James Albert Michener (1907-97), Writer & Novelist: 03/01/2008

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

May Cravath Wharton, M.D. (1873-1959), Founder of Uplands Retirement Village, Pleasant Hill, TN, USA

May Cravath Wharton, M.D. (1873-1959), Founder of Uplands Retirement Village, Pleasant Hill, Tennessee, USA.

By Franklin Parker & Betty J. Parker, 63 Heritage Loop, Crossville, TN 38571-8270.

From Franklin & Betty J. Parker, "Wharton, May Cravath (1873-1959), Tennessee Encyclopedia & Culture. Ed. By Carroll Van West, et. al. Nashville: Tennessee Historical Society, 1998, pp. 1050-1051.

She was Dr. May to friends, doctor woman of the Cumberland's to others. Babies she delivered were called Dr. May babies. By foot, horseback, tin lizzie, on poor roads, in all weather, she made calls to remote cabins on the Cumberland Plateau, middle Tennessee. Her dream of a hospital in Pleasant Hill became Cumberland Medical Center, Crossville. The May Cravath Wharton Nursing Home and Uplands Retirement Community, both in Pleasant Hill, are her dreams come true.

She was born on a Minnesota farm, a sickly child. Family friend and physician Aunt Addie's nursing and gift of Home Doctor Book may have inspired May to become a doctor.

She finished high school at Carleton Academy (1889-90), Rochester, Minn., attended Carleton College (1890-93), and the University of North Dakota (1894-95, B.A.), studied in Europe (1897), taught at the University of North Dakota (1898-99), and earned a University of Michigan medical degree (1905).

She applied to the mission board, which then wanted only married missionaries. Disappointed, she practiced medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. There she met and married Edwin R. Wharton (1867-1920). They accepted a call to a Cleveland, Ohio, settlement house, he as director, she as physician (1907-09). Hard work took its toll. She needed rest. They bought a New Hampshire farm. He served small churches. She practiced medicine (1909-17).

In 1917 he became principal of Pleasant Hill Academy, 11 miles west of Crossville, Cumberland County. Its uniqueness went back to 1883 when resident Mrs. Amos Wightman asked the American Missionary Association (AMA, Boston) to send a trained teacher. Mary Santly, who taught a three-month school (spring 1884), said a minister was needed. The AMA sent Maine-born Benjamin F. Dodge (1818-97). He largely built Pleasant Hill Academy (1884-1947), by necessity a boarding school for widely spread community children. He also built and was pastor of First Congregational Church (since 1885).

Tall and shy, May Cravath Wharton taught health courses and was physician to students, faculty, and scattered communities. She worked tirelessly through the 1918 influenza epidemic. She won respect and distinction as the Doctor Woman of the Cumberland's.

In November 1920 Edwin R. Wharton died suddenly. Dr. May faced a dilemma. Five neighbors came with a letter from 50 families. "The people here want you to stay. We will pay you monthly and help build the hospital. We cannot do without you."

Dr. May stayed. She was helped in her dream to build a hospital by Massachusetts-born Pleasant Hill Academy art teacher Elizabeth Fletcher (1870-1951), who raised funds, and English-born, Canadian-trained Registered Nurse Alice Adshead (1888-1979). A two-bed Sanatorium Annex (July 2, 1922) was followed by a general hospital (1935) and Van Dyck Annex (1938). Federal, state, and local aid came with the 1947 U.S. Hill-Burton Act that required such aided hospitals to be sited in county seats. Cumberland Medical Center opened in Crossville, 1950. The May Cravath Wharton Nursing Home opened June 21, 1957, Pleasant Hill.

She realized another dream: Uplands Retirement Community. On an early fund-raising trip, visiting her cousin Paul Cravath, a New York City attorney, she was inspired by a poem on his office wall: "•From the lowlands and the mire, •From the mists of earth's desire, •From the vain pursuit of pelf, •From the attitude of self, Come up higher, Come up higher."

"Uplands," she wrote in her autobiography, "That was our name--Uplands!"

Honors came late: Carleton College Alumni Award for "outstanding service...in medicine and...medical care," June 1953; Tennessee Tuberculosis Association Kranz Memorial Award for "outstanding service in...tuberculosis control," 1954; Tennessee Medical Association's "Outstanding General Practitioner of the Year," 1956; University of Chattanooga honorary Doctor of Laws degree for "many services to the citizens of Tennessee," 1957; and a Tennessee Bicentennial named marker on the state capitol walkway, 1995.

She ended her autobiography with: "As the shadows of evening fell,...in my dreams I saw the...Uplands of tomorrow."

She built better than she knew.

May Cravath Wharton, Doctor Woman of the Cumberlands (Pleasant Hill, Tenn. 38578: PO Box 168, 1972 revision, 214 pp., $6.20).

About the Authors

1. For biographical account: "Betty & Franklin Parker Looking Back Since 1946,"
access: http://bfparker.blogster.com/betty_franklin_parker_looking.html
or: http://ourstory.com/story.html?v=10919
or: http://www.progressiveu.org/182455-betty-franklin-parker-looking-back-since-1946-57-years-of-a-good-idea-thanksgiving-2007-bfparker-frontiernet-net
or: http://bootlog.com/index.php?cat=travelogs&aut=bfparker
or: http://bootlog.com/index.php?cat=travelogs&aut=bfparker

2. For a list of 153 of authors' publications go to: http://www.worldcat.org
type in: Franklin Parker, 1921- and you should get the following URL:
http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=Parker%2C+Franklin%2C+1921-%2C&=Search&qt=results_page

3. To access free E-Book full contents of Franklin Parker, George Peabody, A Biography. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995 rev. edn., go to:
http://books.google.com/books?id=OPIbk-ZPnF4C&dq=franklin+parker&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=qxV3RqTk1k&sig=sXAmDL_CyCYd-Sl0n_IRl7g1S1I#PPP1,M1
or:
http://books.google.com/books?id=OPIbk-ZPnF4C&dq=franklin+parker&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=qxV3RqTk1k&sig=sXAmDL_CyCYd-Sl0n_IRl7g1S1I#PPP1,M1

Corrections, comments: bfparker@frontiernet.net END OF MANUSCRIPT

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Arthurdale, West Virginia, 1933: Historic First FDR New Deal Homestead Community, By Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net

