Helen Poole Rush, Delta Zeta, #NotableSororityWomen, #WHM 2022

Posted on March 22, 2022 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Helen Poole Rush enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh and became a member of the Omicron Chapter of Delta Zeta. Although she graduated in 1919, she never really left the university. Along the way, she earned a master’s degree from the institution. When she retired more than five decades later, she was the University of Pittsburgh’s first female vice chancellor. She served under eight chancellors.

The Omicron Chapter of Delta Zeta when Helen Poole Rush was a collegiate member.

The March 1952 Lamp of Delta Zeta included this tidbit from the Omicron Chapter:

Our October meeting was a dinner at the Royal York in honor of the founders of Omicron chapter, Guests included the entire membership of the college chapter and Miss Helen Poole Rush, Dean of Women and first pledge of Omicron chapter.

During her tenure, she served as Dean of Women and Dean of Students before becoming Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs. She studied at Columbia University and the University of Oslo, spending several months in Norway.  She received a Winifred Cullis Lecture Fellowship from the British American Association and delivered more than 35 lectures in England during 1957-58.

Pittsburgh Press, May 23, 1941

In 1963, Beaver College (now Arcadia University) awarded Rush an honorary doctorate. The following year, she was named a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania. Upon her retirement, the university named her a Vice Chancellor Emerita.

The University of Pittsburgh awarded her a Bicentennial Medal for achievement and service in 1985. She died 1992 at the age of 94.

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Bessie Margolin, Alpha Epsilon Phi, #NotableSororityWomen, #WHM2022

Posted on March 21, 2022 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Bessie Margolin became a member of the Alpha Epsilon Phi chapter at Sophie Newcomb College. Born in New York City to Russian Jewish immigrants, she and her family moved to Tennessee. Her mother died when Margolin was a child, and her father was unable to care for their children. A prominent Memphis rabbi suggested they be sent to the Jewish Children’s Home in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The Isidore Newman School, where the home’s children were enrolled, provided a milieu in which Margolin could thrive. She graduated with honors at 16. A scholarship led her to Sophie Newcomb College, part of Tulane University.

While at Newcomb, Margolin held an office in AEPhi, was in clubs and played intramurals. She became aware that it was possible to attend Tulane, which was then all male. She could earn a degree from Arts and Science and one from the Tulane Law School simultaneously, although it would take an extra year. Of the 23 students in her law school class, she graduated second.  She was the first woman member of Tulane’s Order of the Coif as well as being a member of the charter class.

Margolin then went to New Haven, Connecticut, where she began work on a J.D. at Yale Law School. After graduation she encountered the same fate as the other female lawyers of her time. Law firms, especially prestigious ones, were not welcoming and would not hire them.

She became the first female attorney working for the Tennessee Valley Authority. Margolin then joined the U.S. Department of Labor. Margolin was a fair labor law advocate and expert. She won almost all of the more than 20 cases she argued before the United States Supreme Court.

Margolin served temporarily in the War Department after World War II and helped draft the regulation which established the Nuremberg Tribunals. She also attended the Nuremberg Trials.

An advocate for equal pay, Margolin helped create the Equal Pay Act. In 1966, she was a cofounder of the National Organization of Women. One hopes that she crossed paths with AEPhi sister Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

She retired in 1972 but occasionally taught a class at George Washington University. Margolin died on June 19, 1996, at the age of 87.

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Sybil Bauer, Gamma Phi Beta, #NotableSororityWomen, #WHM2022

Posted on March 20, 2022 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

On January 31, 1927, Sybil Bauer, an initiate of the Gamma Phi Beta chapter at Northwestern University, died. She was 23.

Bauer was also a gold medal Olympian who, at the age of 22 held 23 swimming records in the women’s backstroke. She was the first woman to break a man’s swimming record.

Her family, immigrants from Norway, had a summer home at Loon Lake and she learned to swim early. She began swimming at the Illinois Athletic Club. Her training partner was Johnny Weissmuller, of Tarzan fame.

She broke high school records. Bauer began her studies at Northwestern University in 1922. That October she broke by four seconds the 440-yard backstroke record for men held by Stubby Krueger. Because the meet was unsanctioned, her time was never officially recognized.

At the 1924 Paris Olympics, she broke her own world in 100 meter backstroke with a time of 1:23:2. A month before the event, a few Gamma Phi friends saw her off as she and her teammates sailed to Europe on The America. In an article in the September 1924 Crescent of Gamma Phi Beta, her sorority sisters felt they had a hand in her gold medal:

 On the day of the meet, according to Sybil’s own story, she had a wretched cold and was feeling decidedly blue and homesick. The mail arrived that very day, bringing her many letters and a writing case from the girls at convention. Immediately the blues took leave and she knew that everyone in Gamma Phi was behind her. She went in with a vengeance and won – so we feel as it we had a little part in her victory.

