Reading Miriam’s Words, Mary Lou’s publication about her mother’s life and the experiences that her family had as a result of Dr. Judd’s prominence as a physician and politician, was truly an outstanding read. The letters highlighted Miriam Judd’s role maintaining independence while fulfilling the domestic obligations that came with family life. It made me think how extraordinary it was that we, 1955ers, referred to by the Dean of Students in the fall of 1951 as “the cream of the crop,” coming from divergent paths, were offered the opportunity to meet and pursue an education that otherwise, for some of us, might not have been available. What was our heritage, our influences, and how did this extraordinary opportunity enter into our lives?
Reading also about those among us whose legacy and heritage include other MHC women: grandmothers, mothers, aunts, cousins, and other distant relatives and friends, has always been gratifying to me as well. I did not have this history and have been drawn into these stories that have this common element. Nevertheless, I am reminded to look at my route to MHC, which did not include a privileged life or any direct familial relationships to the college. I think that there must be others among us as well whose thoughts bring back their own family memories that led them to South Hadley in the fall of 1951. These histories if written down would add significantly to learning about classmates with whom we had no contact while on campus. Each of us has a story to tell; exposure to it might reveal additional, equally compelling reading. These informal narratives would certainly offer to the College a glimpse into a generation that is unique."
Our Routes to Mount Holyoke
From Diana Alexanian Jalelian:
From Carolyn Brastow Pledger
WHY AND HOW I WENT TO MT. HOLYOKE
AND HOW IT CONTINUED TO FOLLOW ME
Carolyn Brastow Pledger
Though I have lived most of my life in Virginia, my roots through my father are from the beginning in what is now Massachusetts and Maine. I heard repeatedly about Mt. Holyoke having had a great grandmother from North Maine who was graduated from there in 1864. Her niece, my great aunt whom I met and loved, was graduated in about 1889. Married to a sea-ship Captain on the China run, Aunt Frances took several Holyoke friends with her periodically. My grandmother married my grandfather Brastow who was a civil engineer and professor at Maine University. He moved to Pittsburgh, PA to design bridges for the many rivers there. Hence my father was born there, where he met my mother whose family on both sides were rooted in PA where I was born. But I kept hearing about Mt. Holyoke.
When I was seven years of age, my father’s company transferred him and a friend to Front Royal, VA, the entrance to the Skyline Drive and to the Blue Ridge Mountains in the lovely Shenandoah Valley. Several fabric mills were there. He was with a new company that manufactured rayon which became essential in World War II. A graduate in chemical engineering from Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh (renamed Carnegie Mellon University in 1967), he was to be the Chief Engineer. Lovely as it was, my parents were appalled to find that the schools in VA in the 30’s and 40’s were 47th out of the then existing 48 states in terms of State-supported primary education. With its abundance of fine, updated schools today, this is hard to believe. Beneath the refined veneer of Virginia from which I learned much, we lived with racism which my parents ignored, living what they believed about equality as the rayon plant helped open opportunities for all, whites as well as blacks.
I was graduated from high school in 1950, looked at a couple of good colleges though my parents had not believed in sending me away to private school as a teen. Of course the highly esteemed University of Virginia didn’t accept women until the 1970’s. I had been fortunate with several individual teachers in drama which I loved but realized the limited possibilities for girls then on the legitimate stage which was my interest. I also was given private music lessons for a number of years, because of which I became an “advanced student” thus required to perform periodically. To this day I must have music!
Though I was the first girl born for several generations, I suddenly felt compelled to carry the family torch to Mt. Holyoke. I really don’t know what got into me, but when I announced this to my parents, I got a mixed reaction. I told them I thought they’d be pleased. They gasped, assuring me that they were, and while they “didn’t question my brains,” I simply didn’t have the background!
After several conversations, they came back to me announcing that maybe they could afford to give me one year of prep school in New England as well as college, if I was willing to work as I’d never been made to work before! For some reason I felt committed to try for that special place at the foot of the mountain for which it was named. Bless my parents and their faith in me, who had a lark in high school, acting in numerous plays and dating and attending dances with boys at the nearby Randolph Macon Academy.
Walnut Hill in Natick, Massachusetts near Wellesley College was recommended by a friend. I never had such a miserable year! However, there were blessings: the Dean was a Holyoke alumna who looked me over and decided I could do it; she would see to it! Fear entered my soul!
