked.”

After they began dating, some of Ashley’s sorority sisters tried to warn her about Dismuke. His best friend even called her to tell her she shouldn’t date him. “But he’s so nice to me,” was Ashley’s response. The warnings went unheeded.

The fall semester of his sophomore year was cut short for Dismuke when he contracted pneumonia, but from that point on, Dismuke began to focus more. His grades improved enough to allow him to be initiated into the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.

The aimlessness of his early Union experience was a thing of the past.

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“FRIENDSHIP IS A SHELTERING TREE.”— SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

From a spiritual standpoint, Dismuke’s time at Union was transformative. He acknowledges that he became a Christian as a boy but says “lukewarm” would be a good way to describe his faith for much of his teenage years. He didn’t read the Bible. He wasn’t involved in his church youth group.

“There was very little fruit,” Dismuke says.

When he came to Union, he was for the first time immersed in an authentic Christian community. He found it off-putting at first, when people he barely knew would ask him about his quiet time or his walk with the Lord.

But eventually, Dismuke encountered some guys, especially in his fraternity, who had a significant influence in his spiritual growth. One of those was Brian Delk. Delk and Dismuke developed a friendship through both SAE and their mutual love for soccer.

“Craig was just fun to be around,” Delk says. “He was one of those guys who could be friends with just about anybody. Although there were things he would do that would frustrate you, you wanted to pull for him. You wanted the guy to succeed.”

One day, in Delk’s room, Brian told Craig that he could see Craig wrestling with a lot of things, and that he was praying for him. Though Delk doesn’t remember that exact conversation, Dismuke says it was a turning point in his life.

“I’d say within a month of that, I took my faith much more seriously,” Dismuke says.

Dismuke and his wife Ashley will celebrate their 20th anniversary this summer.

The transformation in Dismuke’s life from his freshman year to his senior year was profound. He majored in English, studying especially the European Romantic writers. His grades were stellar. He liked the Romantic period because it represented an intellectual recoil from the Enlightenment.

“As someone who found myself often governed by my passions rather than reason,” Dismuke says, “I associated with the characters much more than those in other literature.”

He got engaged to Ashley. He attributes that relationship as one key factor in his maturation. He realized he had to provide for someone else, not just himself, and that made him much more serious about life.

Another part was the community of people around him. University personnel like Fowler, Dave Oran, Randall Bush and Lynn Gnaegy. Friends who were committed Christians and yet loved life, like Wilks, Blake Ward, Bubba Holsinger, Michael Laffoon, Stephen Eldridge and others.

As an upperclassmen, Dismuke took on leadership roles, often helping to shepherd and mentor new SAE initiates in ways that Wilks says nobody could have imagined, if they knew him as a freshman.

“I think I realized that Christianity doesn’t equate with a lack of fun,” Dismuke says. “That was a piece of it. Having guys like Brian Delk around me, who cared about who I was and cared about my soul, when I didn’t, that had an impact.”

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“ADVERSITY IS THE FIRST PATH TO TRUTH.” — LORD BYRON

After graduating from Union in 1998, Dismuke thought about trying to get a job teaching English in Shelby County, but after looking at the pay scale, decided he couldn’t support a family doing so. He went back to school to get a master’s degree at the University of Memphis and eventually ended up landing a job in finance. He was a natural. Though he majored in English, math was always Dismuke’s strength.

Dismuke speaks to a colleague at Vining Sparks.

First he worked as a loan officer in Memphis before becoming a fixed income broker with Morgan Keegan, a wealth management and capital market firm. He discovered that he loved economics and began studying voraciously on his own time. From Harvard’s website, he found reading lists for different economics classes and began devouring those books. From MIT’s open courseware, he listened to lecture after lecture.

He excelled at Morgan Keegan, ranking in the top 10 of their brokers, and then moved on to Bear Stearns, where he was the youngest managing director in institutional fixed income.

While working at Bear Stearns, Dismuke noticed that he regularly got dizzy when he ran. One day his physical condition after a run was bad enough that he went to the emergency room, where hospital personnel hooked him up to machines and started panicking, calling out various codes and wheeling in the crash carts.

“What are you doing?” Dismuke asked. “This happens all the time.”

Dismuke’s condition was serious. He was in ventricular tachycardia, the “death spiral,” the doctors explained. Diagnosed with severe dilated cardiomyopathy, he has an enlarged and weak heart that pumps about half of what it’s supposed to pump. Doctors told him that with his condition, he might only live a couple of years. He was 33 years old at the time.

“So I thought I was dying, which changes everything,” Dismuke says. “You don’t chase money or titles or whatever. Yeah, that was hard, but I came to peace with it very quickly. It took about 24 hours to come to peace with that.”

