It has been a delight to interview these fascinating women of the Class of 1970 and to absorb their perspectives on the many ways that their years at Mount Holyoke College have given them full lives of joyful opportunities. These short summaries are designed to share the breadth and depth of the world of women in our class, and how each has constructed a meaningful life. Please contact Sharon Murray Lorenzo if you would like to participate!
The Authors
Click on links below for recent profiles:
Nancy Thorndike Greenspan
It is my pleasure and privilege to share with my classmates a profile of one of our own who has led a distinguished career in the years since her graduation from MHC. Nancy went to work for the World Health Organization and then completed a masters in health economics at the University of North Carolina in 1973. She then spent almost a decade at the federal agency, Health and Human Services, and married Dr. Stanley Greenspan in 1975. They had three brilliant children who are Sarah, an opera singer in Berlin; Elizabeth, a Ph. D. anthropologist and noted author of The Battle for Ground Zero; and Jake, co-founder of The Floortime Center in Bethesda MD and author of The Floortime Manual, a legacy of Stanley’s work with children with autism.
From 1982 to the present, Nancy has worked as an environmental activist and published six books, the most recent of which will launch in 2020 with Viking Press. Atomic Spy—Klaus Fuchs: Brilliance, Betrayal and the Bomb interweaves the story of Fuchs’ fight against the Nazis in Germany, his brilliance as a physicist, and his betrayal of the US design of the plutonium bomb to the Russians in 1945. Her interest in physics stems from her 2005 biography of physicist Max Born, The End of the Certain World, who won a Noble prize for his work in quantum physics.
After the tragic death of her husband in 2010, Nancy has kept active with ice dancing, power walking, and weight lifting. She adores her two granddaughters and is a board member and past president of the children’s theater, Imagination Stage, her civic pride and joy.
We are all so proud of Nancy and her many accomplishments as a tribute to the depth and breadth of our Mount Holyoke College legacy from 1970.
Sharon Murray Lorenzo
Ariele Brittain von Schrader (Becky Egle)
Today I had the pleasure of starting our class updates with a short telephone interview with Becky Brittain, who was known to most of us during her Mount Holyoke years as Becky Egle. She reminded me that she was able to convince the academic departments of dance and psychology to allow her to major in both. Her honors project explored the importance of crawling in early childhood development. These early ideas have been manifested in her later academic training and career in wonderful and productive ways.
As a full-time resident of St. Louis, Missouri, Becky now has an active practice as both a mothering coach and somatic counselor.
After leaving Mount Holyoke, she ventured west and earned a master’s degree in Dance Therapy at UCLA. In 2006, she finished a Ph.D. at the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute in prenatal and perinatal psychology. She uses her training in dance and psychology to counsel expecting and new mothers and women with eating disorders. She is also an adjunct professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She and her husband, Eric von Schrader (Yale, ’70), are currently writing a book on the importance of grand parenting.
Her field of study chronicles the complex interrelationship of mother and baby from before birth through the first year of life. As Becky explains, the health of the baby depends on the health of the mother in both physical and emotional ways. The stresses and emotional health of the mother pass in utero to the child to influence health all the way to adulthood. A left-brain tiger mom who comes home to young children needs to switch gears to a calm loving voice so that the right brain can take over for the mothering process. These are issues that might have been missed in our years in college. Perhaps they can be incorporated in the new Mount Holyoke experience for competent women who will need to function in both the right and left brain spheres of their lives.
Becky can be reached at: Becky Brittain, Mothering Coach, beckybrittain@sbcglobal.net, 314-482-7240, www.motheringcoach.com
Sharon Murray Lorenzo, President, Class of 1970
Bessy Reyna, Super Chica
Bessy Reyna responded to one of our recent class profiles, as she wanted to reconnect with classmates she had not seen since 1970. I present to you a woman whose life she feels was saved by her chance opportunity to attend Mount Holyoke College.
Born in Cuba and raised in Panama as Magdalena Betsabet, Bessy happened to see an advertisement at her local library for a Foreign Student Fellowship. She applied, and when accepted, packed her bags before her parents could change their minds. Arriving at JFK with her suitcase, she asked the cab driver to take her to South Hadley. He laughed and found her a flight to Hartford, and she was on her way.