I was in a dorm at Walnut Hill which housed a number of post grads like me. I was allowed to join the glee club though they felt I couldn’t sing which enabled me to attend “Tea Dances” with boys and go to concerts in Boston and interact with the musicians – an extraordinary experience. A Spanish teacher was so horrified that I‘d not been taught Spanish in Spanish that she offered to tutor me for free so I could pass the language boards. This was essentially three years of Spanish in one year. The English teacher, a retired college professor, proclaimed one day that I’d probably been told I was a talented writer. I agreed that was so indeed. I was then warned that my paper would be slashed with corrections, that though there were signs of talent, I needed “discipline, discipline, discipline.” I got it and ended up publishing in their famous Blue Pencil Magazine. Oh my, what a year! So Walnut Hill shoveled me into Holyoke. From the beginning, I knew I belonged there; I was at home!
I loved Mt. Holyoke from the stimulating classes, to walking up the hill to dorms and around the lakes and waterfall and Mountain Day. I liked hanging out at the dorm talking and discussing the meaning of life until the wee small hours, to dating different characters who hove in sight on campus. I loved milk and crackers at night and sliding down the stair banisters while they cheered Chippy (my nickname then) on!
There was the time in the zoology lab when I called the professor to see what I had discovered in the microscope. Alas, I was informed it was my “eyelashes Miss Brastow!” Then at the end of sophomore year, I who had always thought I’d major in English agonized over the delicious array of tempting majors. With the patience of the biblical Job, various friends listened to me and agonized with me. Dare I try for philosophy? A friend and far better prepared student than I chose to major in religion and minor in philosophy to avoid the terrible oral examination requirements by the Philosophy Department in order to graduate. The Philosophy Department alone expected students to partake in oral exams before the faculty (like in graduate school) in addition to the written exams expected by all departments. Regardless of the results of the written test, if orals were not satisfactory, we would not be graduated, a terrifying prospect. Dare I risk this? I’d worried about getting in the place earlier; now I was worried about getting out! There were only seven of us. Why put myself through this; yet I had so many questions about life, death, faith, reality – was I going to let fear prevent me from this adventure? No, never! I had a panic attack instead, but I passed and was proudly graduated from Mt. Holyoke College.
I got my first teaching job in a fine private school in New Jersey when I merely mentioned I was a graduate of Mt. Holyoke College. It was a good thing too as my new husband was on a fellowship in graduate school; I enabled us to eat!
Years later after having and adopting children and working in the Civil Rights movement upon our unexpected return to Virginia, I had to pass an exam in my college major of 25 years past before I could apply to enter graduate school in Counseling with a Mental Health specialty. in the University of Virginia (now taking women in the 1970’s). It seems Mt. Holyoke never left me, and in many ways I have never left it!
From Wink
We are really excited about this new page suggested by Diana. Here is an opportunity to add to our legacy at the college by continuing our 50th reunion project in which so many of you participated. Essays by all of you on your journey to Mount Holyoke would be a wonderful addition to the archives. Each story is unique and special and important. Diana and Carolyn have started us off on this new journey of our history with two exceptional essays. Many of us do not have as unique beginnings to our Mount Holyoke journey but we all made the trip.
We ask that each and every one of you participate in this history even if your own story seems uninteresting to you. It is part of the big picture and unique to the Class of 1955
After all...if we can achieve 100% participation in the Mount Holyoke Fund
we can certainly achieve 100% in telling our stories.
Please do respond to this challenge and do not be shy. We're looking forward to seeing many classmates' stories about their routes through
our Mount Holyoke gates.
From Diana Alexanian Jalelian:
Our Routes to Mount Holyoke
From Diana Alexanian Jalelian:
The termination of World War I ended my family’s link with Turkey, their birthplace, home, and origin of their Armenian ancestors for generations. The Alexanians and Bynderians left to begin new lives as Americans in the United States after seeing and enduring insufferable hardships afflicted upon themselves and members of their nationality. Both my father and mother were part of the Armenian genocide of 1915-1918, when the regime of the Ottoman Empire forced Armenians to abandon all of the possessions, including property, profession, and business to face deportation, starvation, illness, and, for thousands, death. The lucky ones survived the torture and death marches into the Arabian deserts to reach foreign destinations. My father and mother’s stories are unique in that they arrived in the United States with family more or less intact, a rarity among their generation. Their lives together led me to Mount Holyoke College which ironically played a part in Armenian history by sending its graduates as missionaries to towns and villages throughout the Ottoman Empire where they established schools and churches in the interior areas of Turkey during the 19th and 20th centuries. Mount Holyoke was part of my history without my even knowing about it.
