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- Creator
- Gleason, Josephine, Pennock, Clarice, Spicer, Verna, Asprey, Winifred
- Date
- [After 1966]
- Text
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‘+3 SYDNOR HARBISON WALKER 1891 - 1966 Miss Sydnor Harbison Walker, Vassar alumna, faculty member, trustee and Assistant to the President, died December 12, 1966, at her home in Millbrook, New York, at the age of 75. She was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the daughter of Walter and Mary Sydnor Perkins Walker. After attending Louisville schools, Miss Walker came to Vassar and was graduated in 1913 with honors. Economics was her major interest and she returned to Vassar to teach it in 1917, with...
Show more‘+3 SYDNOR HARBISON WALKER 1891 - 1966 Miss Sydnor Harbison Walker, Vassar alumna, faculty member, trustee and Assistant to the President, died December 12, 1966, at her home in Millbrook, New York, at the age of 75. She was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the daughter of Walter and Mary Sydnor Perkins Walker. After attending Louisville schools, Miss Walker came to Vassar and was graduated in 1913 with honors. Economics was her major interest and she returned to Vassar to teach it in 1917, with an M.A. from the University of Southern California. Professor Emeritus Mabel Newcomer, a young col- league at the time, writes that "her quick wit and gaiety made her well liked among students in the residential hall where she lived ..... as a teacher she exhibited these same qualities, combined with clarity of thought and expression .... although she could be sharply critical of the careless and the dilatory." In 1919 Miss Walker decided that she needed some practical experience and went to work for a pioneering firm of indust- rial relations consultants where she wrote their weekly news letter. Three members of this young firm became college presidents and some years later Miss Walker herself was on the way to the presidency of a prominent college for women. A fourth member of the firm was Beardsley Ruml. In 1921 Miss Walker engaged in the relief work of the American Friends Service Comittee, first in Vienna and later in Russia In a letter to President Emeritus MacCracken, she vividly describes her experience. "We are now feeding about 15,000 a week through our depots, and we are supplying clothing to nearly 3,000. Our work is done on an individual case basis, which we think to be the soundest, not only from a social point of view, but because we believe that method essential for the creation of a spirit of international good-will - at no time a secondary object in our program... In addition to the feeding and clothing.... we are teaching mothers to care for their babies through the welfare centers; we are supporting a score of hospitals and other institutions for children; we have restocked farms with poultry and cattle and are helping farmers to build up permanent food resources for the city; and we are assisting materially in such constructive Austrian enterprises as the building of suburban land settlements and the creation of a ‘f4 SYDNOR HARBISON WALKER — continued market abroad for the art work of many gifted persons...we feel that we are a real part of the life of the city and not a superimposed group of relief workers." It is not hard for those who knew Miss Walker to visualize her presiding over relief work in the Imperial Palace of the Hofburg, whose stately corridors were cheerless and deserted save for these activities. Returning to America in 1924, Miss Walker combined her inter- ests in industrial relations with social welfare and educa- tion by becoming a research assistant at the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund in New York. In the meantime she received her doctorate in economics from Columbia University in 1928 with a dissertation on "Social Work and the Training of Social Workers." When the Rockefeller Foundation absorbed the Spelman Fund in 1929, Miss Walker began her association of twenty years with the Foundation. She moved from the research department to the position of Associate Director of the Social Sciences Division and finally became its Acting Director. While there she developed a program of international relations involving considerable travel in Europe and South America in very respon- sible positions. In 1933 she collaborated in the preparation of the report of President Hoover's Comittee on Social Trends, contributing a chapter entitled, "Privately Supported Social Work." In 1939 Miss Walker was proposed for trustee of Vassar College by the Faculty Club and she was elected by the board. Again quoting Miss Newcomer, "her contribution as a Vassar trustee was very rea1....Her experience on the faculty and as a student, and her current work in the Rockefeller Foundation, had given her a real understanding of the problems of the college and enabled her to offer constructive criticism and suggestion for change." _ Her resignation as trustee occurred in October 1942, and came because of a crippling illness which led eventually to her permanent confinement to a wheel chair. A friend and fellow alumna described her long battle against mistaken diagnoses, official predictions of helplessness and the end of her career. "Sydnor simply rejected the idea of permanent immobility.... for a person who never knew what fatigue meant, who never could understand inactivity, either mental or physical, 1 < SYDNOR HARBISON WALKER - continued nothing could have been more tragic than paralysis." When Miss Walker realized that complete recovery was impossible, on