Arthurdale, West Virginia, 1933: Historic First FDR New Deal Homestead Community By Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net Some 60 years ago, Arthurdale, in northern West Virginia, was a storm center of New Deal controversy. The first, most controversial, New Deal subsistence homestead project was sited there in 1933. Arthurdale housed displaced and jobless coal mining families. What began as a grand scheme to ease Great Depression suffering by providing homes, gardens, a community school, and jobs for those in want, became a much criticized, costly project which Congress forced the federal government to sell. Yet Arthurdale has also been praised as a noble New Deal experiment to uplift dispossessed West Virginia coal miners, among the most wretched of Depression-era Americans. Lorena A. Hickok "Discovers" Scott's Run, WV The Arthurdale story began with Associated Press reporter Lorena A. Hickok (1893-1968), who covered Eleanor Roosevelt during Franklin Delano Roosevelt's (FDR) first run for the presidency. They became friends and confidantes. Mrs. Roosevelt urged Hickok to work as relief needs investigator for Harry L. Hopkins (1890-1946), Federal Emergency Relief Administration head and later Works Progress Administration head. Hickok reported to him on economic conditions and relief needs in 32 states during 1933-36. She sent the same information in letters to Mrs. Roosevelt. FDR saw both her reports to Hopkins and letters to Mrs. Roosevelt. Hickok first sought advice from the Philadelphia-based Quaker relief agency, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). Executive Secretary Clarence E. Pickett (1884-1964) told her, "If you want to see just how bad things are, go down to the southwestern part of the state and into West Virginia." Of conditions among jobless mining families in northern West Virginia, she wrote : "Scott's Run, a coal-mining community, not far from Morgantown, was the worst place I'd ever seen. In a gutter, along the main street through the town, there was stagnant, filthy water, which the inhabitants used for drinking, cooking, washing, and everything else imaginable. On either side of the street were ramshackle houses, black with coal dust, which most Americans would not have considered fit for pigs. And in those houses every night children went to sleep hungry, on piles of bug-infested rags, spread out on the floor. There were rats in those houses."1 Appalachian Coal Miners and the Great Depression Scott's Run, the name of a creek that empties into the Monongahela River, is also the name of coal mining communities along its banks. It had been an active mining area near Morgantown, WV, site of West Virginia University (WVU). The late nineteenth century coal boom, heightened by World War I energy needs, lured marginal small farmers to work for wages in Appalachian coal mines. Large and many smaller mines flourished in boom times, owned mainly by profit-hungry companies based outside the coal mining areas. Before unions demanded better conditions, miners were housed in low-cost company-owned shacks, paid in scrip redeemable only in a company store, and were controlled and constrained in company-owned and policed towns. The 1920s saw coal mine overexpansion, competition, strikes, and labor-union conflicts. Scott's Run was sometimes called Bloody Run because of its labor union violence. West Virginia coal mining cutbacks and closings became acute by 1928. The 1929 Wall Street crash and Great Depression meant even harder times for miners. Mines closed, lights were turned off, and water pumps shut down. Some families were allowed to live in shacks lest empty ones be torn down for firewood. By 1930, with little mining and much hunger at Scott's Run, a White House Conference on Child Welfare publicized the plight of undernourished Appalachian miners' children. Federal money left from post-World War I aid to Belgian and French children was given to the AFSC in 1931 to help feed needy miners' children in the West Virginia-Pennsylvania Monongahela River Valley. AFSC relief work in the area was centered at Scott's Run because of its poverty and because of earlier relief efforts of Morgantown social agencies and of the WVU Extension Service. Mrs. Roosevelt knew of Scott's Run, having bought some furniture made there as part of the relief effort. She was subsidizing a furniture-making cottage industry for poorer people at Val-kill near the Roosevelt home at Hyde Park. She also knew of the AFSC relief work at Scott's Run. Hickok's description of miners' plight led Mrs. Roosevelt to visit Scott's Run in August 1933. FDR's election, the Depression, passage of subsistence homestead legislation (June 16, 1933), and Mrs. Roosevelt's personal concern over Scott's Run miners' plight led to the founding of the first New Deal subsistence homestead project at Arthurdale, near Reedsville, in Preston County, W. Va. With homesteaders selected mostly from displaced Scott's Run coal miners and Mrs. Roosevelt's publicized frequent visits there, Arthurdale became a conspicuous example of FDR's more controversial experiments to counter the Great Depression. Subsistence Homestead Projects, 1933-1948 The subsistence homestead idea came from the 1920s back-to-the-land movement, which FDR favored. He had tried to resettle jobless families in rural communities during his New York governorship. As president, FDR first urged congressional friends to enact a bill to allot $25 million to put 25,000 needy families on farms at an average cost of $1,000 per family. When such a bill was formulated, the White House suggested that it be attached as Section 208 of Title II of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). Thus was passed with little debate in 1933 a controversial subsistence housing experiment which Congress later forced the government to sell. The Subsistence Homestead Division was placed under Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes (1874-1952), who named as its administrator Milburn L. Wilson (1885-1969), an Agricultural Adjustment Act administrator and a back-to-the-land enthusiast. AFSC relief director Clarence E. Pickett became Wilson's assistant. Mrs. Roosevelt Goes to Scott's Run, August 18-19, 1933 Genuinely concerned after hearing Lorena Hickok's description of dreadful Scott's Run conditions, Mrs. Roosevelt, at FDR's request and at the AFSC's invitation, visited Scott's Run on August 18-19, 1933.2 With her were Lorena Hickok and Clarence Pickett. Unrecognized, she talked to miners, their wives, and children. To the end of her life she recalled how Scott's Run's plight had affected her. Conditions were so bad and the people so dispirited, she told FDR, that she feared a fascist-type revolution there. FDR urged his adviser, Louis M. Howe (1871-1936), to start quickly the first subsistence homestead community near Scott's Run. Howe was a newspaperman who had masterminded FDR's political career. Ill and knowing he was near death, Howe pushed Wilson, Pickett, and others to start the northern West Virginia subsistence homestead project. A WVU agricultural experts' committee recommended federal purchase of the Richard M. Arthur farm, part of a l,200-acre estate l5 miles southwest of Morgantown, about to revert to the state for unpaid taxes, and being used as a WVU experimental farm. With the Arthur farm purchased, Interior Secretary Ickes on October 12, 1933, approved the Arthurdale Resettlement Community Plan for 200 five-acre plots, a community school, and a cooperative store. New Deal and local officials wanted to show that they could move quickly to cut red tape to ease human misery. They also wanted to avoid undue attention and bad publicity. Rightly or wrongly, because residents of the area insisted on it, only native-born Americans were selected as homesteaders. African Americans and the foreign-born were excluded. It was thought that to raise local ire would bring undue publicity and ruin the project. By January 1934 several New Deal agencies were paying a thousand workers on relief $3 per day to build the first houses and roads and to landscape. Problems caused by undue haste and unwise selection of homesteaders were compounded by cost overruns on homes and failure to find industrial jobs for the homesteaders. Trouble in Paradise Arthurdale faced frequent disagreements, mismanagement, and lack of communication between New Deal and local officials. Louis Howe is said to have told Harold Ickes: you buy the land; I'll buy the houses. Despite Mrs. Roosevelt's caution, but pressed by a desire to house the homesteaders before Christmas 1933, Howe ordered by phone 50 prefabricated Cape Code cottages from Boston. Designed for summer use and unsuitable for northern West Virginia winters, they were also smaller than the foundations prepared for them. Mrs. Roosevelt asked New York architect Eric Gugler to recut, rebuild, and winterize the cottages to fit the foundations and the weather. Costs, of course, skyrocketed. Arthurdale suffered from too many uncoordinated committees trying to get too many things done too quickly. There was also interference, though