Hagop Alexanian (known as Jack in America) led his two sisters, aged 14 and 12, his brother, aged 16, and himself, aged 18, out of Tekirdag, Turkey, a seaside town not far from Constantinople (now Istanbul), into the Arabian desert, abandoning his home and the family’s successful clothing manufacturing business. Having lost his mother at an early age, his father started the trip with his children but died of typhus on the deportation road. After many months of hardship, the four remaining Alexanians arrived in Damascus, Syria. Fluent in Turkish and Arabic, and having entrepreneurial skills learned from supervising the family business of making clothing for the Turks, Hagop opened a clothing business in Syria. The young family remained there until 1918. At the end of the war, Hagop returned to his property in Tekirdag where he had buried gold, enough to send his brother, Leo, to America first, and then follow with one of his sisters after Leo sent additional money, leaving the other sister behind to join them later when more money was available. Eventually, by 1921, the Alexanian family all had arrived and settled in New York City until the two sisters married and established residences with their husbands in Michigan. My mother’s experience was slightly less traumatic than my dad’s. Since her father was a prominent American educated physician in the city of Sivas, he was allowed to practice medicine to tend to the Turkish soldiers and Turkish people who lived in the city. Most of the other Armenians had been evacuated and deported. My mother resided with a younger brother and her parents; two sisters and a brother had previously been sent to America prior to the outbreak of the war when Armenians became aware of conditions that would begin the events that were to transpire. Many other relatives of my grandparents had left Turkey in the 1870s and 1890s so there was a large extended family living in Boston, Rhode Island, and New York. These earlier arrivals had assimilated into American life and had established successful lives as physicians and businessmen. My grandfather’s mother was among the family who had left before the massacres had started and despite urging from family members to leave Turkey, he did not believe that harm would come to him since he had built the hospital in Sivas and was such a respected citizen. Unfortunately, his predictions for the safety of his lifestyle and community did not come to pass. At the end of the war, the Bynderians reunited with their three children in Philadelphia where my mother, Eleeza, enrolled in junior high school, graduating from high school in 1924. She had become fluent in English and was adept at the secretarial skills of typing and shorthand which she used later in life to help raise our family. Moving to New York to find work, Eleeza lived with cousins but work in her field was hard to find with the onset of the Depression. Nevertheless, she was willing to do what it took to survive. She often spoke of her job teaching backgammon at McCreery’s Department Store, a popular new game imported from the Middle East that had caught on in the United States. She exhibited her survival skills up to the age of ninety-four when she peacefully passed away. In New York, she had met my dad through Armenian ethnic groups, and they married in 1931, settling eventually in the West Bronx.