His biggest fear was his two young daughters growing up without a father. But he knew Ashley was strong and capable of caring for them. Whatever the outcome, “We wanted God to be glorified through the process, whatever that looked like,” he says.

He soon decided to take a job with Vining Sparks doing economic research. Though the job came with a sizeable pay cut at first, his brush with mortality made Dismuke less concerned with such things.

More than a decade later, Dismuke is still going strong. Sometimes his condition causes low energy levels, but for the most part, it hasn’t affected his life.

The same could not be said a few years later, when the health scare was not his own, but his 3-year-old son Ingram’s.

“NOT WITHOUT HOPE WE SUFFER AND WE MOURN.” — WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Being told he had two years to live was a difficult day for Dismuke. Exponentially more difficult was the day he was told his son Ingram had a brain tumor.

The headaches were the first symptom. Then the nausea started. The doctor’s office told them it was probably just migraines but to call back if the symptoms persisted. They did.

“On a Sunday afternoon he had one, and I saw it for the first time,” Dismuke says. “He was just gripping the back of his head and crying and laying on the floor, and he threw up. I was like, ‘That’s more than a headache.’”

Ashley took Ingram to the doctor who ordered a CT. The results were horrifying. Ingram would need surgery to remove a tumor the size of an egg on his brainstem.

“It’s sheer terror,” Dismuke says. “It was the sound in (Ashley’s) voice. I couldn’t understand what she was saying. All I could understand was ‘tumor’ and ‘get to the hospital.’”

The experience produced a crisis of faith for Dismuke. While his wife and daughters were praying “normal” prayers that God would heal Ingram, Dismuke prayed something different: “God, stay away from my son. If you’ve got a problem with me, take it up with me.” He thought Ingram was being punished for his sins.

The next day, however, Craig’s outlook was radically different. God, in his grace, had made it clear that he was sovereign, and that all Dismuke had to do was trust. He soon came to the realization that as much as he loved Ingram, God loved Ingram more.

“OK,” Dismuke prayed. “Since you love my son even more than I do, it must hurt you even more to see my son hurt. So, whatever your plan is, I can deal with it. I pray that your plan is to heal him. Whatever it is, we’ll try to deal with it.”

Anaplastic ependymoma was the technical diagnosis for Ingram—a rare and aggressive brain tumor. Most patients with that type of tumor see a recurrence within the first two years of treatment. Ingram’s surgery to remove the tumor was successful, and he went through one year of chemotherapy and radiation.

He’s now at almost five years posttreatment, with no indications of any problems. Other than some minor issues with Ingram’s speech and a scar on his head that’s covered by his hair, he shows no signs that anything was ever wrong.

The episode with Ingram’s cancer gave the Dismukes a deep love for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Craig’s two daughters, Madison and Lindsey, both teenagers, have raised nearly $1 million for St. Jude by meeting with management teams and CEOs of various companies and asking for donations. Some of Dismuke’s business contacts have helped grease the wheels, but Madison and Lindsey have accomplished most of it on their own.

“HE IS THE HAPPIEST MAN WHO CAN SET THE END OF HIS LIFE IN CONNECTION WITH THE BEGINNING.” — JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

For Dismuke, as turbulent as much of his college experience was, he is grateful for his time at Union and for the role it played in his life.

“I did a lot of really dumb stuff, and it was just a general lack of focus and lack of understanding of, ‘This is why you’re in college,’” he says. “I’m thankful for Union, because it put some parameters on it. You could go astray, and you could do some really dumb things, but you weren’t going to go too far astray.

“You could go on an intellectual journey about faith and creation and whatnot, but there were a lot of people showing you a Christian lifestyle, so I’m thankful I went to Union for that reason. I think, had I gone to another school and not had those boundaries, not had that peer group, I’d have ended up in a gutter somewhere.”

Twenty years after graduating from Union, the follies of Dismuke’s youth are a distant memory. He’s a successful business leader and active churchman. He’s a devoted husband and father of three extraordinary kids.

“Through the experiences he’s had with his own health and his son’s health, God has used those to deepen his faith in ways that I can’t even imagine,” Wilks says.

“I loved him as a student,” Fowler says. “I love and respect him now for the man and the father and husband that he’s become. He’s a godly influence and uses his platform in the business world and in his church for good.”

Dismuke is proof that despite how things may start out in life, through God’s grace, early setbacks and failures can be overcome. He says if his life is anything, it’s a clear picture that God is gracious, merciful and persistent.

“Life is a drama,” he says. “But I am not the protagonist. That role is reserved for Christ.”

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