Bessy supported her scholarship by teaching in the language labs on campus and after her graduation she went on to the University of Connecticut to complete first an MA in child development and then a degree in law, following her green card permit under the Cuban Refugee Act. After many years in law, she has moved on to a career in literature and poetry. She was one of ten women honored by the Connecticut Hall of Fame.
She has received a Lifetime Achievement Award by the CT Center for the Book, and, in 2007 received the “One Woman Makes a Difference” award by the Connecticut Women’s Education and Legal Fund (CWELF). The University of Connecticut, the University of St. Joseph and the CT Commission or Puerto Rican and Latino Affairs have also recognized her literary and community work in this state.
You can read about her literary publications on her website below, as her current projects involved chairing a local poetry festival at the Hartford Library, as well as a foster parent program and tutorials at the YMCA for young writers. One of the most fascinating projects that Bessy has produced was in coordination with the Wadsworth Athenaeum and their Amistad archives where she found memoirs from the 19th of local slaves and slave owners. In a reading with other authors, Bessy told the story of a runaway slave, Nancy Jackson, who was finally freed by the courts of Connecticut after many hearings. Freedom’s Journey in Four Voices is available at the link below.
As a former columnist for the Hartford Courant, Bessy continues to advocate for the authentic voices of the minority communities of Hartford as a contributor to CTLatinonews.com. A short poem from her collection from Voices follows (published in 1997):
She Remembers
There are voices
Women’s voices calling me
For this and that
Wanting me
For this and that
There are voices
Many voices
All but one
Call me
Call me.
See www.bessyreyna.com, www.cptv2.org, www.vimeo.com/40885349. Bessy would love to her from her Mount Holyoke sisters at mreyna@snet.net
Sharon Lorenzo, President, Class of 1970
Lorraine Broderick
Since Lorraine Broderick graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a BA in Sociology, her career path has illustrated the ways in which so many women reinvent themselves at least once a decade. After her first summer job (with a group of MHC friends) as a lobster waitress in York Harbor, Maine, Lorraine went on to receive a Masters in East Asian Studies from Stanford University, then worked at a different job every year for the next 10 years.
She began at Cal Tech in the office of Career Planning and Placement, taught English as a second language in Los Angeles, helped people quit smoking in Portland, Oregon, guided and escorted tours from Boston to New York, and Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. The MHC career office helped her land a job as Assistant Dean of Admissions at Wells College in Aurora, NY. She went on to become Associate Dean of the College at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.
Lorraine was always a huge fan of the daytime serial All My Children. In 1981, she wrote a letter to the show’s creator, Agnes Nixon, who hired her as Writers’ Assistant and became her mentor. Lorraine worked her way up to become Head Writer of All My Children, then went on to a 30-year career in daytime television. She led the writing of the Guiding Light, As the World Turns, Days of our Lives and One Life to Live, and worked as a staff writer on Port Charles and Another World. She won six Daytime Emmy Awards, the Writers’ Guild Award and the GLAAD award. She traveled to Moscow to develop a treatment for the Ugly Betty series in Russia. Lorraine returned to the US to serve as Head Writer for the final years of her favorite show, All My Children from 2010 – 2011.
Lorraine currently works as Associate Writer for one of the four remaining daytime serials, Days of Our Lives. She lives in New York, where she is married to retired clinical psychologist, Ronald Delehanty. They have two daughters: Annie Hogate, English teacher at the Lexington School in Kentucky, and Julia Delehanty, Assistant Casting Director for the Broadway musical Matilda.
Lorraine is another example of a woman from our wonderful Class of 1970 who has used her MHC education in unexpected ways.
She would love to hear from fellow classmates. Her email is lorrdell@aol.com
Sharon Lorenzo, President, Class of 1970
Merrill Wasserman Sherman
Merrill, like many of our classmates, has had a very successful career path since she left Mount Holyoke College in 1970. She attributes this to hard work, a bit of luck and a few instances on campus that truly got her going. One was a random elective she took from a new professor, Chuck Trout, on the history of women’s achievements. After graduation when she returned home to Denver and her mom nicely asked, “Honey, when are you going to get a job??” she took a stab at being the messenger for a local law firm. Shortly thereafter she enrolled at the University of Denver College of Law and one success has flowed into the next ever since.