well intentioned, from Howe and Mrs. Roosevelt. There were contradictory orders, delays, waste, and cost overruns. Interior Secretary Ickes, a frugal administrator, wrote in his diary, "We have been spending money down there like drunken sailors."3 Despite delays and some incomplete and unoccupied homes, Arthurdale opened officially June 7, 1934. Finding Industry for Arthurdale A small industry could not be found to supplement homesteaders' inadequate gardening and handicrafts incomes. In October 1934, the Public Works Administration allocated $525,000 to the U.S. Post Office Department for a factory at Arthurdale to manufacture post office furniture and mail boxes. Congressmen and others from furniture-producing states attacked the appropriation as a step toward socialism that would destroy capitalism. Indiana Representative Louis Ludlow, pressured from the Keyless Lock Company in his district (it made post office boxes and equipment), blocked the U.S. Post Office appropriation on January 26, 1935. On presidential adviser Bernard Baruch's suggestion, a General Electric Company subsidiary built a vacuum cleaner assembly plant in Arthurdale in the fall of 1935. Its opening was aborted when the U.S. Comptroller General ruled that federal funds could not be used for a private business. Some homesteaders early in 1936, with money borrowed from the government, purchased the plant, but it closed after a year because of financial loss. Other industries that failed included a men's shirt factory in 1937, a poultry farm, a grist mill, and a New York firm making cabinets for radios. World War II defense needs did open coal mines again and many homesteaders returned to work in the mines. By the time an industrial firm was producing war materials at Arthurdale, the government was divesting itself of all of its homestead projects. Other Arthurdale Critics Attacks on Arthurdale mounted. Critics derisively called it "Mrs. Roosevelt's project." One such attack from journalist Wesley Stout in the widely read Saturday Evening Post (August 4, 1934) focused on waste at Arthurdale.4 Critic William A. Wirt, Gary, Indiana, school superintendent, alleged a New Deal conspiracy to subvert the economy of Morgantown, WV. He charged that resettled miners would no longer be paying rent and taxes in Morgantown. Mrs. Roosevelt pointed out that few if any of the jobless miners had paid rent or taxes for years. Arthurdale Community School From the first Mrs. Roosevelt saw the school as a center of Arthurdale activities. The community school she envisioned was one which John Dewey and other progressive education leaders advocated: a child centered, community centered school, emphasizing children's interest and their learning, not by drill in a set curriculum, but by active involvement in community affairs. This progressive concept went back to Jean Jacques Rousseau's Emile (1762) and was practiced from the mid-nineteenth century by Swiss educator Heinrich Pestalozzi and others in Europe and the U.S. During the Depression, there was also a "social reconstructionist" element in the community school concept. Teachers College, Columbia University educator George S. Counts (1889-1974) wrote Dare the School Build a New Social Order? in 1932. His colleague, Harold O. Rugg (1886-1960), had developed and teachers were using social studies textbooks that stressed American society's faults as well as successes. Reconstructionists believed that students and teachers should discuss current problems, take sides on issues, and that the school should be an active agent to reform (i.e., improve) society. In this context Mrs. Roosevelt in January 1934 formed a National Advisory Committee for Arthurdale made up of leading prestigious progressive educators: Dean William Russell of Teachers College, Columbia University; Columbia University philosopher John Dewey; Clarence Pickett; E. E. Agger of the Resettlement Administration; Fred J. Kelly of the U.S. Office of Education; Lucy Sprague Mitchell of New York's Bank Street School; and W. Carson Ryan, Progressive Education Association president. Because Preston County, WV, was poor, it was decided to build the Arthurdale school at federal expense and to divide staff and operating costs with county and state education agencies. Thinking that operating costs for the kind of community school she envisioned would be too costly for the state and county, Mrs. Roosevelt determined to donate to the school her earnings from radio talks and newspaper articles and to solicit private funds. It was Clarence Pickett who brought Elsie Ripley Clapp 1879-1965) to Mrs. Roosevelt's attention as particularly suitable to be director of the Arthurdale school. Arthurdale School Director Elsie Ripley Clapp (1934-36) Elsie Ripley Clapp, born in Brooklyn, NY, on November 16, 1879, had attended Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, 1899-1903; received the B.A. degree in English from Barnard College, New York, in 1908; and the M.A. degree in Philosophy from Columbia University in 1909. She had assisted John Dewey in his Philosophy of Education classes at Teachers College, Columbia University, 1909-13, and again during 1923-29. She had taught in the following private schools: Ashley Hall, Charleston, SC, 1913-14; Brooklyn Heights Seminary, NY, 1914-21; Milton Academy, Milton, MA, 1921-22; City and Country School, New York, NY, 1922-24; and Rosemary Junior School, Greenwich, CT, 1924-25. As Principal of Rogers Clark Ballard Memorial School, Jefferson County, near Louisville, KY, 1929-34, she developed a community school atmosphere, described later in her two books and several articles. By the early 1930s she was a leader in the Progressive Education Association (1917-55) and headed its Community School Division, which advised government agencies on education. Mrs. Roosevelt interviewed Elsie Ripley Clapp in February 1934. They agreed on the community school approach. Clapp was appointed that summer as Arthurdale School director. She visited Scott's Run and the Arthur farm, met the parents and children selected to move there, viewed possible school sites, and got the architect to adapt his school building plans to facilitate student group work and community school activities. Clapp brought six experienced progressive teachers with her from the Ballard School and helped select the three local teachers who were paid by the Preston County Public Schools. Buildings were not yet completed when the Arthurdale school opened in September 1934 with 246 students. Classes were temporarily held in the Arthurdale farm's main building. When finished, the school complex included a school center, a nursery school, elementary school, high school, and a community recreation center. Community School Activities Arthurdale, then a rural beehive of construction, was a natural place to involve school children in community activities. First graders were taken to see buckwheat threshed and potatoes disked. When some cows were acquired, children studied butter and cheese making. A surviving log cabin from colonial times was restored and taken over by fourth graders for a study of pioneer life. Children painted, sang folk songs, and wrote and produced plays. There were square dances, sports, and an annual summer music festival. Classes were organized around small interest groups rather than by formal grades. The nursery school, a source of community pride, served as the community child care center. Most parents were impressed with the school, although some felt that the 3 Rs were being neglected. Some complained because the high school was not accredited in 1936. Elsie Clapp made light of the complaint, saying that none of the 3 high school graduates that spring planned to go to college. Private aid was needed to supplement federal, state, and county funds. Mrs. Roosevelt gave the AFSC her radio talk and newspaper earnings to pay Clapp's salary ($6,000 a year, criticized as too high for the times), buy library books and equipment, and pay other costs. Bernard Baruch, who shared her enthusiasm for the school, contributed, mostly to the nursery school which was not eligible for state funds: $33,518 in 1934-35, $23,775 in 1935-36, $l0,272 in 1936-37, and $5,000 a year for the next few years. Elsie Clapp's Departure When other private funds could not be found, Clarence Pickett told the school advisory committee in early 1936 that the time had come to transfer school control and finance to West Virginia supervision and Preston County administration. Mrs. Roosevelt reluctantly relayed the decision to disappointed homesteaders, who wanted Clapp and her staff to remain, possibly paid by Preston County. But Clapp discouraged plans to keep her on. She and the six teachers from the Ballard School left after school ended in 1936. She became editor of Progressive Education, journal of the Progressive Education Association, October 1937 through May 1939. She wrote several articles and two books, Community Schools in Action, 1939, and The Use of Resources in Education, 1952, extolling her community school experiments at the Ballard School in Kentucky and the