After the Olympics, she competed in Brussels and England and then went on a family visit to Norway, where she won first place in an exhibition.

Her Gamma Phi sisters were proud of her and an article in The Crescent reported that although she had:

received prizes and medals without number – and still she is modest and retiring. It seems remarkable that a girl can do so much and remain unchanged and unspoiled through it all. She is not only a swimmer but an all-around athlete, for she has made hockey, basketball, baseball and golf teams at college, in addition to being head of the swimming for the coming year.

In February of 1926, she competed for the last time. There are reports that she felt dizzy at that meet in in St. Augustine, Florida. Medical attention was sought and surgery was performed in late 1926. It appears to have been intestinal cancer.

 

Tacoma Daily Register, January 17

Newspapers reported that she fought valiantly for 92 days while in Michael Reese Hospital. The Northwestern senior was getting ready to graduate and her fiancé was Edward Sullivan, a New York newspaper man who became smitten with her when he was covering the 1924 Paris Olympics. Years later the world would know him as Ed Sullivan, host of a Sunday evening television show. They were to be married that June. One report stated, “her sorority sisters have been visiting her in the hospital and assisting in the gathering of her hope chest.” Sullivan, along with her family, were at her bedside when she died. Weissmuller and other local swimmers served as pallbearers.

The International Swimming Hall of Fame honored Bauer with inclusion in 1967. In 1984, when Northwestern University created its Athletics Hall of Fame in 1984 she was a charter member.

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Jacqueline Jenkins-Nye, Ph.D., Alpha Gamma Delta, #NotableSororityWomen, #WHM2022

Posted on March 19, 2022 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Jacqueline Jenkins-Nye moved to Baltimore, Maryland when she was a young child and her father started teaching at Johns Hopkins University. After high school graduation, she enrolled in Goucher College, which was then located in downtown Baltimore. There she became a member of Alpha Gamma Delta. She majored in math and psychology.

The Alpha Gamma Delta Executive Board. Jenkins-Nye was Vice President and is pictured on the left.

A 1945 announcement in the Baltimore Sun told of her engagement to Edwin Nye:

Lieutenant Jenkins is a 1942 graduate of Goucher College, where she was a member of Alpha Gamma Delta. She joined the Naval Reserve in 1942 and has been stationed in Washington three years.

Jenkins-Nye likely hadn’t planned on becoming a WAVE (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). She along with small group of Goucher women, who excelled in math and had keen analytical minds, were recruited to help break the codes used in enemy radio transmissions. But they really didn’t know that’s what they were doing when they signed on, The women were unable to tell anyone what their day-to-day duties were like and had no idea what any of them were working on, even though many of them lived in the same place and socialized together after work. Working independently, these highly intelligent were able to break the codes. The stories of these code breakers did not come to light until more than half a century later.

The Nyes had three children. One son is Bill Nye, “the Science Guy.” They divorced in the late 1970s.

After her children were grown, Jenkins-Nye earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in education from George Washington University. Her dissertation, which she defended in 1982, was titled, “Program manager tasks performed by Federal HRD practitioners as perceived  by incumbents and their supervisors.” She taught in DC schools as a substitute and at George Washington University. She then started working for federal agencies until her retirement from government work. In her mid-60s, Jenkins-Nye started a human resource firm and did consulting work.

She died on March 30, 2000, at the age of 79 and is buried in Arlington Cemetery.

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Dr. Bette Catoe Strudwick, Alpha Kappa Alpha, #NotableSororityWomen, #WHM2022

Posted on March 18, 2022 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Dr. Bette Catoe Strudwick, known professionally as Dr. Catoe, was born in 1926. In 1944, she graduated from Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. and received a scholarship to Howard University.

Although most people told her she could be a nurse, it was a physics professor who convinced her she could be a doctor. In 1948, she was awarded a B.S. in chemistry and physics and another scholarship, this time to the Howard University College of Medicine. While studying to become a doctor, she became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. Her medical school class of 75 had only seven women in it.

She married Warren Strudwick, Sr. when she was 23 and in medical school. In an interview, she said, “After I got married, they took away my scholarship because married women were not supposed to be in medical school. I persisted.”

The couple had three children, two boys and a girl. At first, her pediatrics office was in the basement of her home. She explained:

As a two-doctor family, we had to work on our schedules. When we were in medical school, my husband would come home and study, and I would come home to study and cook. I did what all other housewives did, and then did medicine. When we started working as doctors, we scheduled our work so that there would always be one parent with the children.