Following a seventeen-year practice of corporate law and real estate finance, Merrill became President and CEO of the Eastland Bank in 1991. By 1993 she was hired to run the New First National Bank of Vermont. In 1996 she co-founded the Bank of Rhode Island, a state-chartered commercial bank and served as its President and CEO. The bank was formed as the result of her group’s successful bid on 12 branches being divested by Fleet Financial Group.
In 2011, after navigating the growth of that entity to $1.6B in assets, she successfully negotiated its merger with Brookline Bancorp. The transaction produced an approximately 400% return for the corporation’s shareholders, compared to about 30% for the S&P 500 Index for the comparable sixteen-year period.
Merrill now has up her own consulting practice and is currently serving as the Special Master for the Federal District Court of Rhode Island for hundreds of foreclosure cases.
Also a great passion for Merrill is her service in the non-profit arena, formerly as chairman of the Rhode Island School of Design and as a trustee of Johnson and Wales University. For all of this time and effort, she has been named one of the top 25 most influential business leaders in Rhode Island.
Currently operating from her Providence office and residence in Jamestown, Rhode Island, Merrill keeps in touch with a number of her MHC classmates. The network continues to thrive and brings us back to friends to share in our many experiences since our campus days.
She would be delighted to hear from you: msherman1@cox.net
Sharon Lorenzo, President, Class of 1970
Jane Hiller Farran
Jane graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1970 with an honors degree in English. Those writing and reading skills have evolved into a life’s career in management and teaching. She is now a Fellow at the Wharton School, developing and teaching in programs for executives at the University of Pennsylvania. She has also established an active executive coaching practice.
With both an MBA and Ph. D in finance and management from Syracuse University, Jane has authored papers and designed executive programs for companies who want to develop team effectiveness and global organizational leadership. Jane credits her English lit major with teaching her about identifying patterns—in prose style, imagery, symbols and themes. Analyzing executive behavior and organizational issues and teaching executive effectiveness is all about identifying patterns, too—they’re just different patterns from those in literature.
Jane is involved with the Mount Holyoke Club in Philadelphia and on the board of directors of PathwaysPA, a non-profit organization that provides services to low-income women and children in Southeastern Pennsylvania, helping them achieve self-sufficiency.
She gives her parents and MHC much of the credit for establishing her sense of confidence in her ability and the belief that she could stand shoulder to shoulder with men in any position for which she was qualified. “I was a tomboy as a girl—with 2 brothers that came easy! My parents always impressed on us that while there were legitimate differences between us, the options and the opportunities were largely equal. Given that upbringing, Mount Holyoke was a natural fit for me, and my parents made it clear that they were proud of my being there.”
“My experience at MHC built on and enlarged the sense of self-worth and opportunity that my parents had begun. At Holyoke, I felt both my individuality and my belonging. While we all had different gifts and different interests, we were all highly capable and valuable individuals, acknowledged and respected by the faculty. This is the stuff of which confidence and positive self-image are born.”
Sharon Lorenzo, President, Class of 1970
Pamela Thiele
Pam, our indefatigable former class president and three-time reunion chair, has spent her years since graduation not pursuing a land-shaking career. She has successfully promoted her passion and activist causes, especially in the area of women’s and gay rights.
“Certainly going to Mount Holyoke College solidified my conviction that women can do anything men can, and generally better,” she said. “And it strengthened my resolve to speak out against discrimination despite the consequences I could, and often have, faced.”
With a major in English Composition but more credits in English Literature than any prior student, Pam entered Northwestern University immediately after graduation and earned a Master of Arts in English. It was during this two-year program that she was finally diagnosed with dyslexia. When asked how she ever got into and through Mount Holyoke, Pam merely said, “I’d figured out how to compensate.”
After grad school, Pam worked as a reporter for a small bi-weekly newspaper in New Jersey, and then in New York City as a copywriter for Bloomingdales and Avon. Eventually she migrated to eastern Long Island, to the village of Sag Harbor, where she managed a garden store, worked for the U.S. Census, and taught creative writing to senior citizens.