Arthurdale School in West Virginia. She lived in retirement in Exeter, NH, where she died July 28, 1965, some three decades after her work at the Arthurdale school. Was the Arthurdale School Successful? As a progressive community school under Elsie Clapp as director, Arthurdale enjoyed esteem and praise. The school fostered a spirit of community cooperation. Better student social adjustment and a higher standard of community health were achieved. Rexford Tugwell, federal administrator of the Homestead Projects, in praising the original Arthurdale school, said, "Morale at Arthurdale and conditions there were 90 percent better than in other homesteads, entirely due to the school."5 Critics said that in its zeal for community service, the school neglected the realities of the complex industrial world around it. Some criticized its lack of long-range planning. In a 1941 survey of its first 49 graduates, all but one said they had enjoyed the high school, valuing its smallness and friendly informality, but several faulted its limited course offerings. The school's promoters--Mrs. Roosevelt, Baruch, Tugwell, and Pickett--were convinced that the school was the most successful part of the Arthurdale experiment. After June 1936, Preston County, WV, took over the school and appointed a principal. Its original progressive education and community influences dwindled. Traditional teaching and administration followed. The high school was organized along subject department lines. With the approach of World War II, it became just another rural school. Eden Liquidated: Arthurdale on Its Own By 1938 national sentiment for socioeconomic reform had waned. New Deal critics in Congress in 1939 cut funds for the subsistence homestead projects. Congress in 1942 directed the federal government to sell all interests in the homestead communities. Homes, land, and properties were sold to homesteaders and others. With wartime employment high and new building scarce, the homes sold readily by 1948. Arthurdale cost the government an estimated $2 million from 1933 to final liquidation in 1948. Epilogue Arthurdale remains a pleasant community in northern West Virginia. Its fiftieth anniversary celebration was held on July 14, 1984, with meals and speeches. Of the original homesteaders, 27 persons were still living there, 42 couples had lived there until one or both spouses died, and 76 children or grandchildren were heads of families living in Arthurdale, some in the homes of their forebears.6 Arthurdale, a controversial New Deal experiment, is but a footnote to history, a dream that was. Footnotes 1. Hickok, Lorena A. Reluctant First Lady. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1962, pp. 136-137. 2. Haid, Stephen Edward (Ph.D. dissertation). "Arthurdale: An Experiment in Community Planning, 1933-1947." West Virginia University, 1975, p. 66. 3. Ickes, Harold L. The Secret Diaries of Harold L. Ickes; Vol. I: The First Thousand Days, 1933-1936. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1953, pp. 152, 207, 218. 4. Stout, Wesley. "The New Homesteaders," Saturday Evening Post, CCVII (August 4, 1934), pp. 5-7, 61-65. 5. Haid, op cit., p. 295. 6. Eble, Jettie and Charles. The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Homesteading of Arthurdale, W. Va. Arthurdale, WV: Privately Printed, 1984, pp. 9, 14. References Elsie Ripley Clapp's two books on community schools during the Depression years were Community Schools in Action, New York: Viking Press, 1939; and The Use of Resources in Education, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952. Her journal articles include "Plays in a Kentucky County School," Progressive Education, VIII, No. 1 (January 1931), pp. 34-39; "A Rural Community School in Kentucky," Progressive Education, X, No. 3 (March 1933), pp. 123-128; "The Teacher in Social Education," Progressive Education, X, No. 5 (May 1933), pp. 283-287; and [Editorial] "Schools Socially Functioning," Progressive Education, XV, No. 2 (February 1938), pp. 89-90. The Arthurdale School is described in: College of Education, West Virginia University, Report of the Survey of Arthurdale School, Morgantown, WV: College of Education, West Virginia University, May 6, 1940; Thomas H. Coode and Dennis E. Fabbri, "The New Deal's Arthurdale Project in West Virginia," West Virginia History, XXXVI, No. 4 (July l975), pp. 291-308; Holly Cowan, "Arthurdale," Columbia University Faculty of Political Science thesis, 1968?; Kathleen Irwin, "Schools at the Center of Society's Values and Vision," paper read at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting, Chicago, April 2, 1985, ERIC ED 254 961 [abstracted in Resources in Education, XX, No. 8 (August 1985), p. 57]; Richard S. Little and Margaret Little, Arthurdale--Its History, Its Lessons for Today, Morgantown, WV: 1940; Franklin Parker, "The Progressive Educator: Elsie Ripley Clapp," The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Homesteading of Arthurdale, W. Va., coedited by Jettie and Charles Eble, Arthurdale, WV: Privately Printed, 1984, pp. 11-12; Carleton E. Preston and Vester M. Mulholland, "Experiments in Community Education," in Secondary Education in the South, edited by W. Carson Ryan et al., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946, pp. 199-205; Bob Robinson, "Great Social Experiment in Arthurdale Inconclusive," Dominion-Post (Morgantown, WV), June 7, 1981, p. 2-A; and Steward Wagner, "School Buildings, Arthurdale, West Virginia," Progressive Education, XV, No. 4 (April 1938), pp. 304-316. Books by Eleanor Roosevelt describing Arthurdale include This I Remember, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949, pp. 126-133; and My Day, Edited by Rochelle Chadakoff, New York: Pharos Books, 1989, pp. 36-37, 86, 170-171, 245, 380. Works mentioning Eleanor Roosevelt's involvement in Arthurdale include Maurine H. Beasley, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Media: A Public Quest for Self-Fulfillment, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987, pp. 62-64, 74, 104, 127; Bruce G. Beezer, "Arthurdale: An Experiment in Community Education," West Virginia History, Vol. XXVI, No. 1 (October 1974), pp. 17-36; Tamara K. Hareven, "Arthurdale: A Venture in Utopia," Eleanor Roosevelt: An American Conscience, New York: Da Capo Press, 1975, pp. 91-111, 290-292; Lorena A. Hickok, Reluctant First Lady, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1962, pp. 136-137; Joseph P. Lash, "Mrs. Roosevelt's 'Baby'--Arthurdale," Eleanor and Franklin, New York: W.W. Norton, 1971, pp. 393-417, 737-738; Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor Roosevelt: A Friend's Memoir, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964, pp. 110-111; Lois Scharf, Eleanor Roosevelt: First Lady of American Liberalism, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987, pp. 100-103; Graham White and John Maze, Harold Ickes of the New Deal: His Private Life and Public Career, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985, pp. 128-132; J. William T. Youngs, Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life, Boston: Little, Brown, 1985, pp. 164-169, 177. Elsie Clapp's earliest work on the community school, done at the Junior School of Rosemary Hall, Greenwich, CT, 1924-25, is briefly mentioned in Harold Rugg and Ann Shumaker, The Child-Centered School: An Appraisal of the New Education, Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book Co., 1927, p. 51. Her later community schools in Kentucky and West Virginia are mentioned in Harold Rugg, Foundations for American Education, Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book Co., 1947, pp. 572-573; and Harold Rugg and B. Marian Brooks, The Teacher in School and Society: An Introduction to Education, Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book Co., 1950, pp. 259-260. Doctoral dissertations on Elsie Ripley Clapp's community school in Arthurdale, WV, include: Robert A. Naslund (Ph.D. dissertation), "The Origin and Development of the Community School Concept," Stanford University, 1951; more fully in Stephen Edward Haid (Ph.D. dissertation), "Arthurdale: An Experiment in Community Planning, 1933-1947," West Virginia University, 1975; and Martin L. Berman (Ph.D. dissertation), "Arthurdale, Nambe, and the Developing Community School Model: A Comparative Study," University of New Mexico, May 1979. There is a biographical sketch in the "Elsie Ripley Clapp Papers 1910-1943" Mss. Collection 21, The Center for Dewey Studies, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL 62901. Elsie Ripley Clapp obituaries appeared in The Exeter News-Letter (Exeter, NH), August 12, 1965, and in The New York Times, July 31, 1965, p. 21. END OF MANUSCRIPT. Send comments and corrections to bfparker@frontiernet.net Addendum: 24 of Franklin and Betty J. Parker’s book titles are listed in: http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/peabody/about/alum6.html#P For their writings in blog form, enter bfparker in google.com or in any other search engine. 
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Saturday, March 22, 2008

