AgnesTheScott Magazine fall 2004
Life in Savoonga
AgnesTheScott Magazine fall 2004 | volume 81 | number 1 our mission
Agnes Scott College educates women to think deeply, live honorably and engage the intellectual and social challenges of their times. director of communications
Mary Ackerly
KIMBERLEY TRUETT
2 Reader’s Voice
editor
Jennifer Bryon Owen designer
Winnie Hulme communications intern
Kristin Kallaher ’04 communications advisory committee
Sara Ector Vagliano ’63, chair Mary Ackerly Lara Webb Carrigan ’94 Christine Cozzens Barbara Byrd Gaines ’77 Marilyn Johnson Hammond ’68 Elizabeth Anderson Little ’66 Sallie Manning ’82 Jennifer Bryon Owen Michael Schlig Lewis Thayne We encourage you to share views and opinions. Please send them to: Editor, Agnes Scott The Magazine, Agnes Scott College, Rebekah Annex, 141 E. College Ave., Decatur, GA 30030 or e-mail to:
[email protected]. © 2004 Agnes Scott College. Published for alumnae and friends twice a year by the Office of Communications, Agnes Scott College, Rebekah Annex, 141 E. College Ave., Decatur, GA 30030. The content of the magazine reflects the opinions of the writers and not the viewpoint of the College, its trustees or administration. Change of address: Send address changes by mail to Office of Development, Agnes Scott College, 141 E. College Ave., Decatur, GA 30030; by telephone, call 404 471-6472 or by e-mail to
[email protected]. E-mail:
[email protected] Web site: www.agnesscott.edu Agnes Scott Alumnae Magazine is recipient of: Award of Excellence for Alumni Magazines, CASE District III Advancement Awards, 2001 Best of Category, Spring 2003 issue, Printing Industry Association of Georgia Award of Excellence, Fall 2003 issue, Printing Industry Association of Georgia Cover photo © Corbis
6 This Old House
Through renovating a neglected house, Catherine Fleming Bruce ’84 honors a historical role model. by nancy moreland
8 The “Affable Familiar” Ghosts of Agnes Scott
Linda Lentz Hubert ’62 recalls the endearing professorial ghosts who haunt her — and maybe you. by linda lentz hubert ’62
13 Free Speech — Everyone’s Right and Everyone’s Responsibility
Do Agnes Scott students feel free to express their opinions?
16 The Bakersfield Bunch A 1950s westward migration turned alumnae into teachers — and lifelong friends. by kristin kallaher ’04 and mary alma durrett
18 The Art of Teaching Today
While the ultimate goal remains the same, teaching styles evolve and change to meet the needs of the students. by beth blaney ’91, m.a.t. ’95
22 Parents as Teachers
Homeschooling’s lure turns many alumnae into their children’s K-12 teachers while this increasingly popular educational trend delivers to the college students who are ready to go. by melanie s. best ’79
26 Body Story
Through her new memoir, an Agnes Scott professor shares her struggle with her body image. by julia k. de pree
29 From War to Education
War survivors — an alumna and two students — share intensely personal stories of their journey from war-torn countries to Agnes Scott. by allison adams ’89 and victoria f. stopp ’01
32 Life’s Little Turns
An alumna — single, no children, no dog — invites five children and their dog into her home and heart. by celeste pennington
34 Life in Savoonga
Helping students reach their potential and “raise the scores” of their school creates one kind of challenge. Doing this in Alaska presents an even greater challenge. by jessie yarbrough ’05
The Bakersfield Bunch In the late ’50s, a group of alumnae needed jobs and California needed teachers. The results of this westward migration have been pure gold. by Kristin Kallaher ’04 and Mary Alma Durrett
A
century after a wave of forty-niners headed to California to stake their claims, Hazel Ellis ’58 and Margaret Woolfolk Webb ’58 beat their own path West to find and polish a more valuable treasure — the minds of Bakersfield’s
youth. In 1958, Ellis and Webb were recruited to teach in Southern California’s San Joaquin River Valley, the destination of the fictitious Joad family immortalized in The Grapes of Wrath. Ellis and Webb were followed by four members of the class of 1959: Elizabeth “Betty” Garrad Saba, Leah “Bugs” Mathews Fontaine, Nancy Graves Mull and Frances Elliot Kempen. Serendipitous circumstances led to their westward adventure. Ellis, a Spanish major from Chesterfield, S.C., and Webb, a psychology major from Columbus, Ga., had attended a meeting in February of their senior year with a recruiter from the Bakersfield school system. At the time, Agnes Scott had no formal teacher-education program and neither one had ever thought of teaching. “To tell the truth, I found [the recruiter’s] lecture uninspiring, so Margaret and I left early,” says Ellis. Within days, both Ellis and Webb received telegrams stipulating job offers with generous salaries — between $4,700 and $4,800. Master pranksters, each thought the other had sent the telegram, so they dismissed the offers. “There was only a two-cent difference in our salaries,” Ellis remembers. “I thought, ‘somebody has sent this telegram as a joke, and I’m not about to call and make a fool of myself.’” But one rainy Sunday night in May, Ellis and Webb realized they were about to graduate without jobs. “I had not ever had the slightest idea of teaching,” Ellis says, “but we were desperate. I said, ‘Let’s call Bakersfield.’ That was career planning 101.” Luckily, the offers from Bakersfield — desperate for teachers — were still on the table. “It was an adventurous thing to do,” says Webb, “and Agnes Scott prepared me very well for it.” When the young women journeyed from Georgia, Bakersfield was riding the crest of the post-World War II baby boom, causing swells in school enrollment. But Bakersfield’s agricultural base and burgeoning oil fields distinguished it from other cities. Cotton, 16 agnes scott the magazine fall 2004