After several years, she got a job at the Sag Harbor Express as a reporter and met the woman who is her soul mate and would become her spouse, Lauren Fortmiller, the first openly gay major of Sag Harbor.
Although Pam always thought she’d end up in New England, after 16 years in Manhattan and 16 in Sag Harbor, she and Lauren moved to Lakewood, Colorado, in 2007.
During those 32 years, wherever Pam lived, she demonstrated, rallied, petitioned and agitated for women’s rights and LGBT quality as a member of NOW, Empire Pride, the ACLU and the Human Rights Campaign.
When she and Lauren made the move to Colorado, that state had just passed a constitutional amendment prohibiting same gender marriage. They have worked tirelessly to get equal rights for Colorado gays. “We’re not there yet, but we have moved forward,” Pam said.
Eight months ago, the Colorado legislature adopted a law permitting civil unions. During the legislative hearings leading up to this, Pam and Lauren became the featured couple on the nightly local NBC news for several weeks. Their civil union, which took place at 12:01am, May 1, was also televised.
On Oct 19, they were celebrated in a wedding ceremony of holy union in the Methodist Church. The service itself was in rebellion against the laws of the Methodist Church, but the entire congregation had voted in favor of it, and most of them attended. “Our processional was ‘Born This Way.’’’
What’s next? Full civil marriage in Colorado and across America. “When we travel, we go from being married in one state to being nothing in another, which is a crazy way to have to live. Our rights dissolve and reappear on a state-by-state basis.”
In her spare time, Pam has become a quilter of note. Her creations are modern and edgy (“I can’t do symmetrical—it’s the positive side of dyslexia.”) They’ve been displayed at juried shows in Ireland, Denver and the most prestigious, The International Quilt Show in Houston. This writer is thrilled to have a Pam Thiele original that she received for some class fundraising performed for our 25th Reunion.
Pam keeps in touch with a number of her MHC classmates. The network continues to thrive and brings us back to friends to share in our many experiences since our campus days. She would be delighted to hear from you at pamthiele@comcast.net
Barbara Cooke Monks, Vice-president, Class of 1970
Clara Wong
Clara Wong may be remembered by her classmates as a major in the Religion Department with minors in Pre-med Chemistry, English and Psychology. For me, she was a new friend whose tales of her years on campus and thereafter are about how she blossomed into a diverse career path that used her interest in all of these fields. They have unfolded in her years since graduation like the many petals of a beautiful flower!
Starting as a banking employee for the Union Trust Company in New Haven following graduation, Clara told a story about this career initiative: A senior officer of the bank asked her how she got to be in charge of the design and development of the international banking operations as a religion major and she replied, “When you have a good foundation from Mount Holyoke College, the rest is easy.”
Following her years in New Haven, Clara returned to school to complete a Masters in Divinity at the Crozer Theological Seminary in Rochester, New York. She then led her own congregation in Oshkosh, Wisconsin for a number of years. More recently she has been the special assistant to the Deputy General Secretary of the National Council of Churches in New York, where she continues to reside today. She is intrigued with the overlap of the disciplines of religion and other fields like education and community development, since she has also been a frequent advocate for interfaith dialogue and projects that bring people of many religions into cooperative learning.
A fascinating part of Clara’s life involves her hobby of making jewelry and designing glass beads of her own. As she wrote for the 10thAnniversary Bead Project show in New York: “My glass art evolves from a deep, centered, focused spiritual attentiveness. A quiet playfulness sometimes changes my design image in my mind as I am applying the molten glass. In my pieces is an appreciation for movement in the natural-created order and its effect on our sense of place and identity with the colors blending and bursting. At other times colors are the medium to birth the feeling of energy patterns or merging feelings of majesty or grace or brilliance and strength.”
In summary Clara stated: “I am an American-born Chinese woman, who has been gifted with the experience of living in the wealth of a country setting at childhood and the poverty of access to resources in inner city communities. I was fortunate to have an Ivy League education, which encouraged clarity of thought and innovative, groundbreaking ideas. My interests are diverse and complex. I am equally at home watching an ant with a small child or listening to a lecture about astrophysics. The juxtaposition of conceptual constructs with nascent perspectives intrigues and excites me.”