Ezekiel Cheever (1614-1708), New England Colonial Teacher, by Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net

Ezekiel Cheever (1614-1708), New England Colonial Teacher
 by Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net
 [63 Heritage Loop, Crossville, TN 38571-8270, Ph. (931) 277-3268]
 Ezekiel Cheever was the most famous colonial New England Latin grammar teacher of his time. He came from middle class Puritan roots in England, where he received a classical education before emigrating to Boston. His remarkably long teaching career of 70 years in four New England towns and the esteem shown by his famous pupils at his death tell much about how the New England colonial mind shaped American education and thought.
 Ezekiel Cheever was born in London, January 25, 1614, the son of William Cheaver (as he spelled his name), who made his living in the cloth trade. Family circumstances were good enough so that Ezekiel received a classical secondary education that prepared him for Emmanuel College, Cambridge University. One account says he attended a secondary school attached to Christ's Hospital in 1624. By another account, about which there is some doubt, he attended the well known St. Paul's School in London.
 If he attended the school near Christ's Hospital, located at Newgate Street, London, it was originally the priory (or residence) of the Grey Friars. On that location a school was founded in 1553 by King Edward VI to support poor orphans. The school was commonly called the Blue Coat School after the blue uniform pupils wore. When fully enrolled, the school annually boarded and taught from 1,000 to 1,200 boys and a few girls who entered at ages 8 to 10 and left at ages 15 or 16. Each year five or six of the best pupils were sent to enroll in colleges at Oxford or Cambridge universities.
 If Cheever attended St. Paul's School, he was in good company. England's famous poet John Milton, six years older than Cheever, also attended St. Paul's. St. Paul's was an endowed grammar school founded in 1509 (or 1512 by one source) by John Colet, famous humanist scholar, who founded it originally for the free education of poor children.
 The colleges making up Cambridge University attracted such future leaders as Oliver Cromwell, who headed the Puritan Revolution in England. Other Cambridge-educated Puritans who left England for the New World and became leaders in America included William Brewster, John Winthrop, and John Cotton. John Milton entered Christ's College, Cambridge University, in 1625. Ezekiel Cheever entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, eight years later in 1633.
 Emmanuel College was founded as a Puritan institution in 1584 and was the model for Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. John Harvard, a Puritan and Emmanuel College graduate (1635), left for New England where he worked as an assistant pastor. His important gift of half of his estate and his library of 320 books led to the founding in 1636 of Harvard College at Cambridge, near Boston, Massachusetts, named in his honor.
 Ezekiel Cheever arrived in Boston in June 1637. He came to the New World, like many before and since, for religious freedom and economic opportunity. He was 23 years old and single. Boston was then only seven years old. Two years before his arrival in Boston there was founded in that town, on April 23, 1635, the New World's first college-preparatory secondary school, the Boston Latin Grammar School (still active as the Boston Latin School), where Cheever taught for the last 37 of his 70 years as a teacher.
 Cheever's first stay in Boston lasted only one year. He left in 1638 for the New Haven Colony, later named Connecticut, perhaps because, like Roger Williams before him, he disliked the rigid Puritan state-church atmosphere in the Boston area. In New Haven, where he was among the earliest founding settlers, Cheever began the first of his 70 years as a teacher. He taught Latin, first in his own home and later in a school house built for him. He married Mary (last name not known) and with the New Haven leaders signed the "Plantation Covenant" in Newman's barn, June 4, 1639, a compact which formed New Haven's religious and civic government. He received £20 for his teaching in 1641. This amount was raised to £30 in August 1644.
 Although of very modest means when he went to New Haven (Cheever's estate was then listed as worth £20), the esteem in which he was held as a teacher can be seen in the fact that in 1643 his name was listed sixth among the planters of New Haven . This respect can also be seen from his being chosen one of the twelve deacons in the New Haven church, from his being deputized to represent his district in the general court in 1646, and from his being occasionally asked to preach at New Haven's First Church. He was respected as a teacher for his scholarly knowledge of Latin and Greek and also for his firm discipline, considered essential in colonial education. One of his pupils in New Haven who later became a well known minister and poet was Michael Wigglesworth.
 But Cheever was also known as a man of strong independent mind, as shown in an incident of censure in New Haven in 1649. Some elders of the New Haven community were criticized for "partiality and usurpation"; that is, for having done some act or deed the community frowned upon. Many wanted the accused tried and disciplined. When the case was presented before church leaders, the accused individuals were cleared. Cheever, observing the proceedings, expressed strong disagreement with the verdict. Because of his independent stand, he was criticized by the church elders and censured for his "uncomely gestures and carriage before the church." His own defense sounds better than the charges made against him. His arguments made some of the church leaders doubt that they had made the right decision. In ringing words he said to the church elders, "I had rather suffer anything from men than make shipwreck of a good conscience, or go against my present light."
 His wife Mary died the year of this trial, 1649, leaving him with five children. One child, named Ezekiel after him, had died in infancy. In 1650 he left New Haven after 12 years as its schoolteacher. It was probably while in New Haven that he wrote a Latin grammar textbook whose shortened title was Accidence. It was a highly popular textbook in colonial Latin grammar schools and was used long after his death in 1708. The eighteenth edition was published in 1785 and the twentieth edition was published in 1838.
 While Cheever taught in New Haven, the Massachusetts General Court passed two important school laws. The Massachusetts School Law of 1642 required parents and masters to teach their children to read and write, on penalty of paying a fine. This law reflected the Calvinists' desire for universal elementary education for moral and religious purposes. To understand the Bible, children had to learn to read. This law was based on the English Poor Law of 1601, which laid down England's policy for the welfare of lower class children. This English law required pauper and orphan children to be apprenticed to a trade and stipulated that their masters see to their moral and religious welfare.
 Two years later the Massachusetts School Law of 1647 went further. It required every town of 50 homes or more to employ an elementary school teacher, and every town of 100 or more homes to have a Latin grammar school. This 1647 law has been popularly called the Old Deluder Satan Law, after its quaint wording which said that since the Old Deluder Satan tried to keep men and women from reading the Bible, the best way to fight the devil was to promote schools and learning.
 Even though these two school laws were not strictly enforced, they marked the first time an English-speaking legislature anywhere in the world had declared in favor of universal elementary and secondary education. The year Cheever left New Haven, 1650, Connecticut passed a school law which incorporated the main features of the Massachusetts school laws of 1642 and 1647.
 In December 1650 Cheever went to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he taught for 11 years. His school, endowed with grants of land and bequests, was called a free school but still required fees from pupils' parents. There Cheever taught Latin and Greek to prepare boys for college. His teaching fame spread and helped make Ipswich more widely known. In 1652 he married his second wife, Ellen Lathrop, who had come from England two years earlier to live with her brother. The Cheevers had four children in Ipswich. In 1653 a philanthropic citizen gave the town a better school building and provided a house for Cheever with a few acres of land.
 In November 1661 Cheever went to Charlestown, Massachusetts, as its teacher at a salary of £30 a year. He was not always paid, however, and in November 1666 he petitioned the selectmen of the town for his salary, mentioning that "the constables were much behind with him" (meaning that he might be jailed for his debts). He asked that the school building be repaired. He also complained that the agreement under which he was hired to teach was that he would be the only teacher in town. .But, now, a Mr. Mansfield was taking pupils away from him. In 1669 he petitioned for land on which to build his hme. The selectmen voted him the land, but Cheever left the next year after nine years of teaching in Charlestown.