tomatoes, grapes, almonds, alfalfa, oranges and olives thrived in the fertile soil of the San Joaquin River Valley, while black gold had bubbled to the surface in northeast Bakersfield in 1899. Within a decade, the nearby Lakeview gusher helped transform the landscape of Kern County into a forest of oil derricks. (Today, Kern County is reportedly the number one oil-producing county in the nation.) By the 1950s, the Okies and the Arkies who had migrated during the Great Depression were entrenched in San Joaquin’s green valley. Subsequent waves of migrant and permanent farm workers flooded the valley to accommodate the growing farm production. In this environment, Ellis and Webb arrived ready for their first teaching assignments. For Webb, this meant teaching reading at Emerson Junior High School, where she taught seventh- and eighth-graders for nine years. “I had taken one education class at Agnes Scott that had done me in,” Ellis laughs. “So I walked into a class of junior high
ALE X HORVATH
students on my first day, not ever having taught in my life. But it was exciting, and I had a really good feeling about it.” She felt a real bonding with the students. “It was exciting to see the light come on when they got a concept.” While Ellis enjoys the challenge of “facing whatever needed to be done at the moment the need arose,” she admits being discouraged by recent stresses on the state’s education budget, as well as the effects of drugs, alcohol and gang violence in the school populations. “Teaching in 1958 was very different than teaching in 1999,” says Ellis, who left teaching to earn a master’s in counseling in 1981. “Many of the students were much less serious about school and less willing to work hard. They seem to have shorter attention spans, which I attribute to television. They felt like they needed to be entertained, which made it more difficult to get them to produce.” Counseling allows Ellis to work with students but in a different capacity. She contends that “seeing a student really succeed” is worth every bit of struggle on her part. Webb describes her life in Bakersfield and her career in teaching as a “wonderful adventure.” After teaching sixth grade for two years, Webb took off when she had her first child. She moved back into teaching by tutoring and did not return to teaching full time Agnes Scott is the first topic of until her youngest son went to discussion when these members college. of the Bakersfield Bunch get together. They are, left to right, “I interviewed with the Margaret Woolfolk Webb ’58, Leah nearby DiGiorgio school sys“Bugs” Mathews Fontaine ’59, tem,” says Webb, “and the prinMarguerite Kelly Pulley ’69 and cipal hired me right away. I had Hazel Ellis ’58. to drive 25 miles to get to it, but I had some wonderful kids, and that made it really fun to teach there.” Webb, who taught second, third, and fourth grade, especially enjoyed her fourth-grade class, which she took on field trips to explore California missions. She retired after 10 years there. Elizabeth “Betty” Garrad Saba followed Webb and Ellis to Bakersfield in 1959, admitting to “a wild hair that lives in me.” Having taken no education courses and knowing her whole life she was not going to teach, Saba turned to teaching in Bakersfield only because three friends had signed up, and she had entertained no other options.
“On a whim, I made the phone call, and the woman hired me over the phone right then,” she says, “not really from any assets of my own, just from the fact that she had three of my friends from Agnes Scott signed up, and Hazel from the year before.” Saba had never been out West, but says she was young enough that she never looked back. “The move was not difficult. I like to do radical things,” she says. “My parents were certain I would return home after one year, that it would be a sightseeing tour, but it didn’t turn out that way.” Saba, who met her husband the second day she was in Bakersfield, taught eighth-grade English for two years, before she left for “a very fulfilling life as a homemaker and volunteer in Bakersfield.” “To not have had one thing in terms of preparation, teaching worked out fine,” Saba reflects. “The teaching-level back then was very relaxed. I was able to formulate my own lesson plans, and I did just fine.” “‘The Bakersfield Bunch’ is a natural little term,” says Saba. “We have our own version of The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.” The group, plus Marguerite Kelly Pulley ’69, gets together every four to six weeks for lunch. Ellis and Webb say the women were drawn closer by the death of Frances Elliot Kempen ’59, who had taught kindergarten and first grade in Bakersfield.
“As we get older, we realize what a priceless thing we have in the midst of us — our friendship.” “We had all been getting together before the onset of her cancer, but seeing Franny decline, going through that with her and supporting her made us more conscious of our closeness in one another,” reflects Ellis. “We found out how important we are to one another.” “As we get older, we realize what a priceless thing we have in the midst of us — our friendship,” says Saba. “The special thing for me is just the long thread that has run through our parallel lives,” she adds. “It’s a wonderful experience to spend four years of college with certain women and then for the rest of our lives be in a faraway place where it’s just you — your little group that’s there — so that it becomes a really fulfilling female friendship.” She notes Agnes Scott is always the first item of discussion at their get-togethers. Although none of the women live very close together, their contact with one another is more now than it has ever been. Saba says the group has discussed how important having girlfriends is at this stage of their lives. “I’m so glad that we’ve come to a place historically that women’s friendships can be appreciated,” she says. “They begin at a women’s college in just such a very special way. These are the ties that bind.” Kristin Kallaher ’04, office of communications intern, is enrolled in the college’s master of arts in teaching secondary English program. She is the 2002 and 2004 recipient of the Sara Wilson “Sally” Glendinning Journalism Award and the 2004 recipient of the Louise McKinney Literary Award and the George P. Hayes Fellowship Award for graduate study in English. Mary Alma Durrett is editor of Loose Canons at Emory University. the bakersfield bunch 17
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CAROLINE JOE
An alumna — single, no children, no dog — invites five children and their dog into her home and heart. See page 32.