her own initiative she went to one of the first rehabilitation clinics in New York and learned to help herself to a remarkable degree. Also she wrote, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation published in l945, a report entitled "The First Hundred Days of the Atomic Age." In 1948 another opportunity to serve Vassar came to Miss Walker when Miss Blanding named her Assistant to the President. She returned to live in Metcalf House and became an active participant in Vassar's development. Miss Blanding knew her as "a brilliant woman who never lost her zest for life nor her interest in things of the mind. She was a voracious reader and stimulating companion." After Miss Walker's retirement in 1957, she bought a large colonial house in Millbrook, reminiscent of her native Kentucky. There she continued her vital interest in Vassar and in the many friendships she had made throughout her rich and colorful life. Respectfully submitted, Josephine Gleason Clarice Pennock Verna Spicer Winifred Asprey, Chairman XVIII BBQ-336
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- Creator
- Gleason, Josephine, Pennock, Clarice, Rothwell, William, Ross, James Bruce
- Date
- [After 1961]
- Text
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MARY_VIRCINlA,HElNLEIN l903 - 1961 Mary Virginia Heinlein was born in 1903 in Bridgeport, Ohio. She must have liked her town. She insisted on going to its public schools, against the preference of her family for pri- vate ones. Years later she could bring generations of Bridge- port people alive for us with her reminiscences. Or one might hear her and an old neighbor from home telling over with relish all the institutions of higher learning in their native state. Perhaps these steady ties...
Show moreMARY_VIRCINlA,HElNLEIN l903 - 1961 Mary Virginia Heinlein was born in 1903 in Bridgeport, Ohio. She must have liked her town. She insisted on going to its public schools, against the preference of her family for pri- vate ones. Years later she could bring generations of Bridge- port people alive for us with her reminiscences. Or one might hear her and an old neighbor from home telling over with relish all the institutions of higher learning in their native state. Perhaps these steady ties with the place she first knew had a share in her passion for authenticity, in the richness and sub- stance of her experience of the wide world. It was in Bridgeport that the theatre took hold of her. She saw all the plays that Chautauqua on its circuit and stock companies on their tours brought to her part of the Ohio Valley; and early in life she began to find her way backstage to talk with the players. For her own part, this theatre-goer, who was also getting to be well-read, initiated her playmates into many dramatic ventures. So, when she came to Vassar College in l923 to enter the Junior class, after two years at Ohio State University, it was natural that her teacher, Winifred Smith, should be struck by her intui- tive and vivid understanding of Elizabethan drama, unusual in students then or now; by her quick response even to the old- fashioned Elizabethan humor and comedy, which she could interpret in the medium of American rural dialect and slang. At Vassar, she chose some of the courses that Vassar Alumnae are still talking about. One of them was Henry Nobel MacCracken's Chaucer and the Early Renaissance. Her teacher must have seen her then as he saw her long after. The other day Mr. MacCracken wrote: "The chief quality of Mary Virginia Heinlein - my student, colleague, director, and friend — was dedication to the very point of possession. For two-score years I never ceased to wonder at its intensity." It was not the Vassar actors but the debaters whom she joined as a student. Mr. MacCracken remembers this, too: "An obscure member (as we often let a transfer be) of a brilliant class, with no toehold in her glass mountain, she climbed to the presi- dency of Debate Council, then the most favored of college sports In the fall of 1925 she led her team against one from Cambridge University, whose most notable member was Richard Austin Butler (now Great Britain's Home Secretary). The issue was: Resolved that modern democracies are not compatible with personal liberty l MARY VIRGINIA HEINLEIN (Continued) The judges‘ award went to the English. But Mr. MacCracken thought they found it a hollow award: "They had come to win converts not debates; and the Vassar audience voted solidly for Mary Virginia's side." From Vassar Miss Heinlein went straight to the Theater Guild School of New York. The next six years she spent in the theatre, studying in this country and in Europe, acting in New York and in travelling companies, trying her hand at directing - managing. In these years she was deeply influenced by the psychological exploration of the experimental dramatists of the twenties; and this became one of her continuing and developing interests. Then came the lean years of the thirties. She went home to Ohio, into her father's law office, and the law school of the State University. But the fine career in the law, and perhaps in the State Legislature, that her Vassar teachers and friends began now to predict for her barely got under way. In l933 Sarah Lawrence College offered her an opportunity that she could not resist: to introduce drama into its liberal arts curriculum. It is hard for Vassar people to remember how radical and rare such an opportunity was in those days because Vassar's own pioneering in the Arts began early. For twenty years in our own Department of English, students had been tak- ing courses in playwriting