 On January 6, 1670, when Cheever was 56 years old and had taught for more than 30 years, he became schoolmaster of the Boston Latin Grammar School, where he remained for 38 years until his death in 1708. The still-existing Boston Latin School (as it is now called) was founded February 13, 1635, a year before the founding of Harvard College (1636). This Boston Latin School, the oldest and best known grammar school in New England, is believed to have been founded through the influence of John Cotton and based on the school John Cotton knew called the High School in Boston, Lincolnshire, England, founded in 1554. John Cotton came to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1633, and helped found the Boston Latin School two years later (1635), one year before the founding of Harvard College. John Cotton's will provided that half of his estate go the "Free School of Boston." Philemon Pormort was the Boston Latin School's first master. It was early supported by the town of Boston. Five signers of the Declaration of Independence and four presidents of Harvard College attended the Boston Latin School. Its many famous pupils read like a who's who of New England and included Benjamin Franklin, Cotton Mather, John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Edward Everett, Robert C. Winthrop, Charles Francis Adams, Charles Sumner, William M. Evarts, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wendell Phillips, John Lothrop Motley, Francis Parkman, Henry Ward Beecher, Charles W. Eliot, Edward Everett Hale, and others. More recent Boston Latin School graduates include philosophers George Santayana and Bernard Berenson, journalist Theodore H. White, and education-writer Jonathan Kozol.
 Cheever's last 37 years of teaching at Boston Latin School established his reputation as the most famous teacher in the colonies. His salary was £60 a year, then a very good salary. Elijah Corlet, a schoolmaster of the Latin grammar school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and almost as well-known a teacher as Cheever, earned only £20 a year.
 The school room in which Cheever taught was large and received little light from its high, small windows. Smoke from the large fireplace at one end of the room often drifted over the heads of the pupils and blackened the ceiling. Copying or listening, the pupils sat on long fixed benches with fixed desks in front of them. Cheever wore a black skullcap on his gray head and his white beard was long and pointed. The boys always knew when he was angry because he would start stroking his beard to the point faster and faster. The rod of birch twigs hung nearby. Cheever's school was open mornings from 7 to 11 in summer and from 8 to 11 in winter and in the afternoons from 1 to 5. Boys learned their Latin from his Accidence and read the New Testament in Greek.
 Cheever, who had seen many generations of boys come and go, knew that those who learned their Latin and Greek would go on to one of the colonial colleges and become mainly ministers or physicians. During Cheever's lifetime three colonial colleges were founded by the established churches in three colonies. Harvard College was founded in 1636 at Cambridge, Massachusetts, by the Puritans and named after John Harvard because of his early gift. William and Mary College was founded in 1693 in Williamsburg, Virginia, 1693, by the Anglicans. Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut, was founded in 1701 by the Puritans.
 American colleges did not cluster at great learning centers as in England's Oxford and Cambridge universities but were small and scattered. This diffusion of colleges was aided by the Great Awakening, whose resulting revivals and evangelism led to splits in the Congregational, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches, splits that aided the spread of American higher education.
 The fourth colonial college, Princeton College, founded in 1746 as the College of New Jersey, was founded by "New Side" Presbyterians. The fifth colonial college, Brown College, was founded in 1764 by Revivalist Baptists in Providence, Rhode Island. The sixth colonial college, Rutgers College, originally called Queen's College, was founded in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1766 by Theodore J. Frelinghuysen and his followers of the Dutch Reformed Church. The seventh colonial college, Dartmouth College, 1769, in Hanover, New Hampshire, grew out of an Indian missionary school organized with visiting English Anglican evangelist George Whitfield's help by Eleazar Wheelock, Congregational pastor. The eighth colonial college, King's College, later Columbia University, was founded by Anglicans in New York in 1754. The ninth college founded before the Revolution was the secular College of Philadelphia, later the University of Pennsylvania, based on the first academy in America, founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1755.
 Cheever knew that those pupils who did not do well in their classical languages would become farmers, shopkeepers, merchants, or go to sea on sailing ships. For those trades they needed a little more arithmetic. Little history, geography, or literature were taught. The curriculum of the Latin grammar schools aimed at college entrance; and the entrance requirements at Harvard College were to read Tully or another classical Latin author in the original, write and speak Latin verse and prose, and be able to decline Greek nouns and verbs.
 When his pupils grew in number, Cheever hired and paid his own assistant. In March 1699, when Cheever was 85, the selectmen voted to pay his assistant, Ezekiel Lewis, £40 a year, raising this to £45 in 1701. Cheever's second wife died in 1706. He lived his last two years with his youngest daughter Susannah and her husband. Of his children Cheever was particularly proud of his son Samuel, a minister, who was well known and much respected.
 Cheever's last illness came in August of 1708, in his seventieth year of teaching. On August 12, after going out to hear his old pupil, Cotton Mather, preach, he became ill. On August 13 his friend, Judge Sewall, another successful former pupil, who had arranged for an old age pension for Cheever, went to see him. Cheever, in bed, blessed the judge. On August 19 Sewall called again and Cheever took him by the hand several times. On August 20 Sewall called to find Cheever much weaker. In a very low voice Cheever called for his daughter and asked those in the room if they were ready for his end. He died early in the morning of August 21, 1708. He was 94 years old.
 Cheever's funeral was attended by many people of all stations of life, including the governor, councilors, ministers, and justices, most of whom had been his pupils. Cotton Mather preached a long funeral sermon for his old schoolmaster. He recalled Cheever's long and distinguished teaching career: 23 years in New Haven, 11 years in Ipswich, nine years in Charlestown, and 37 years at Boston Latin School. Cotton Mather told how he and his classmates were taught by Cheever an oration by the Roman orator Tully praising his (Tully's) schoolmaster; and how Cheever taught them Corderius's Colloquies and the fact that Corderius had himself taught the great John Calvin. Mather praised Cheever's scholarship, dedication as a teacher, and piety; and ended with "He Dyed, a Candidate for the First Resurrection."
 Cheever left behind an estate of £837, 19 shillings, and 6 pence. He also left behind him a legend of 74 years of teaching. His thousands of pupils remembered him as the most famous teacher in colonial New England.
 The Latin grammar school was inherited from Europe via England as the first type of secondary school in colonial America, from 1635. It was succeeded by the more practical academy, introduced by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, 1751. The academy was succeeded by the high school after 1821 and especially after the 1872 Kalamazoo, Michigan, decision legalizing use of tax funds for public high schools.
 END
 References
 Barnard, Henry. "Ezekiel Cheever," American Journal of Education, I (1855), pp. 267, 297-310; XXVII? (1877), pp. 67, 73, 395; XXXIII? (1878), pp. 134, 286.
 Barnard, John. [his autobiography-describes Latin School in Cheever's time] Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd Series, Vol. V.
 "The Old Deluder Satan Act [original wording]," in Beckner, Weldon, and Wayne Dumas, eds. American Education: Foundations and Superstructures. ?place: International Textbooks, 1970.
 Butterfield, Fox. "Boston Latin Marks 350th Anniversary as Oldest Public School in the U.S." New York Times (April 24, 1985), p. 11.
 Connecticul Historical Society Collections, I (1860), pp. 22-51.
 Gould, Elizabeth Porter. Ezekiel Cheever, Schoolmaster. Boston: Palmer Co., 1904.
 Mather, Cotton. "Cotton Mather's Tribute to Ezekiel Cheever," Old South Leaflets, No. 177. Boston: Directors of the Old South Work, Old South Meeting House, year ?, pp. 21-36; reprinted from Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society (October 1889).
 Parker, Franklin. "Ezekiel Cheever: New England Colonial Teacher," Peabody Journal of Education, XXXVII, No. 6 (May, 1960), pp. 355-360.
 Parker, Franklin and Betty J. "Ezekiel Cheever (1614-1708), New England Colonial Teacher." CORE (Collected Original Resources in Education), XX, No. 2 (June 1996), Fiche 8 E11. Abstract in Resources in Education, XXXI, No. 8 (Aug. 1996), p. 151-152 (ERIC ED 393 774).
 Woody, Thomas. "Ezekiel Cheever," Dictionary of American Biography, IV. New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, ?19??, pp. 47-48.
 Jenks, Henry Fitch, The Boston Public Latin School. 1635-1880. Cambridge, Mass., M. King, 1881.
 Hassam, John T. Ezekiel Cheever and Some of His Descendants END of Manuscript.

