On a snowy afternoon in late January, in her art-filled home, she shared her thoughts on what it was like growing up during the Depression; the wonderful education she received at Vassar, Yale, and in the WAVES; her love of teaching; and her thoughts on what she thing – at 89 – thinks it takes to age successfully.

When and where were you born? And where are you in the family line-up?

I was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1921. I was the third child, the baby. My older sister, Sally, was a doctor. And I had a five-year-older brother, Bill. He was a coast guard helicopter pilot during World War II. Then he was an engineer for Schlumberger. He was one of the first people to work on printed circuit boards. He was doing all that electronic stuff that we think of a ‘magic' today.

What did your parents do professionally?

My mother graduated in 1911 from Vassar College, and was basically a homemaker before it became apparent, after the stock market crash in 1929, that if we were ever going to get the education she wanted for us, she was going to have to go to work.

Because of the Depression, the public school district was looking for ways to cut costs and they were starting to ‘jump' students. I had already skipped one grade and they were going to skip me another. That was too much for mother. She got a part time job at The Mrs. Day Girls School, so that I was able to go there.

My father graduated from Yale, in forestry, also in 1911. He started working in the South, for a lumber company, but that didn't work out, so he came back [to New Haven] and went into brokerage and investments. He was a victim of the stock market crash and in and out of institutions until I was in college.

So your mother had more influence on you growing up than your dad?

Yes, but I was very close to dad, too, especially when I was a little kid. He was an athlete, and I was, too. In college I was on six varsity teams.

As a child, what were you good at in school, and not so good at?

When mother went to work at The Mrs. Day School, I started there. I was a very ‘fresh' kid, so I was in trouble – not bad trouble – but the director of the school still seemed to be quite fond of me.

When I graduated in 1938 I was 16 and had been the top student in the school from the 5 th to the 12 th grade. I very much liked science, but I wasn't particularly fond of English, except when we studied Shakespeare. And I was on all the [sports] teams at school, though since there were only 14 in my class, practically everyone was on one team or another.

I won the Connecticut State Championship in both singles and doubles tennis when I was 15. I took up serious tournament tennis again when I was 65. I did very well, ending up ranked 4 th in the country in doubles and 5 th in singles. I continued being nationally ranked until I was 85. Then I had unsuccessful shoulder replacement surgery and that was the end of that.

You came of age at the height of the Depression. How do you think that impacted the person you are today? Or do you think it did?

My mother's father was wealthy – he owned a company that provided all the hardware used on carriages – and he bought our house for her. That was a real help because we didn't have to worry about where we would live when daddy could no longer work.

All of us that grew up during the Depression are very careful of money. I never had an allowance: no one had money for that kind of thing.

Today, I'm horrified when I see students on campus, who I know can't afford it, drinking what I know is a $4 cup of coffee. That's not to say I'm ‘tight,' because I've enjoyed being able to have money and being able to use it and give it away. I can't imagine paying $500 for a dress.

You went to Vassar for your undergraduate degree. What were you planning on doing with your degree after college?

Because I'd skipped grades, I started college when I was sixteen and graduated when I was 20. My first year, I had some scholarship assistance from the New Haven Vassar Club and each year I got a bit more assistance. My senior year I received The Janet Warren Shaw Scholarship, a full scholarship given for leadership.

When I went to Vassar I majored in biology. That's because I wanted to be a medical illustrator and illustrate books for high school students. At college I had a lot of trouble killing my lab animals, so I worked it out with others that they would bump off my animals and I'd do their drawings. It was a fair deal.

I minored in art and took life drawing and painting classes. But at Vassar for every drawing or painting class you took you also had to take an art history class. And I found that I loved the art history courses.

When you graduated from Vassar in 1942, you went right into the Navy, in the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). What was your job and rank in the Navy?

I didn't go right into the Navy. The summer after I graduated I had a job at the Yale Medical School doing cancer research, and I'd hoped to do an internship in medical illustration at the school that fall. But by then the doctor with whom I'd hoped to do the internship had left for the Pacific. He was with the Yale Medical Unit. People can't imagine today what it was like during World War II. Everyone was involved in the war.

For some reason, I'd written the Dean at Vassar – a very saucy letter – and the next thing I knew I got a call telling me to go to New York City and take a test – and it was a tough test – for the WAVES. When I got there I felt like a real hay-seed. The room where they were doing the test was full of all these very professional and sophisticated looking women.

