By Leanna James Blackwell
It was a warm Sunday in August 1953, and Katherine Butler Jones ’57 (above) had one more person to visit before leaving her childhood home in Harlem for college. A family friend, Aunt Ida, was expecting her. Aunt Ida cooked her meals on a hot plate and worked in service, spending her small savings on gifts for others. Five-dollar bills were slipped quietly into Jones’s hand during every visit. But this time, when Jones arrived at the familiar brownstone, Aunt Ida had another surprise. It was a carefully folded hundred-dollar bill, enough for transportation to and spending money at Mount Holyoke.
It was the biggest bill she had ever seen. Jones’s first-year tuition, room, and board were covered by her mother’s cashed-in life insurance policy. These sacrifices represented, she knew, years of hard work and the belief of a community in the power of education to change lives.
That belief is the frame around everything Jones has achieved since, as professor, activist, historian, and writer. After Mount Holyoke, Jones earned a master’s in education from Simmons College and a doctorate in educational administration from Harvard. She settled in Newton, Massachusetts, with her husband, Hubert Eugene “Hubey” Jones. together they raised eight children, an achievement Jones calls “a political act” for its “power to shape the future.”
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Julie Holley ’87 Says Crew’s Lessons Linger
By Maryann Teale Snell ’86
Julie Holley ’87 looks pretty serious. But behind that near-scowl of concentration are a ready laugh and spirited confidence when she tells how she wound up at Mount Holyoke, and how she joined the crew team despite using a steel hook instead of a right hand.
Rewind to spring 1983, awards night at a high school in Queens, New York. Holley, on the brink of graduation, is getting several. Jean Sudrann ’39, an MHC English professor, is also being honored. She and department colleague Marjorie Kaufman are impressed with Holley and ask where she’s going to college. To SUNY Purchase, she replies, to study music. The professors tell her, “You need to come to Mount Holyoke.” After a year at Purchase, she transferred.
In browsing MHC’s course catalogue, Holley was taken with a photo of rowers on the water. Although a star swimmer and competitor in track-and-field events (she was on the winning U.S. team at the 1984 International Games for the Disabled), she had never rowed before. But she looked at that picture hard. “I said to myself: That’s what I want to do when I get to Mount Holyoke.”
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My Struggle With Panic Disorder
By Kara C. Baskin ’00
Photo by Scott Suchman
I’m twenty eight years old, recently married, happily employed and, for two months last fall, I was terrified to leave my house. Things should’ve been peachy, really. I had a book deal in the works. Brian and I had just gotten married. My life was hectic, Type A, and organized just the way I liked it. But suddenly my fancy “happy hours” gave way to TV Land reruns; my posh dinners with media clients were replaced with yogurt and bananas; and my “for better or for worse” marriage vows were being put to the test before my wedding gown even came back from the dry cleaner’s.
I have panic disorder. An acute, debilitating form of anxiety, it affects six million Americans. Women are twice as likely as men to suffer from it, and the attacks usually begin in one’s twenties. Sufferers tend to be overachieving, highly creative, and dare I say it?—a little neurotic. Trembling, sweating, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, choking, chest tightness, and intense nausea are a few of the lovely symptoms that come on like an impromptu acid bath.
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