About the Authors

1. For biographical account: "Betty & Franklin Parker Looking Back Since 1946,"
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or: http://ourstory.com/story.html?v=10919

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3. To access free E-Book full contents of Franklin Parker, George Peabody, A Biography. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995 rev. edn., go to:
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May Cravath Wharton, M.D. (1873-1959), Founder of Uplands Retirement Village, Pleasant Hill, Tennessee, USA.

May Cravath Wharton, M.D. (1873-1959), Founder of Uplands Retirement Village, Pleasant Hill, Tennessee, USA.

By Franklin Parker & Betty J. Parker, 63 Heritage Loop, Crossville, TN 38571-8270.

From Franklin & Betty J. Parker, "Wharton, May Cravath (1873-1959), Tennessee Encyclopedia & Culture. Ed. By Carroll Van West, et. al. Nashville: Tennessee Historical Society, 1998, pp. 1050-1051.

She was Dr. May to friends, doctor woman of the Cumberland's to others. Babies she delivered were called Dr. May babies. By foot, horseback, tin lizzie, on poor roads, in all weather, she made calls to remote cabins on the Cumberland Plateau, middle Tennessee. Her dream of a hospital in Pleasant Hill became Cumberland Medical Center, Crossville. The May Cravath Wharton Nursing Home and Uplands Retirement Community, both in Pleasant Hill, are her dreams come true.

She was born on a Minnesota farm, a sickly child. Family friend and physician Aunt Addie's nursing and gift of Home Doctor Book may have inspired May to become a doctor.

She finished high school at Carleton Academy (1889-90), Rochester, Minn., attended Carleton College (1890-93), and the University of North Dakota (1894-95, B.A.), studied in Europe (1897), taught at the University of North Dakota (1898-99), and earned a University of Michigan medical degree (1905).

She applied to the mission board, which then wanted only married missionaries. Disappointed, she practiced medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. There she met and married Edwin R. Wharton (1867-1920). They accepted a call to a Cleveland, Ohio, settlement house, he as director, she as physician (1907-09). Hard work took its toll. She needed rest. They bought a New Hampshire farm. He served small churches. She practiced medicine (1909-17).

In 1917 he became principal of Pleasant Hill Academy, 11 miles west of Crossville, Cumberland County. Its uniqueness went back to 1883 when resident Mrs. Amos Wightman asked the American Missionary Association (AMA, Boston) to send a trained teacher. Mary Santly, who taught a three-month school (spring 1884), said a minister was needed. The AMA sent Maine-born Benjamin F. Dodge (1818-97). He largely built Pleasant Hill Academy (1884-1947), by necessity a boarding school for widely spread community children. He also built and was pastor of First Congregational Church (since 1885).

Tall and shy, May Cravath Wharton taught health courses and was physician to students, faculty, and scattered communities. She worked tirelessly through the 1918 influenza epidemic. She won respect and distinction as the Doctor Woman of the Cumberland's.

In November 1920 Edwin R. Wharton died suddenly. Dr. May faced a dilemma. Five neighbors came with a letter from 50 families. "The people here want you to stay. We will pay you monthly and help build the hospital. We cannot do without you."

Dr. May stayed. She was helped in her dream to build a hospital by Massachusetts-born Pleasant Hill Academy art teacher Elizabeth Fletcher (1870-1951), who raised funds, and English-born, Canadian-trained Registered Nurse Alice Adshead (1888-1979). A two-bed Sanatorium Annex (July 2, 1922) was followed by a general hospital (1935) and Van Dyck Annex (1938). Federal, state, and local aid came with the 1947 U.S. Hill-Burton Act that required such aided hospitals to be sited in county seats. Cumberland Medical Center opened in Crossville, 1950. The May Cravath Wharton Nursing Home opened June 21, 1957, Pleasant Hill.

She realized another dream: Uplands Retirement Community. On an early fund-raising trip, visiting her cousin Paul Cravath, a New York City attorney, she was inspired by a poem on his office wall: "•From the lowlands and the mire, •From the mists of earth's desire, •From the vain pursuit of pelf, •From the attitude of self, Come up higher, Come up higher."

"Uplands," she wrote in her autobiography, "That was our name--Uplands!"

Honors came late: Carleton College Alumni Award for "outstanding service...in medicine and...medical care," June 1953; Tennessee Tuberculosis Association Kranz Memorial Award for "outstanding service in...tuberculosis control," 1954; Tennessee Medical Association's "Outstanding General Practitioner of the Year," 1956; University of Chattanooga honorary Doctor of Laws degree for "many services to the citizens of Tennessee," 1957; and a Tennessee Bicentennial named marker on the state capitol walkway, 1995.

She ended her autobiography with: "As the shadows of evening fell,...in my dreams I saw the...Uplands of tomorrow."

She built better than she knew.

May Cravath Wharton, Doctor Woman of the Cumberlands (Pleasant Hill, Tenn. 38578: PO Box 168, 1972 revision, 214 pp., $6.20).

About the Authors

1. For biographical account: "Betty & Franklin Parker Looking Back Since 1946,"
access: http://bfparker.blogster.com/betty_franklin_parker_looking.html
or: http://ourstory.com/story.html?v=10919

or: http://www.progressiveu.org/182455-betty-franklin-parker-looking-back-since-1946-57-years-of-a-good-idea-thanksgiving-2007-bfparker-frontiernet-net

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2. For a list of 153 of authors' publications go to: http://www.worldcat.org
type in: Franklin Parker, 1921- and you should get the following URL:
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3. To access free E-Book full contents of Franklin Parker, George Peabody, A Biography. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995 rev. edn., go to:
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Karen Armstrong (1944-) as Master Teacher: A Dialogue on the British Ex-Nun, Author, and Historian of Religion, by Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net

"Karen Armstrong (1944-) as Master Teacher: A Dialogue on the British Ex-Nun, Author, and Historian of Religion," by Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker (bfparker@frontiernet.net), 63 Heritage Loop, Crossville, TN 38571-8270
 
Betty J. Parker: Frank, explain our interest in Karen Armstrong. Why have so many readers, wanting to understanding why Muslim extremists hate us, turned to her books on religion? Why have so many study groups spent months analyzing her 1993 book, A History of God? What circumstances made her, for a time at least, as writer and lecturer, also a master teacher?
 
Franklin Parker: Her interviews on CNN, C-Span's Booknotes, and elsewhere have impressed many. She is a English-born former nun who is a notable historian of religion. Her books and speeches help us understand religious conflicts. Betty, what else explains Karen Armstrong's appeal?
BJP: Her historical perspective helps us understand, for example, , why they attack us. Yet, she cautions us to separate Islam's fundamentalist minority from its peaceful majority. Readers find her explanations provocative and plausible. Frank, describe her life.
 
FP: Her two autobiographical books, Through the Narrow Gate, 1981, and Beginning the World, 1983, tell of her birth on Nov. 14, 1944, near Birmingham, England. Her father, John O. S. Armstrong, from Ireland, married Eileen Hastings (nee McHale) Armstrong, a born English Catholic. Since Catholics are a minority in Anglican England, understandably, her middle class family lived in an enclave of fellow Catholics. The father was a scrap metal dealer. Karen grew up small, chubby, introverted, and serious, unlike her prettier extroverted younger sister, Lindsey, who later became an actress and radio performer and lived in California.
 
BJP: Karen attended the Convent of the Holy Child Jesus School in Birmingham. She early determined to enter that same teaching order of nuns. Her motivation? When she was 12 her sister Lindsey, then nine, almost died of diphtheria. Karen prayed that if Lindsey lived she would think of becoming a nun. Lindsey recovered. Karen pushed that promise to the back of her mind. Later, a lay Catholic teacher of physics in Karen's school, Miss Jackson, became a nun. Karen gazed at Miss Jackson's picture in nun's habit on the school bulletin board. She thought she saw in Miss Jackson's eyes the joy and serenity she hoped to achieve herself.
 