Labor Day weekend I got a telegram telling me to report back to where I'd taken the test. I went and they said: Hold up your right hand. I took an oath and I was in the WAVES. I thought there would at least be a physical exam, but that was it.

You were a properly brought up young woman with a degree from Vassar. What did your family and friends think of your decision to join the Navy?

When I came back home that night and told my folks I was in the Navy, mother said: Are you sure you're in the Navy ? And I said: Well, that's what they told me when they told me to report to the Officer Training School in Northampton [Massachusetts], where the Navy had taken over a part of the Smith College campus.

Daddy thought it was great. And, as for my friends, a lot of classmates from Vassar, and the Dean at Vassar, were involved in the WAVES.

What did you do in the WAVES?

I was in the first group of WAVES and we were all assigned in communications. For that, to be involved with codes and ciphers and transcriptions and very sensitive communications, you had to be an officer in the Navy, so the first thing was naval training to be an officer. When I finished training – we ‘graduated in October of 1942 – I was an ensign.

After training, my orders were to stay at the base and teach, so I became an instructor in codes and ciphers. I taught there three years, leaving in May of 1945 [with the rank of Lieutenant j.g.]. One reason I left was that Seth and I were expecting our first child.

I went home to New Haven and stayed with my parents and I thought about medical school, and talked a lot about it with my sister who was going to medical school, but with a new baby I knew I couldn't do that. So, with the GI Bill, I enrolled in the Art History Program at Yale. It was a wonderful…There were only three people in the program at that time, so it was very rigorous.

When and how did you meet your husband, Seth? And when did you marry?

I met him my last year at Vassar, through his sister, Sylvia . He was at Yale, going full-time in the Navy's ROTC program there, and when I came home one weekend I invited him to the house for dinner. Then I invited him to be my date for senior prom. That summer, since the medical school where I was working was so close to the Yale campus, we'd have lunch together a lot. And we started spending a lot of time together on weekends, sailing.

He was surprised when I told him I'd joined the WAVES and about two weeks after I'd gone to Northampton for my training, he took the train up to the Smith campus – and proposed. The ring was so big that it wouldn't even stay on my thumb . We got married in June of 1943 and then he went down to Norfolk [Virginia] to take up duties on his destroyer. Whenever it came in, we would be able to get together, usually in New York City.

What brought you and your husband to Cleveland in 1948?

Seth had finished his law degree at Yale, and I'd finished my art history degree at Yale, and he had to find a job. I'd have been perfectly happy to stay in New Haven.

We had visited Cincinnati, where Seth had grown up, but he didn't want to go there, where the expectation would be that he'd of course work for a law firm where Tafts had always worked. So he kept looking. He ‘looked' all the way out to Seattle, but finally decided on Cleveland because it was a city that had a reputation for being very civic minded. He joined Jones Day in Cleveland, because it was a fine law firm.

He came out around Christmas in 1948, and I came out a couple of months later with our three year old son, Rick [Frederick]. For the first couple of months we lived with a cousin, Jane Ingalls, till we bought a house on Bellfield Avenue in Cleveland Heights. We were there for seven years. In 1953 we started building our house in a community that we had started in Pepper Pike.

With your husbands “life” in politics, I'm wondering why you, yourself, never got interested in politics?

Because he was in politics. And it's not that I wasn't politically involved, it's that I was doing things behind the scenes. I did a lot of writing for him. And when he was running for mayor of Cleveland [1967], I was speaking at a campaign-related function almost every night.

He lost the election to Carl Stokes, and became a County Commissioner and was there for eight years. While he was commissioner, he was very straightforward. He didn't just hand people jobs, he made sure they took tests so that the person best-qualified for the job got it.

You've been married 68 years and have four successful kids. Both you and your husband chose very demanding careers – he in law and public service and you in teaching and, for lack of a better way to put it, behind-the-scenes public service. How did you make your marriage work?

I don't think either of us was ever much for ‘just sitting.' When we built our house [1953], I took half-a-year off from teaching to do work on the house, and I probably saved more money doing the exterior and interior painting and tiling in the bathrooms and the kitchen and things like that than I'd have made teaching. He worked on everything in the house made of wood: the shelving, the cabinetry, our dining room table and chairs. And he never took a day off work. Everything he did was at night or on the weekends.

We both were responsible for the kids when they were little. Today, Rick is a lawyer, Tom is a financial officer, Cindy is an English professor at MIT, and Tucker is a computer entrepreneur. But I have to say that he was never what you would call much of a disciplinarian. That usually fell to me….But for the most part, the kids were always good, and good students, too.

