A profile of M. Estelle Angier was published in Volume 17 of The Angelos of Kappa Delta, the recap of convention edition. At that convention, she was elected National Secretary. Angier was an initiate of the Kappa Delta chapter at Hollins College. She wrote:
I did not go to be the ‘College Queen,’ nor yet did I know anything about sororities. My first thrilling introduction was a formal invitation to Kappa Delta. I didn’t know anything about rushing,—in fact I hadn’t been rushed, and Gamma records show no awful secrets about my past. But just by accident they decided to take me, because, as one member confided to me long after, ‘We decided there must be something good in you because dogs and children liked you.’
The following year she went to the Richmond convention as her chapter’s delegate. After graduation she gave music lessons and performed as an accompanist. She then began teaching high school in Portsmouth, Virginia. In the fall of 1917, she enrolled in the American College of Physical Education in Chicago. There she earned a Bachelor’s in Physical Education. She funded her studies by accompanying and managing a college orchestra. She worked at one of the South side park playgrounds during the summer term.
After that she:
went into the Army! I was first at Walter Reed Hospital, in Washington. From Washington I was sent to Boston, where I had the privilege of eight weeks’ work in the shadow of the sacred halls of Harvard Medical School. And then I went to Fort Sheridan, where I stayed during the last fifteen months of my service. While here, I was made Head Aide, in charge of a clinical investigation of the recovery from peripheral nerve wounds. Then the office personnel was changed, and the obedient genii swished me into the corrective gymnasium,—and a private office. And then my period of usefulness was over, and my Army career ended.
Angier served as Secretary-Treasurer of the World War Reconstruction Aides Association, (WWRAA), “an organization to perpetuate the friendships and interests formed during the recent period of stress, both for Occupational and Physiotherapy Aides.” She was an officer in the WWRAA from its 1920s inception until it dissolved in 1952.
Angier taught at several colleges, including Cornell College, Marshall University and Oklahoma State University. In 1954, she celebrated her sixty-third birthday by driving the Alaska Highway. The travel conditions on the early Alaska Highway were challenging. There were many flat tires and vehicle repairs along the way. She died in 1977.
Mary Estelle Angier
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