The Deans' Bible. Angie Klink

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Island as a safety measure when the Earhart plane zoomed across the sea from New Guinea expected Amelia would broadcast in code on 500 kilocycles. The Itasca was equipped to take a directional bearing on the plane only if Miss Earhart was sending in code over 500 kilocycles.

      But Amelia, before leaving on her globe-circling flight, had scrapped her 500-kilocycle equipment. She could send only on high frequencies.

      Amelia was quoted regarding the scrapping of the 500-kilocycle equipment: “It means we would have to take along a 250-foot trailing antenna, which would have to be reeled out after every takeoff and reeled in before each landing.… The antenna would be one more thing to worry about, and we have enough things to think of already.”

      The commander of the Itasca was unaware that Amelia’s cherished Lockheed Electra could not receive the signal sent from his ship.

      On July 16, President Elliott sent a Western Union telegram to George, who was in Burbank, California, the text of which read:

      SHE WOULD NOT WANT US TO GRIEVE AND WEEP YET WE ARE IN THE DEEPEST DEPTHS OF SADNESS STOP WE SHALL LONG MOURN THIS GALLANT ONE WHOSE LIFE WAS A COURAGEOUS ADVENTURE SHE WOULD HAVE A HEROINES PART IN ANY AGE STOP WHEN YOU ARE ABLE PLEASE LET ME KNOW YOUR PLANS SO THAT WE MAY MEET TO CONSIDER HOW TO CARRY ON

      Nearly forty years later, Dorothy told her friend Sally Watlington where she was on July 2, 1937, a moment etched in time, just prior to America’s most patriotic of celebrations, Independence Day. Dorothy was at a meeting in the Purdue Memorial Union when word came—Amelia Earhart was lost at sea. Those in the meeting sat dazed, then mechanically and without a word, they gathered their papers. Still not speaking, Dorothy and the group left the room, walked down the terrazzo tiled hallways of the Union, where Amelia had once walked, and out into the summer sunshine.

      When asked how she felt upon hearing Amelia was missing, Dorothy thought of her famous, fearless friend whom she had hosted in her home with waffles and talks of “cabbages and kings.” She gave a one-word answer: “Devastated.”

       11

       BEVERLEY STONE, A LOVELY LIGHT

      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 СКАЧАТЬ