Читать книгу The Deans' Bible - Angie Klink - Страница 22

AS DOROTHY STRATTON AND HELEN SCHLEMAN were spiriting women through their education and Purdue campus life amid the corn and hayfields of Indiana, Beverley (Bev) Stone, a woman they would come to know as a friend and colleague, was beginning her formative years at a woman’s college at the foot of the majestic Blue Ridge Mountains near the Appalachian Trail—Randolph-Macon.

At Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, Bev majored in chemistry. Years later, Bev recalled her girlhood visions of her professional goals. She said, “I had three dreams—to be a movie star, a doctor, or a schoolteacher.” All of her life, Bev dressed like a movie star in pearls, high heels, and furs. She used her chemistry degree to become a schoolteacher, but the physician dream she voiced as a child never came to pass.

Several of Bev’s family members were doctors, and they discouraged her from becoming a physician, fearing that it would be too difficult a career for a woman, or as Bev said, “They decided a female doctor would be inappropriate.” Financial hardships brought on by the Great Depression also made medical school an unrealized dream.

At Randolph-Macon, Bev was influenced by female deans and instructors who, unbeknownst to her at the time, gave her the underpinning for her future calling as a guide for students, encouraging them to follow their innate gifts and capabilities. Deanship was a dream, not yet formed. Bev said:

In 1932, when I entered Randolph-Macon at age sixteen from the small town of Crewe, Virginia, I was probably the most naïve and unsophisticated freshman there. When I was assigned seating at Dean Sallie Payne Morgan’s table for the semester, I assumed that this occurred by chance. It turned out to be prophetic! From her I learned many things beyond the academic. Throughout my experience on campus, there was an atmosphere of caring about individual students. The faculty helped students discover and enhance their capabilities in an environment of personal attention, encouragement, and support.

Personal attention, encouragement, and support would become Bev’s trifecta of student care.

Feminine, ash-blond, and blue-eyed, Marguerite Beverley Stone was born in Norfolk, Virginia, on June 10, 1916. She had an “old Virginia voice,” described by a newspaper reporter as “soft and warm as the mellow glow of antique silver.” Bev’s parents were her heroes. Her father was an electrical engineer, and her mother was a schoolteacher. Her maternal grandmother was a higher education pioneer. Araminta Elizabeth Sims, “Miss Minty,” was one of eight women, along with nine men, to graduate from Indiana University in 1883. So even though she was a “southerner,” Bev grew up with a warm connection to the Hoosier state.

Bev recalled, “The basis to my life has been growing up in a loving family who had reasonable expectations.” Bev’s sister Mary entered Randolph-Macon three years after her older sister. Their parents believed that “anyone who was of reasonable intelligence had a responsibility to do something worthwhile for the sake of others.” Bev would forever carry that parental mantra into her daily life and profession.

When Bev graduated from high school, a friend of her mother’s gave her a book by Edna St. Vincent Millay. That’s when Bev adopted a lifelong love for Millay’s poetry. Millay was five when she began to write poems, and by 1912, when she was just eighteen, she was quite famous. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Millay read her poems aloud on her series of nationwide radio broadcasts. English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy once said that the two great things about America were its skyscrapers and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Bev’s favorite Millay poem was “A Few Figs from Thistles,” which she could recite by memory:

First Fig

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

It gives a lovely light!

Second Fig

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:

Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

Little did youthful Bev know when she memorized Millay’s poem, that one day as dean of women at Purdue University, she would feel as if she was burning her candle at both ends while building a “shining palace” upon what may have felt like sand. Yet Bev’s students would only see her lovely light.

Millay visited Randolph-Macon to give a lecture while Bev was a student. Bev would forever remember that day. It seems that Millay lived up to her reputation. She was known to drink, party, and have affairs, making her the envy of some during the days of Prohibition, particularly young women. Millay’s poetry was described as “wild, cool, elusive,” and it “intoxicated the Jazz Babies.” Bev described the day she saw Millay: “She had on a green velvet dress with a train on it. She may have done a little too much imbibing because, though she read beautifully, her papers kept dropping on the floor. And her husband in the receiving line pinched some of the students’ behinds.”