And I was always volunteering. I could never say no, not when it had to do with education. The year he ran for mayor I was head of the Board of Trustees at Laurel School, and head of the Alumni Association of Vassar College, and I was also responsible for my graduating class's 25th reunion.

I couldn't have done any of that without Seth's support. He never, got out of sorts. Ever.

You've been teaching Art History, primarily at the Cleveland Institute of Art, since 1950. That's 61 years. On a personal level, what got you so interested in, and committed to, teaching?

The Navy actually made me a teacher. It's there that I learned how to teach, how to present information so that people got it. And it's there that I realized that I really enjoyed teaching. That's one reason, when the war was over, I decided to get my masters degree in Art History.

I'd have loved teaching at the high school level, but when I interviewed for a job at a local high school, the superintendent told me that he'd hire me to start teaching the next day, but that to keep the job I'd have to start coursework for a teacher's certificate. I told him no thanks.

When we'd first moved to Cleveland, I met the director of the Cleveland Institute of Art. One day, in October of 1950, he called me and told me that his dean had died and asked me if I would come in and take over teaching his [the director's] Art History classes. I've been there ever since…I'm not just teaching art, I'm showing students the influence art has on society, on politics, science, technology.

As I look at you, it's apparent that you are definitely aging well. What do you do on a regular basis to stay physically, mentally and emotionally “fit?”

To stay physically fit, for the longest time I played a tremendous amount of tennis. But due to shoulder surgery I can't do that, so now I'm going to exercise classes twice a week. All the people in the class are athletes, so I have to work to keep up.

Seth has some memory problems, so twice a week we go to a really good fitness gal and she works with both of us in terms of muscle strengthening and range of motion and things like that.

In terms of intellectual fitness, teaching keeps me stimulated. And I'm writing, too. I thought, back in college, that I was a lousy writer, but when I look back on the classes I was in, five classmates became professional writers.

Probably the most intellectually stimulating stuff I'm reading right now is in my field of pre-Colombian Art. There's so much going on in terms of research and discovery, and I have to stay up on that so that I can integrate the material into the lectures that I do twice a week. I read popular publications, too, but I have to admit, I do have problems getting through The Economist . And I'm always listening to stations like WCPN when I'm driving.

As for staying emotionally fit, that means staying active, but I'm not talking about jumping up and down. I'm talking about staying connected with people, engaging in conversations with the people around you and being open to new ideas and new information.

You've been an athlete all your life. What role do you think having been physically active has played in helping you maintain your health and vigor now, today.

I think it was essential. For me, exercise has always helped maintain more than just my physical health. I've had a bout or two of depression, and I know that was because I wasn't getting the exercise I was used to getting.

MythBusters is all about successful aging. But different people have different definitions of what that is. What is your definition of successful aging?

I think it's keeping up as many of the activities as you can that you enjoy and keeping up – no keeping connected – with your friends…When there are people over, and there is a good conversation going, that gives me a lot of pleasure.

One of the things I really miss about not being able to play competitive tennis anymore is the people who'd become my friends. We'd get together every year for a week or so and we weren't just playing tennis, we were playing catch-up, too. I can't stand some of the conversations I overhear today, where they are yakkity-yaking about the latest styles or TV shows. But I don't want to sound like I just want to be with people who are like me. I've always made it a point, and not just with my teaching, to be with, to engage with, people who are different than me, not just younger than me.

You've been given dozens of awards and prizes and citations. If you could be remembered for only one thing you have accomplished professionally , what would that one thing be?

It would be getting the Victor Schreckengost Award for outstanding excellence in teaching from CIA. That was last year. The main thing about being a good teacher is that you aren't just presenting students with information, you are getting them interested, opening them up to new experiences and ideas.

If you could be remembered for only one thing you have accomplished personally , what would that be?

I have four awfully nice kids.

This has been a long interview, but I know I've missed things. So what did I not ask that I should have?

About what people call my ‘passion' for Pre-Columbian art. But it's not so much that I have a passion for Pre-Columbian art, it's that I enjoy seeing others become passionate about it.

And my attitude about life. And that is: As long as you can do what you like, do it.

And my approach with people. I expect to get along with just about anyone and I'm always looking for a way to make that happen, to engage them, to make them so comfortable with me that they can laugh.

And that was something that I think I learned from my mother.

And since you asked, I thought I'd mention the fact that I can't sing. My mother was tone deaf, and I think I probably got that from her, too.

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