In the late 1950s, she and her husband, who was a surgeon, helped integrate DC area hospitals. She moved her office to a building she and other Black professionals owned in the Brightwood neighborhood.

In the mid 1960s she became a member of the Board of Trustees of the Medical Society of the District of Columbia, a position she held for more than three decades. She was involved in many community, civic, social and medical organizations. And over her lifetime she was honored by a number of those organizations.

She was honored with a drive-by celebration for her 95th birthday in 2021.

She retired from her practice in 2003. Her husband of 59 years passed away in 2008 when he was 84. She died on February 1, 2022 at the age of 95.

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Keilah Kuzminski Goff, Delta Phi Epsilon, #NotableSororityWomen, #WHM2022

Posted on March 17, 2022 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

On March 17, 1917, five young female students at Washington Square College Law, a Division of New York University, founded Delta Phi Epsilon. There were only about two dozen women enrolled in the college. The DIMES, as they are referred to, are Dorothy Cohen Schwartzman, Ida Bienstock Landau, Minna Goldsmith Mahler, Eva Effron Robin, and Sylvia Steierman Cohn. Delta Phi Epsilon was formally incorporated under New York State law on March 17, 1922.

Keilah Kuzminski Goff became a member of Delta Phi Epsilon in the 1980s at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hills. She earned a B.A. in Radio, Television and Motion Pictures. After graduation, her career took her to Mississippi.

Chapter at

She married an Air Force man and they had four children. After many deployments and five moves, the Goffs ended up back in North Carolina.  There, she began reporting for a local newspaper and immersed herself in local activities, including a regional theater company and a civic development organization.

In 2017, she received a life changing diagnosis – stage IV colorectal cancer. It lead her to become a Fight Colorectal Cancer (Fight CRC) Ambassador in 2020. Despite the pandemic, she and her fellow Class of 2020 Fight CRC Ambassadors “found creative and interesting ways to get their messages into the world” and served as “relentless champions of hope for all affected by this disease through informed patient support, impactful policy change, and breakthrough research endeavors.”

In an interview about her experience she said, “My time as an ambassador has helped me share my experience as a stage IV colon cancer patient; challenge the fears, stigmas, and misconceptions surrounding cancer; and promote better screening, prevention, and treatment.” Goff added, “I want to make sure no one ever has to face a devastating colon cancer diagnosis.”

After a valiant fight, she died on July 24, 2021, at the age of 55. The Fight CRC staff said of her, “Keilah was a light. Even though our team had only met her through Zoom, you could feel her energy and spunk for raising awareness for this disease.”

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Ruth Shellhorn, Kappa Kappa Gamma, #NotableSororityWomen, #WHM2022

Posted on March 16, 2022 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Ruth Shellhorn was born in Los Angeles in 1909. Her landscape designs, numbering close to 400 and centered in Southern California, were iconic and trendsetting. At a young age she was influenced by her neighbor, Florence Yoch, a Kappa Kappa Gamma who was a landscape architect. Shellhorn became a Kappa Kappa Gamma and a landscape architect, too.

Shellhorn wsa initiated into Kappa Kappa Gamma at Oregon State University, where she was enrolled from 1927 until 1930. She transferred to Cornell University and affiliated with the chapter there. She also served as its president. The February 1932 Key includes this information about her, “Ruth Shellhorn, our chapter president, transfer from Oregon, was awarded a gold seal for having the highest mark in architectural design. Her problem is to be placed in the college files.” Shellhorn’s goal was to earn two degrees from Cornell, one in Landscape Architecture and the other in Architecture. However, she was denied the opportunity to take an overload of classes. She left Cornell and went back to California.

 

The Cornell University chapter of Kappa Kappa Gamma

She made her way from Ithaca, New York, to Southern California, by way of the Panama Canal. While travelling through South and Central America she took notes about the exotic plants that she saw.

Shellhorn first worked with her mentor and fellow Kappa Florence Yoch and Ralph Cornell. Her marriage to Harry Alexander Kueser took place in 1940, but she continued to use her own name professionally. He left his career in banking and handled the finances for her landscape architecture firm. They worked together in a studio which was in their home.

Her first big break was her design for landscaping at Bullocks’s Department Store in Pasadena. It led to decades of working, from 1945 to 1978, with Bullock’s stores and Fashion Square shopping centers. It also helped in getting her noticed by Walt Disney. In the 1950s, she designed Disneyland walkways and plantings in the entry as well as Main Street and the Plaza Hub. The University of California Riverside was another of her landscaping projects. She also designed residential gardens, for a veritable Who’s Who of Southern Californians.