and play production, and putting their learning to the test, first in the campus dramatic work- shop, then in the Poughkeepsie Community Theatre and finally in the Experimental Theatre. By the time Miss Heinlein returned to Vassar the Division of Drama had been established. She came in 1942 as Professor of Drama and Director of the Experimental Theatre. She brought with her a clear vision of what the education of women should be, and of the place of the arts in this education Her own words give the best statement of her goals as a teacher Our teaching philosophy is sensible and simple. We believe that a student's status is a dignified one, comparable to a profession, and that the student's chief business is learning. Since all things change and man's wisdom is finite, the important thing for the student to learn is hpw to learn so that her experience here may be the start of an ever continuing process of self-education. We teach, therefore, techniques of learning and hope the student acquires the taste for constant exploration. MARY VIRGINIA HEINLEIN (Continued) Our goal is the student's independence of us, an independence based on the genuine confidence which comes from knowing that one has a reasonable under- standing of oneself and the ability to do useful work, and on her realization that final responsibility for her education as well as for her direction in life rests upon herself alone. We believe, also, that for some individuals the practice of an art is an integrating and truly educating process, demanding, as it does, the involvement of the whole personality and the constant searching and testing of oneself, and calling at the same time for the utmost flexibility, originality, and spontaneity, and the most rigorous self-discipline, organization, and order. We believe that drama furnishes proper substance for the students‘ meditation, dealing, as it does, with the most important question affecting man, the meaning of his own existence; and that it presents to the mind, as do the myths, rites and dreams from which it comes those symbols and images the contemplation of which leads the human spirit toward its true and proper development. This is not a definition of permissive teaching, and Miss Heinlein's students did not have an easy time of it. "She behaved," one of them says, "As if our naivete were a fault we could shed if we chose; and she chose that we get rid of it fast." A young woman might kick hard against the pricks - hard enough for all to see. But ten years later she would write that Miss Heinlein was her great teacher, the first person she had ever known who showed "intellectual passion." She would say that in having to submit to the "authority of accuracy and precision"; to subject the development of her ideas to the rigor of logic, to suffer the explorations of her own mind, she was getting her introduction to "a great science, in the fine old Greek sense of the word." We all had a share in Miss Heinlein's educational enterprise, evenififlfie of us who never appeared on her stage, or lent the resources and insights of their own professions to her produc- tions. We were her audience, whom she made feel as essential to the theatre, between curtain—up and curtain-down, as her cast. Some of us had to take it on faith, now and then, that the play before us was, in her words, "so good that it needed doing." But in the end every one of us had his own treasury of satisfying memories of her theatre; perhaps the power and the insights in her production of The Tempest; perhaps the MARY VIRGINIA HEINLEIN (Continued) sights and sounds of young women, so moving, against the stylized sets of The Mother_of Us All; perhaps the perfection of The Blood Wedding, that “brooding folkplay of simple peasants, devoid of all decor but mere sunlight on plaster walls." All those years Miss Heinlein took her part in the national and international affairs of the theatre. She held office in the American National Theatre and Academy, the State and National Theatre Conferences, the American Educational Theatre Association, the American Society for Theatre Research. She was a delegate to Conferences of the U. S. Commission for UNESCO to the National Theatre Assemblies. Her paper for the Inter- national Congress of Theatre Scholars and Historians held in Venice in '57 was published in German by the Institute for Theatre Science of the University of Vienna, and in other languages. She gave lectures on the drama, wrote articles and reviews, made reports for Foundations. She found time to write for children a play called The Panda and the Spy, first given at Vassar in 1943, and still showing in children's theatres. She visited theatres around the world. Now and then, by way of a holiday, yet keeping her hand in, she would spend a summer in one of the stock companies. In collaboration with Mrs. Stavrides, she had almost completed a translation of the memoirs of Andre Antoine, founder of the Theatre Libre in Paris. But important as it was, her public role has for her friends and colleagues far less reality than her warm and generous personality, with its unique combination of wit and wisdom which responded so directly to the authentic, yet was so quick to unmask the false and deflate the pretentious. It has less reality than the gallant, playful and truly comic spirit that set our mundane concerns in a proper perspective. On December 20, 1961, Mary Virginia Heinlein taught her last class. She died on Christmas Day. Josephine Gleason Clarice Pennock William Rothwell James Bruce Ross, Chairman XV 333-390
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