Miss Clara Davidson taught courses in religion and character education at Randolph-Macon. She was a stimulating and challenging professor who influenced Bev’s life with her genuine concern for others and her desire to bring out the best in people. Bev remained close to Davidson until the teacher’s death in 1951. Bev said: “[Randolph-Macon] was a small college—750 students. I was invited into the home of all my professors—not once, but many times. That close relationship was the most meaningful part of my college experience. Many times in my career, I have felt Miss Davidson looking over my shoulders! Clara Davidson was my special mentor, role model, and friend through my first teaching experiences. Her moral, spiritual, and ethical values shown like a beacon for countless students.”

When Bev graduated in 1936, three public schools offered her a job teaching mathematics and chemistry. She chose the highest paying at $90 per month with no benefits at a high school in Norfolk, Virginia. Bev said, “I loved high school teaching, but my first day was a disaster. I told the class everything I knew about chemistry. I looked at my watch, and ten minutes had passed.”

Bev’s position acquainted her with the wide range of needs of teenagers in Norfolk. She saw that many needed counseling during the difficult days of the Depression, and she was frustrated at her lack of expertise in the field. Some had personal problems, and she was not equipped to help. One such student was Freddie. He was intelligent, yet he did not like school and missed classes. Freddie had contracted a bad case of trench mouth from smoking cigarette butts that he had found on the ground.

Bev helped Freddie, putting into practice the examples she had been shown by Miss Davidson and the deans and counselors at Randolph-Macon. She saw a smart, likeable young man who was not living up to his fullest potential, and she wanted to change that. Bev helped Freddie, but also Freddie helped Bev, for it was because of him that Bev realized she wanted to serve others as a counselor rather than teacher. She returned to school for a master’s degree in student personnel administration, studying in the summers at Teachers College of Columbia University (where Dorothy Stratton had earned her PhD in 1932) and graduating in 1940.

While at Columbia, Bev made what would become a profound, lifelong connection with one of her professors, Esther McDonald Lloyd-Jones. Esther was a legend in student personnel administration teaching at Columbia from 1928–1966. She wrote the first book on personnel work in higher education, Student Personnel Work at Northwestern University (1929).

Decades later, with a very full and sometimes tumultuous career as Purdue’s dean of women and dean of students behind her, Bev, age sixty-three, wrote a letter to her beloved teacher:

I suspect you have no notion of the extent of your influence you have had from the time I had the first course with you in 1937. You have been a constant inspiration during these intervening years. Your encouragement, support, affection, and warmth have been qualities I have always counted on, and I hope that I may have imparted some of these same qualities to others. Many students I may have reached may not be aware that a part of you has influenced my reaching out to them. Nonetheless this is true.

Esther believed in a holistic approach. She became an advocate for deans of women and deans of men to be educators in an unconventional and new sense, which she called “deeper teaching.” The Lloyd-Jones approach was to help students and staff learn skills for their fulfillment as whole persons, facilitating their personal growth. She believed in creating environments where everyone could feel worthy of receiving and giving respect. She believed students learned through enriched interactions with others, and this learning would best take place in small, natural communities on campus. Esther’s concepts countered the view that student personnel work was a collection of services from which students would select, such as career counseling, academic advising, and testing.

In a sense, Bev became a Lloyd-Jones protégé, who in the coming years would take the holistic approach in her career. Through her model of caring, Bev would teach thousands of students how to form bonds with others.

Bev’s first position where she would begin to emulate Esther was as the headship of Virginia Hall and assistant professor of history at Tusculum College in Greeneville, Tennessee. While Bev ultimately would teach chemistry, a letter from the college president stated that she was to be in the history department.

At the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, Tusculum is the oldest college in Tennessee. The college is famous for its landmark, “The Arch,” a stone archway built at the front of the shady campus after the American declaration of war in 1917.

An August 21, 1941 letter from Tusculum President Charles Albert Anderson to Bev stated that she was to have added responsibilities as hostess in the dining hall in charge of service during mealtimes. He wrote that Bev’s room was to be on the first floor opposite the stairs with a bed, dresser, two tables, and two chairs, and that it had “just been freshly papered with yellow.” He provided the dimensions of the room’s windows so that Bev could obtain curtains.

President Anderson also suggested that Bev participate in some meetings prior to the arrival of the students for the academic year and, “It would help to have you direct a woman who will clean Virginia Hall.” At age twenty-five, Bev’s life was taking shape as she settled in to preside over the women’s hall baring the name of her home state, deciding the perfect drapes to match her yellow-papered walls.