Clara Wong can be reached at clara.wong@att.net
Sharon Murray Lorenzo, President, Class of 1970
Terry Jean Seligmann
Terry was a member of the class of 1970, who as a bold adventure in the early days of co-education, spent her senior year at Dartmouth College. She managed to do this her senior year and still graduate, thanks in part to the nationwide campus strike that allowed her to avoid Political Science comprehensive exams.
Following her summer of 1969 internship with Victoria Schuck’s program in Washington for the Housing and Urban Development Agency, she took the federal service entrance exam and wound up in New York City buying paper clips for the government. It beat the alternative, which was to be an agricultural inspector upstate. After a brief interval, she enrolled at NYU Law School, which was then leading the way in admitting substantial numbers of women. She made the law review there and after graduation headed to Massachusetts to be the law clerk to Judge W. Arthur Garrity during the first year of busing desegregation in Boston.
Terry did stints in the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office and the Supreme Judicial Court’s office of staff counsel, as well as holding jobs in law firms with litigation practices. As her two children arrived by plane from Colombia, she transitioned into teaching legal writing skills full-time. Starting out at Suffolk University, she joined the tenure track at the age of 48 at the School of Law at the University of Arkansas. She currently teaches at Drexel University’s Earle Mack School of Law in Philadelphia, where she has been the Arlin M. Adams Professor of Legal Research and Writing since that school opened its doors in 2006.
Terry also teaches and writes on special education law, an area she had to engage with personally for one of her two children. One of her articles in 2000, “ Not as Simple as ABC: Disciplining Children with Disabilities,” was very important to me, as I am helping one of my daughters struggle with the parenting of a young child with autism in a state which resists publicly funding education for this condition.
Terry is a gifted legal scholar who has definitely put her MHC degree to work at the top of her field. We salute all those efforts and skills, and I am thrilled to have her as my neighbor in Pennsylvania.
Terry can be reached at tjs57@drexel.edu
Sharon Murray Lorenzo, President, Class of 1970
Kathleen Pierson Eagle
A White Woman’s Sojourn in Indian Country
In the spring of my junior year, a girl from South Hadley moved in to Wilder Hall with me, as my former roommate had transferred to the University of Michigan. Kathy was a lovely replacement, and we learned a great deal from each other. As an English major, she chose a summer job which made her miss graduation, but she landed on the Standing Rock Sioux Lakota Reservation in North Dakota as a high school English school teacher.
Much to the amazement of all, Kathy fell in love with Clyde Eagle, a real cowboy and a member of the Hunkpapa, Sitting Bull’s band. They were married in the fall of 1970. The couple went into cattle ranching, and had three children while Kathy continued to teach, get her MS in secondary school administration. Her husband did the same under the GI bill for both a BS and an MS. Kathy served as president of the ND Council of Teachers of English and a member of the state curriculum council. She started writing women’s fiction before the couple moved to Minneapolis, where Clyde taught elementary school and was named Minneapolis Teacher of the Year.
While Clyde has retired from teaching and the couple is raising two of their grandchildren, Kathy teaches writing classes at the Loft Literary Center. She served on the board of Romance Writers of America, is an award-winning New York Times bestseller, and is working on her 46th novel.
You can follow her progress on her blog: ridingwiththetopdown@wordpress.com or catch up with her at www.facebook.com/kathleen.eagle1.Her website, kathleeneagle.com, tells the stories of titles like Night Falls Like Silk, Cowboy Take Me Away and her latest, The Last Good Man.
Finding Kathy again and hearing the brave story of her adventures west of the Mississippi is another example of a Mount Holyoke grad using her skills to better America. On our college calendar this year, there is a photo of Ruth Muskrat, Class of 1925, who became the Secretary of the National Congress of the American Indian. Haven’t Ruth and Kathy both added so much to our legacy of what a great education can bring to a woman’s life? What Kathy has done with her gift of competency and sense of adventure is something for us all to applaud and treasure.
Kathy can be reached at kathleen.eagle@comcast.net
Sharon Murray Lorenzo, President, Class of 1970
Catherine Harvey Murray-Rust
Catherine is a graduate of the class of 1970 whose early skills in political science with Ruth Lawson led her to a broader focus on ever-expanding library needs in our changing world. Her educational background has ranged from graduate work in African politics and international relations at the University of Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania, to a graduate degree in library and information studies from the University of London in 1974. In 2003 she was a Senior Fellow in the UCLA Graduate Department of Information Studies.