Hagop’s journey brought him from Istanbul to Ellis Island on January 11, 1921. His brother had found a cold water, fifth floor flat, and had rented it on 63rd street between Second and Third Avenues where the three siblings lived together. All found work, my dad as an elevator operator in a hospital, his brother as an embroiderer, and sister as a seamstress. At the same time, all went to night school to learn English. As the years passed, and their situation improved, they moved to better living conditions on 125th Street where they finally had heat, hot water, and a bathtub in their apartment. Dad learned mechanical drilling on celluloid and found a job making women’s combs, a fashion item of the 1920s and 1930s. Again, with the improvement of finances, the two brothers opened up an embroidery business called Alex Bros. in the garment district of New York which succeeded until the financial crash of 1929 when all was lost again. Undaunted by these setbacks, Hagop and Eleeza, decided to marry, at which time he bought a grocery business, and they settled down to raise a family. With the onset of World War II, my mother found work as an administrative secretary to the vice–president of a large manufacturing company. Into this environment, my brother and I were born living in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx and growing up as Americans.The tragic experiences of the genocide or as Armenians called it, “the massacres,” were never discussed by my parents within our immediate family; it was brought up only with relatives and friends who had shared similar experiences, always discussed in Armenian (a language that I somehow picked up without any formal instruction) or worse yet, Turkish, of which I had no knowledge. The point was, I later discovered, to protect my brother and me from the atrocities that they had viewed and to focus upon the good lives that America offered. My parents focused totally upon assimilation. Living in an Irish Catholic area of the Bronx, my brother and I attended the local public elementary and secondary schools where we excelled. He was placed in special classes as he had a disability resulting from polio. These small classes allowed him to skip numerous grades and graduate from high school at age fifteen. I also was recognized for my talents and placed in gifted classes graduating a year earlier than my peers. (Many years later when I was teaching Gifted and Talented students in the local junior high school in Arlington Massachusetts, I had the opportunity to contact my teacher who still lived in the Bronx and the principal of our public school who had also been in the class. It was an especially rewarding experience to reunite with them.) As my brother and I moved through the grades, there was never any question that he would leave home to attend college, Dartmouth. I, as a female, faced a different set of issues. Among my parents’ generation of Armenian immigrants, the idea of sending daughters away to college was unthinkable. However, I was fortunate in that my parents were not of this mind and associated with friends who had arrived in America prior to the genocide. These men had had the opportunity, denied to my father, to graduate from college and become professionals. However, my dad, unlike many other men of his generation, believed in the value of female education and was in accord with my mother’s desire to send me away to “boarding school.” One family friend, in particular, had a niece who had attended Mount Holyoke and informed my parents about the college, the first knowledge that we had heard about the school. I was encouraged to apply to Hunter by my guidance counselor in high school as well as to other coeducational institutions that were considered appropriate but nowhere near the caliber of the seven sister colleges. However, as my high school consisted of all girls, I was opposed to attending an all-female institution as my social life had been limited with no exposure to boys in school, and I thought that I wanted a more “normal” academic experience. Discussion with family friends continued, and it was brought to our attention that Mount Holyoke offered a scholarship to women of Armenian descent. It had been established by Hagop Bogigian in the 1870s, a successful immigrant whose rug business on Beacon Hill in Boston served such well-known Americans as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Mr. Bogigian had established his scholarship at the college in memory of his wife, an alumna, not an Armenian. Little known among Armenians of the 1950s, this generous endowment was awarded on merit as well as need but was rarely granted as knowledge of its existence was minimal. Parents and children of the diaspora had not yet achieved the wherewithal to look for resources of financial support among the outside community. Additionally, the concept of higher female education away from the primary residence was not a high priority. Not to be stopped, my mother was instrumental in investigating the scholarship and was convinced that I was an appropriate candidate to receive it. Thus, Mount Holyoke became the school for me. Reluctantly, I applied and was accepted, receiving assistance from the Bogigian scholarship for each of my four years. Entering in 1951, I quickly forgot about my gender bias, and experienced four years of unforgettable learning and achievement which changed the course of my life. It was one of the best decisions that I have ever made in my entire life. As the years have passed, I realize how much my parents endured and sacrificed to enable me to truly become a part of the American Dream that they so unsparingly provided. Sending me to Mount Holyoke College gave me the ability to offer a life of richness not only to my own family but to the hundreds of students whom I have had the privilege to teach during my professional career. POSTSCRIPT: During my sophomore year at North Mandelle while serving lunch an incident occurred which was unforgettable. The rush to eat lunch quickly and then return to routines were always filled with frenzy and a bit of chaos. I did my waitressing, not really thinking about whom I was serving, just doing it to finish up and get back to the activities of my day. On this particular day, I placed the platters on the table when I heard a classmate remark to those seated at the table, “We’re acting like a bunch of ‘starving Armenians!’” At that moment, she looked up at me regretfully and said, “Diana, I’m so sorry; I meant no offense.” (“Starving Armenians” was the term that the press at the time used to refer to the tragic circumstances that faced Armenians during the genocide.) Of course, I took none. After all, I was never a “starving Armenian.” What little I knew of the history of my ethnicity had never really caused any distress in my life. I certainly was never “starving.” The genocide was never a part of my life although I was aware of it through our ethnicity and family friends. Yet, this young woman realized that she had misspoken and perhaps felt that I had been insulted. Of importance, however, was that she quick to apologize and remedy her action. (If the person who reads this is still amongst us and remembers this situation, I would love to know who she is.) It was a moment of revelation to me not only of the people in my history but also of the people in my future.