It appears that Bev turned a lemon of a situation during Freshman Week into some southern lemonade, and her superiors noticed. A letter to Bev from Dean Leslie K. Patton states: “I want to take this opportunity to express my genuine appreciation for the splendid way that you handled the problem of scoring the tests during Freshman Week. From my observation and from what I hear from others, I think that you just about ‘worked a miracle.’ … In the name of the college I want to tell you that we are very grateful.”

Whatever “miracle” Bev worked, the dean went on to ask that Bev prepare in writing a plan for scoring the tests and a report on how she believed the job should be done for future exams. It appears that Bev had gone above and beyond her duty and solved a scoring glitch in the freshmen testing. It must have been a shining, memorable event for Bev, for she saved the letter of commendation from Dean Patton for the remainder of her life.

The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the United States entered into World War II. When the head of Tusculum’s chemistry department left to accept a position in military research at Johns Hopkins, Bev was called to the office of the president. He asked her if she would teach quantitative analysis and organic chemistry to premed students. While Bev had taught chemistry at the high school level, all of her graduate work had been in student personnel administration, so she was uncertain about the proposed teaching position.

The president convinced Bev that it was her “patriotic duty” to accept the challenge. Most of her students were men. Bev said, “For the organic course, I worked harder than ever in my life. I spent fifteen hours preparing for each lecture. But all of the med students who applied were accepted for medical school.”

Throughout her life, Bev was described as “a lady.” She often wore her signature pearls with her favorite color—pink. She frequently wore a cardigan loosely draped over her shoulders, the sleeves dangling like angel wings. Bev was charming and sincere, able to command a meeting with the proper tone and grace, garnering respect from men and women alike. Perhaps to some, Bev’s decision to enlist in the United States Navy was seen as out of character.

By the spring of the next year, America was in an all-out war, and male students received draft notices daily. Bev became convinced of her desire to serve in one of the armed services. Two female role models influenced Bev’s desire to apply for the United States Naval Women’s Reserve (the WAVES, “Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service”).

Bev had read about Mildred McAfee, a president on leave from Wellesley College (where Helen Schleman had obtained her advanced degree in hygiene and physical education in 1928). Mildred had been appointed director of the WAVES. When Bev arrived at Tusculum, she discovered that Mildred had been a faculty member there and was a campus legend, greatly beloved and respected. When Mildred was selected to head the WAVES, the news media gave great attention to Tusculum. Soon after, Mildred appealed to women in higher education to apply for commissions in the navy, and Bev wholeheartedly heeded the call from the woman she so admired.

The other role model who influenced Bev’s attraction to the navy was her favorite aunt, who had been one of the 11,000 plus yeomanettes in World War I. A yeoman (or female nicknamed “yeomanette”) is a member of the navy who manages the paperwork. Bev had been intrigued with photos and stories of her aunt and always was proud of her service. Women were employed as yeomanettes to meet severe clerical shortages during World War I. The Naval Reserve Act of 1916 (the year Bev was born) had conspicuously omitted mention of gender as a condition for service, leading to the enlistment of women in mid-March 1917, shortly before the United States entered the Great War.

The yeomanettes primarily served in secretarial and clerical positions, though some were translators, draftswomen, fingerprint experts, ship camouflage designers, and recruiting agents. The majority were assigned duties at naval installations in the United States, frequently near their homes, processing the great volume of paperwork generated by the war effort.

The yeomanettes wore wide-brimmed flattop hats with a band of ribbon imprinted with “U.S. Navy,” white gloves, white blouses with navy blue neckties, blazers, and ankle-length skirts. The insignia for a yeomanette is a pair of crossed quills, symbolizing her clerical duties.

When Bev enlisted in the WAVES, her mother was supportive. Her father was opposed until he warmed to the idea and ended up rooting for his daughter. Bev said, “After I was in, my father was sure I was the one who had won the war.”

Decades later, Bev spoke of her commissioning: “In September 1943, I entered Midshipman Training School at Smith College and was commissioned in November. I still remember Mildred McAfee’s address when our class was commissioned, in which she said she did not worry about women officers performing well when the going was rough—but in wartime, when of necessity there would be occasions when there would be over-staffing—she was concerned about how we would handle responsibility when the going was dull.”

While Bev was enlisting in the navy to become a WAVE, at Purdue University Dorothy Stratton was answering her own call to create a newly spawned women’s reserve for the United States Coast Guard. Helen Schleman would follow Dorothy into the uncharted territory of women serving in World War II. And Mildred McAfee would be the common thread that would braid the lives of Bev, Dorothy, and Helen.