Her many honors include being named the Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year and the South Pasadena San Marino Woman of the Year, both in 1955. Kappa Kappa Gamma honored her twice with its Alumnae Achievement Award, once in 1960 and again in 2006. She became a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1971.

Cornell University also bestowed upon her with its career achievement award in 2005. At that time, it was discovered that she indeed had the correct number of courses to graduate but she had not received her degrees. That error was rectified.  She died on November 3, 2006.

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Margaret Shove Morriss, Ph.D., Delta Gamma, #NotableSororityWomen, #WHM2022

Posted on March 15, 2022 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

March 15 is the date upon which Delta Gamma celebrates Founders’ Day. Read about the founding of Delta Gamma and its connection to Phi Delta Theta, a fraternity whose Founders’ Day is also celebrated on March 15.

Margaret Shove Morriss, Ph.D., was born in 1884. While at the Women’s College of Baltimore, she became a member of the Psi Chapter of Delta Gamma. The chapter reported in The Anchora, “Our college world has been greatly excited over the important fact of the Senior Play, ‘Twelfth Night.’ It touched our Delta Gamma world, too, since Margaret Morriss took the part of the Duke.”

During her senior year, Morriss was editor-in-chief of the college newspaper, the Kalends. She also earned a Phi Beta Kappa key. Morriss graduated in 1904, several years before the institution became known as Goucher College.

She then enrolled in graduate study at Bryn Mawr. During 1906-07, Morriss went abroad and studied at the London School of Economics as a Dean Van Meter Fellow. She returned to Bryn Mawr and earned a doctorate in 1911. Her dissertation became the basis for her book, Colonial Trade in Maryland. 

Morriss moved to South Hadley, Massachusetts, where she joined the faculty of Mount Holyoke College. She taught history and also served on its board of admissions. She was an active member of the College Equal Suffrage League. From 1917-1919, she took part in the war effort and served in the Y.W.C.A. in France and New York.

In 1923, she became the fourth Dean at Pembroke College, the women’s coordinate of Brown University. During her nearly three-decade tenure at Pembroke, the enrollment of women more than doubled and the demographics shifted from local students to students from all over the country and world. One of her first tasks was overseeing the establishment of a new Women’s Building. It opened in 1927.

Morriss became a member of the board of trustees at Goucher College in 1931. In addition, she served as national president of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) from 1937-1941. The AAUW Connecticut chapter established an international fellowship in her name.

Brown University created the Margaret S. Morriss Scholarship to honor her in 1951, the year she retired. A residence hall at the university bears her name.

Morriss Hall

The Northern Connecticut Delta Gamma Alumnae Association held a Founders’ Day banquet on Friday, March 27, 1953. Morriss was a guest of honor and was presented the Delta Gamma Rose Award to her for outstanding achievement in her field.

During her career she was awarded honorary degrees from Russell Sage College, Goucher College, Mount Holyoke College, and Rhode Island State College.

Morriss, a member of the Society of Friends, was 90 years old when she died on January 22, 1975.

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Wilkie Hughes, Alpha Omicron Pi, #NotableSororityWomen, #WHM2022

Posted on March 14, 2022 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

After Wilkie Hughes graduated from Alexandria High School in Alexandria, Indiana, she entered Indiana University. There she became a member of the Beta Phi Chapter of Alpha Omicron Pi. Hughes served as Chapter President and was also President of the Junior Class. In addition, she was Treasurer of the Women’s League and a member of the Skelton Club.

After graduation in 1920, she taught Physiology and Hygiene at Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis. During the summers she worked as head nurse and night supervisor at Robert W. Long Hospital and she was President of the Indiana University Nurses Alumnae Association.

Hughes was awarded the 1925-26 Alpha Omicron Pi Fellowship in memory of Ruth Capen Farmer. The To Dragma article about the fellowship quoted the Dean of Indiana University’s School of Medicine feeling that Hughes was one of the most brilliant graduates of IU’s Nursing program.

During the summer of 1925 she worked at the Yale University School of Nursing, a training school that succeeded the Connecticut Training School for Nursing. Hughes and her friend Barbara Porter left Indianapolis on June 16 via automobile. They traveled from Indianapolis to Columbus, Ohio, and onto Cleveland. There they traveled by boat to Buffalo, New York, by way of Niagara Falls. From Toronto, they drove to Montreal. Once they crossed into the United States, they took in the New England sites before heading to the nursing school in Connecticut. That was a very ambitious trip for two twenty-something women to undertake before the advent of the interstate highway system.