We took each other, and the world around us, with a gravity that said we are, we matter, and you do too.
Mount Holyoke has given us permission to be fiercely, unapologetically passionate. We have been taught, over and over again, that our voices matter simply because they are our voices. Whether it was by slathering red paint on our faces for a scream-your-trachea-out Convocation or by learning to radically listen to each other in the classroom, life at MHC demands you live with a full-bodied love of living. This passion is not the passive admiring of silent appreciation.
Elizabeth McManus ‘14
It began with a trip visiting my aunties in some place called Amherst, Massachusetts, and my father speaking sternly to me over the Formica kitchen counter.
“While we’re up North visiting them,” he said, “I want you to look at Mount Holyoke College.”
“Mount Holyoke? What is that?”
“It’s a women’s college,” my father replied. I think he even braced himself for my reply.
“A women’s college?” I spat. “Over my dead body!”
Famous last words.
A week later I stood ankle-deep in Massachusetts rain looking out at a campus that I had arrived at, determined to dislike. And yet, something about that iron-wrought gate, something about the clock tower lit even in the downpour, something about it began to change my mind. I’m not sure what sealed the deal for me: if it was the cultural, racial and religious diversity I saw in the student body, or the kindness with which people helped my father and me navigate what then felt like the impossibility of ordering food in Blanchard, or the lecture I attended entitled “Harry Potter and the Power of Critical Social Thought.”
All I knew was that when I called my mother that night, I had to convince her that no, I really wasn’t kidding when I said Mount Holyoke was now my first choice school.
Every one of us who chose this school has our own story of why we chose this quirky, Hogwartsian oasis nestled in the Pioneer Valley. We came, some of us from just down the road and others, like myself, from thousands of miles away. We all came with suitcases full of wonder and trepidation. We brought with us the multitude of stories that were our childhoods. We came by way of planes and cars and trains, four years ago, to grow into our adulthood.
We were promised a place that would challenge us as much as it would comfort. For comfort, we were given M&Cs — milk and cookies — at 9:30 p.m. as small comforts for the insurmountable work each night promised. For challenge our peers and our professors pushed us to rethink and unpack and deconstruct our assumptions about gender, race, religion, sexuality, ethnicity, politics and science. And as much as our professors have given us, I think I have learned more from dinners and student-led campaigns than I ever could have in the classroom.
This passion has broken us open, it has driven us through these four years of menial jobs and incredible internships and more papers than I ever thought possible to write in a lifetime.
Passion, though, is not always perfect.
But when we honor our authentic selves, passion is always real.
As beautiful as these four years have been, they too, have not been perfect. Some of us have come to know loss for the first time, others of us have come to know loss again as an old, unwanted friend. We have endured painful ends to relationships, we have grappled with maintaining a sense of mental and physical well-being, we have learned that seemingly endless lesson that we can be very, very wrong. Living with such passion means we have the ability to feel all things — the good and the bad — deep in our bones.
But, hopefully, we have also learned that we are capable of continuing to live fiercely, regardless.
You see, this passion that swims in Mount Holyoke water is infectious. But as much as this passion, this valuing of who we are and what we have to say has cocooned us, we know this Hogwartsian place is not all that lies beyond those iron-wrought gates.
Mount Holyoke has prepared us for a world unprepared for us.
Mount Holyoke is not a community that invites the meek to stay meek. Mount Holyoke is not a community that invites those of us afraid to speak out in the classroom to stay silent. Mount Holyoke is not a community that gives a pass on prejudice without pushing back. Mount Holyoke is not a community that says you cannot have love and reason. Mount Holyoke is not a community that placidly accepts the status quo as gospel.
Mount Holyoke has given us permission to be riotous in the face of injustice.
Mount Holyoke has taught us to sing boldly when we are taught to be silent.
Mount Holyoke has taught us that saying we cannot is really just a dare for us to prove you wrong.
We've only had 2 submissions for this wonderful idea from Diana so we have printed an essay from a MHC grad of 2014 which appears below the information about emailing your stories.
Perhaps you will be interested to see what drew young people to Mt Holyoke.
We hoped this would start a conversation...Please join in!
From Elizabeth McManus 2014