In her early career, Catherine worked for Reuters News Agency and Oxfam in London. Since then her career in library science has spanned the United States. She spent more than twenty years in a variety of positions at Cornell University Libraries. She also served as dean of libraries at Colorado State, associate university librarian at Oregon State, in addition to her current position as Vice Provost for Learning Excellence and Dean of Libraries at Georgia Institute of Technology, where she also teaches in the Honors Program.
In 2009, shortly after moving to Atlanta, Catherine was diagnosed with colon cancer. Her insurance in Colorado would not have covered the routine colonoscopy which saved her life. Catherine appeared on the CBS Evening News to advocate for the importance of screenings. She underwent surgery and chemotherapy, and one and a half years later, ran the women’s marathon in San Francisco (her third.)
In addition to family responsibilities with her two grown children, Catherine recently took a group of students from Georgia Tech on a study abroad trip to Europe. Traveling on a bus with fifty undergrads was fun, but a reminder of what it is like to be a student, visit museums all day and try to party all night!
Catherine enjoys the company of her peers in organizations like the Library Administration and Management Association, where she is a mentor in its Leadership Initiative Program. Catherine is an outstanding example of an MHC graduate who is capable, competent and at the top of her game in higher education.
Sharon Murray Lorenzo, President, Class of 1970
Pamela B. Stuart
Her Journey from South Hadley to the Nation’s Capital
I had the opportunity to interview Pam Stuart, who has been an active member of our class with her volunteer efforts with both the Alumnae Association and the Art Museum. After a summer internship as a Political Science major with U.S. Senator Birch Bayh, Pam wanted to be a legislative assistant but instead went directly to the University of Michigan Law School, where she was one of 28 women in the entering class of 366. At the time, there were fewer than 15,000 women lawyers in the entire United States. She spent a semester at the Center for Public Policy, a public interest law firm, in the fall of 1972. There she worked with the late Justice Arthur Goldberg, drafting memos and comments on the rights and responsibilities of outside directors of public and non-profit corporations. This work influenced the insurance industry to offer directors’ and officers’ liability insurance.
Pam’s desire to be a public-interest lawyer led her to the Bureau of Consumer Protection of the Federal Trade Commission upon her law school graduation in 1973. A course in trial advocacy given by the fledgling National Institute for Trial Advocacy gave Pam an advantage in the stiff competition for a job at the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. She was the 25th woman hired in the history of that Office as an Assistant United States Attorney. As a federal prosecutor she tried fifty jury trials and argued numerous appeals in the federal and local courts of the District of Columbia.
She won a precedent-setting case, United States v. William Powell, which changed the law in D.C. on murder while armed with a car. Pam left the US Attorney’s Office in 1985 to join the Office of International Affairs at the Justice Department where she represented foreign governments in federal court in extradition cases and assisted foreign and US prosecutors with internationally significant prosecutions.
Pam entered private practice in 1987 and established her own practice in 1992. While a member of the bar in New York, D.C., Maryland, Virginia and Florida, she has worked primarily in the District of Columbia in many areas of both civil and criminal practice including estate planning and wealth management. She was voted one of Washington’s “Best Lawyers” by Washingtonian Magazine in 2004 and has been a “SuperLawyer” since 2009.
As a strong proponent for women’s rights, she has handled employment cases involving discrimination and sexual harassment as well as medical malpractice cases including birth trauma and failure to diagnose breast cancer. She has represented people in the intelligence community on security clearance matters including a female CIA employee who was told she was too attractive for an overseas assignment. We all should know that she has represented authors in book contract negotiations with publishing houses. Today she is counsel to Simon & Partners in New York and has her own offices in Washington and Vero Beach, Florida.
When we all look back at our own days on the Mount Holyoke campus, we can take great comfort in knowing that many among us have gone on to productive lives as independent women making a difference in their worlds with leadership and confidence. Pam is one of those, and we applaud her for all the good work she has done with the education she received at Mount Holyoke College.
Sharon Murray Lorenzo, President, Class of 1970