In the fall of 1925, she stared a master’s degree at Columbia University. Hughes attended the Alpha Omicron Pi Founders’ Day celebration held at the Hotel Martinique that December. The four founders Alpha Omicron Pi founders were in attendance.

It appears she headed to Boston after earning her graduate degree from Columbia. In the 1930 census, she was employed by the New England Hospital for Women and Children. Ball State’s Memorial Hospital seems to have been the next stop where she taught nursing and was supervisor of nurse training.

In 1938, Hughes became general secretary of the New Jersey State Nurses Association in Newark. In March of 1944, as executive secretary of the New Jersey Nursing Council for War Service, she spoke to a group of young women at a vocational conference at Ridgeway High School in New Jersey. She was attempting to get some of them to join the Cadet Nursing Corps and she touted the opportunities awaiting women who became nurses. A 1946 publication of the American Nursing Association noted that she was Chairman of its Committee on Uniforms for Nurses in War Areas.

From 1957 to 1966, she worked for the National Practical Nursing Association. In a 1958 article in the Tucson Daily Citizen, described her thusly:

Occasionally one meets a person absolutely dedicated to a particular field of endeavor. Much less frequently, one meets a person who is both dedicated and objective. The really rare soul is one who combines dedication and objectivity with a sense of humor, a ready wit and a happy sparkly outlook on the world.

Hughes died on Saturday, October 14, 1967, after spending 14 months in the Americana Nursing Home in Anderson, Indiana. She was 72 years old.

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Georgia Neese Clark Gray, Alpha Phi, #NotableSororityWomen, #WHM2022

Posted on March 13, 2022 by Fran Becque, Ph.D.

Georgia Neese Clark Gray became a member of the Upsilon Chapter of Alpha Phi at Washburn College.

During her senior year, the second large recruitment event was a formal party at her “lovely big home.” It included dinner which was followed by a “clever Magazine Show”*. Neese and Marie Moore had the leading roles in “Alice-sit-by-the-Fire.” She previously starred in “Peg ‘o My Heart.” Although acting seemed her passion, she graduated in 1921 with a degree in economics. But acting won out, at least for her first career.

After graduation, she studied acting at the Franklin Sargent School of Dramatic Art in New York City. From 1921 until 1931, she performed with stock companies all across the country. In 1929 she married her manager, George M. Clark. Towards the end of her acting career, films were replacing touring companies and film acting was a different path than performing in front of a live audience.

She moved back to Kansas in the early 1930s when her father’s health failed. In 1935, she began working at Richland State Bank, the bank her father owned. She started as an assistant cashier.

After her father’s death in 1937, she became president of the bank. In addition, she took over all the other businesses her father had acquired over the years. An active Democrat, she was elected National Committee Woman in Kansas in 1936. She became known in Democratic circles and was an associate of Eleanor Roosevelt. Her support of Harry S. Truman early in his career was fortuitous.

Boston Globe, June 9, 1949

She was the first woman to serve as Treasurer of the United States. More than $29 billion in paper money was printed during her tenure from June 1949 to January 1953. Although she divorced George M. Clark in the mid-1940s, she kept his name throughout her professional career and the signature on the bills is “Georgia Neese Clark.” When she was offered the job, Truman noted its low salary and asked her if she could afford it. Her later recalled that reply was “Mr. President, can I afford not to?” The Senate confirmed her unanimously.

St. Louis Globe Democrat, October 24, 1950

Arizona Daily Star (Tucson), February 19, 1952

She married Andrew J. Gray, in 1953; he was a journalist and press agent. In 1964, she resigned as Democratic National Committee Woman for Kansas, citing personal reasons. Her hometown of Richland was to be razed to become a reservoir. Richland Bank moved to Topeka and was renamed Capital City State Bank. Its dedication in November 1964 was attended by the Trumans. At that time, former President Truman said of her, “She knows money affairs as well as any man, and anyone who brings their money here will know it is in charge of someone who knows how to take care of it.”

At the 1974 Alpha Phi convention, she received one of its first Frances E. Willard Awards of Achievement. Washburn University honored her with the Andrew J. & Georgia Neese Gray Theatre  on campus.

She died on October 26, 1995 at the age of 95. A celebration of her life on November 17, 1995, took place at the Topeka Performing Arts Center in its theater bearing her name.

Georgia Neese Clark Gray

 

* I have it on good authority that a Magazine Show “had to do with acting out the subject of magazine articles. It could take many forms like charades or dramatizing the subject of the article.” Thanks, Mike Raymond!

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