Alpha Sigma Alpha was founded on November 15, 1901 at the State Female Normal School (now Longwood University) in Farmville, Virginia. Its founders had been asked to join some of the other sororities on campus, but they wanted to stay together. The five, Virginia Lee Boyd (Noell), Juliette Jefferson Hundley (Gilliam), Calva Hamlet Watson (Wootton), Louise Burks Cox (Carper) and Mary Williamson Hundley, started their own sorority; they called it Alpha Sigma Alpha.
Just as the March 1945 Phoenix went to press, news was received of the release of Beth Harkness from the Santo Tomas prisoner camp. Harkness was an alumna of the Tau Tau chapter, at Fort Hays Kansas State College.
Harkness earned a Master’s degree from Columbia University. She went to Shanghai as an Episcopalian missionary. In January 1941, she was transferred the Phillipine Island of Luzon and was assigned to the mountain province of Sagade. She was 29 years old when she was taken captive by the Japanese in 1942.
For three years she and was confined to Camp Holmes near Baguio. The 500 prisoners lived in barracks designed for 85. The room she shared with three other women was crowded and privacy was nil. During her captivity she served as a schoolteacher for the 80 children who were there.
In October 1944, as American forces advanced towards the Philippines the prisoners were transferred to a camp near Manila. Late in January 1945, the prisoners saw low flying American planes. That night there were battles in the streets. Although the Japanese guards had left their posts, the prisoners remained in the camp until their American liberators found them the next day.
At the camp Harkness met John A. Renning, who had grown up in South Dakota. He spent four years as a mining engineer on Luzon and was taken prisoner in December, 1941. While captive, Harkness and Redding grew fond of one another. Once they were free to live life away from the camp, the couple knew they wanted to spend their lives together. They married on May 10, 1945, at the Church of the Incarnation in Santa Rosa, California, shortly after each returned to the United States separately.
The November 1945 Phoenix included this quote from Beth Harkness Renning:
Looking back, one has time to do so in a Prison Camp, I am so glad for happy Alpha Sigma Alpha memories and realize those experiences were the kind which help tide one over in difficult times.
In 1977, the Rennings had retired to Auburn, California. They spoke to the local newspaper about their experiences in the early 1940s. They planned to attend a reunion of camp survivors. Later that year, they spoke to a community group about their time in the prison camp. Beth Renning died in 2000 and her husband in 2002.