FP: Also, Karen's Granny, her mother's mother, as a girl wanted to become a nun but was stopped by her parents. Disappointed, Granny was unhappy all of her life. Karen always thought her Granny should have been given a chance to become a nun.
 
BJP: In her mid-teens, Karen thought her girl friends too worldly, too trendy, too "boy crazy." Self-conscious about her dumpy body and less than attractive appearance, she increasingly turned inward, away from the material world, toward books and literature. Growing up Catholic she was comforted by ritual, saints, holy days, and holy visions. Her father, proud of her school success, hoped she would be the first in the family to attend a woman's college at Oxford University.
 
FP: Karen spoke to the mother superior of her convent school about becoming a nun. The mother superior advised her to wait and see if she felt the same after finishing high school. When Karen was 15 her father asked: "What do you want to do?" She answered: "I want to be a nun."
 
BJP: Her parents tried to dissuade her. They listed the pleasures she would give up, the vows she would be compelled to follow. The mother superior told her parents that Karen was young, bright, was seemingly sincere in wanting to be a nun; that experienced superiors would observe, test, and monitor her training; that there were set times when she could leave if she proved not to have the calling. On Sept. 14, 1962, at 17, with her parents' wary approval, Karen entered the training convent in Tripton, near London. With mystic resolve to find and serve God, she faced a life of poverty, chastity, obedience.
 
FP: Her teaching order was founded in the 1840s under the strict rules of 16th century Spanish soldier Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), founder of the Jesuits. Wearing a novice's confining habit; given a new name, Martha, symbol of a new life, she slept on a hard narrow bed in a dorm-like room with nine other entrants; rose at dawn; washed with carbolic soap; and had to eat everything on her plate. To leave a scrap invited censure, even macaroni and cheese which always made her sick. Her chores were ones she had either never done before or had done poorly before. Postulants prayed five hours daily and performed tasks under the rule of silence. In the one hour of talk allowed each evening, personal and trivial chatter was discouraged.
 
BJP: Close friendships were also discouraged, as were touching, embracing, or unduly befriending others inside or outside the community. The intent was to reduce human closeness to a minimum, the better to find and serve God. Publicly she controlled her inner despair and hurts. Her sobs at night were less over hard work than over loneliness, giving up family and friends, humbling herself, trying to eliminate ego, in order to be a perfect nun.
 
FP: She was awkward, inept, nervous. She found food repulsive, lost weight from anorexia, was ill. Yet she had to clean, sweep, sew, cook, and pray. Most frightening were her unaccountable fainting spells. These brought unwanted attention and shame. In the first one, 1963, during morning meditation, she saw bright flashing lights, smelt a horrible odor, broke out in a cold sweat, fell on the floor stiff and unconscious. She awoke shaking, kicking, crying, surrounded by concerned novices and nuns. These spells occurred sporadically.
 
BJP: Her superiors attributed her fainting spells to hysteria and nervousness They thought her spells were an unconscious bid for sympathy. She was assigned penance intended to strengthen her religious vows. Penance included prayers said standing for an hour or so with arms extended in the form of a cross. She performed self flagellation in a secluded room, striking her back over each shoulder with a corded rope. Another penance was to kiss the feet of her sisters, 70 of them, in the dining hall while they ate.
 
FP: Her superiors did send her to a physician who, unable to find a physical cause for her problems, accepted her superiors' belief that she was a nervous young nun. Despite difficulties she finished her training, took the veil, and prepared to become a teaching nun. Her superiors, seeing promise in her academic abilities, decided she should prepare to teach English literature in their parochial high schools. They sent her to St. Anne's College, Oxford University, where she was studious, timid, hesitant, but gradually spoke up in small discussion groups. She impressed her tutors with her good mind. She read widely in Oxford's Bodleian Library, wrote weekly papers, and absorbed great literature and history.
 
BJP: Inwardly, she questioned blind obedience to Catholic dogmas. Her anorexia continued. Her fainting spells recurred. Physically ill, distraught, not able to find God, she sensed that continuing as a nun would kill her or drive her mad. On January 6, 1969, the Feast of Epiphany, the day of miraculous insights, when nuns symbolically renew their vows, she explained her doubts to her superiors. She asked to leave the cloister to seek God in the world.
 
FP: A sympathetic mother superior who had known her since school days, contacted the Mother Provincial, who spoke to Karen and approved her leaving the order. Karen wrote the bishop, asked to be released from her vows, asked that his dispensation be forwarded to the Sacred Congregation for Religious in Rome. On January 27, 1969, the official papers arrived from Rome. Having entered at 17, now at 24, after seven years, no longer a nun, she was depressed and uncertain.
 
BJP: A small scholarship enabled her to continue her studies at Oxford. She strove to overcome depression, to adjust to the strange outside world, to get used to miniskirts, raucous music, gyrating dancing. In her second autobiographical book, Beginning the World, she wrote of being lost, of being "in the world, but not of it."
 
FP: While she grieved at leaving the convent, her college tutor nominated her for a competitive academic prize. She spent six hours in competition with others writing papers about the novel, tragedy, and verse. When the University Registry letter came, she stared at it, not believing that she had won the Violet Vaughan Morgan Prize for Literature. This prize gave her new assurance.
 
BJP: Another bright spot at Oxford was the Stanley family. Both Judith and Edwin Stanley taught at Oxford and needed a live–in student to help care for their 10 year old autistic son Simon, a highly strung epileptic. Needing the job, Karen successfully coped with Simon's erratic behavior, was warmed by this kind family. But her sense of failure and her occasional fainting spells continued.
 
FP: Karen remained at Oxford, 1969-73, four years, receiving the B.A. degree in literature. She then taught English Literature at the University of London's Bedford College, 1973-76, three years. She had a failed love affair with an equally troubled Oxford student, was treated by a psychiatrist, had a nervous breakdown, and was suicidal.
 
BJP: The climax came at age 38 while she taught English at a girls' high school in Dulwich, England, 1976-82, six years. At the end of a play she had directed, while thanking the student actors and guests, she experienced flashing lights, perspiration, light-headedness. She fainted. In the emergency room of the local hospital, examined by a neurologist, Dr. Wolfe, she described her previous attacks going back to 1963 when she was 18. He gave her an EEG test to measure her brain waves. He diagnosed her condition as sporadic brain wave irregularity leading to temporal lobe epilepsy, probably from a birth defect. He assured her that the epilepsy was controllable by drugs. He said she should have had an EEG test much, much earlier.
 
FP: The weight of anxiety about her sanity was lifted. She knew from young Simon Stanley's case that epilepsy is treatable. The right medication was soon found. She has not had an epileptic seizure since. But the head of the Dulwich girls school, worried that epilepsy would frighten parents, replaced her. Her job lost, barred from teaching because of prejudice against epilepsy, she was at another low point, another crossroads.
 
BJP: To make sense of her shattered life she wrote her first autobiographical book, Through the Narrow Gate?. The title came from the New Testament, Matthew 7:12: "Enter by the narrow gate, since the gate that leads to perdition is wide, and the road spacious, and many take it; but it is a narrow gate and a hard road that leads to life, and only a few find it."
 
FP: Her editor asked that she revise her first bitter draft to include good things that had kept her a nun for seven years. Her final version speaks of the beauty of the liturgy, the belief that every moment of life has eternal significance, her optimism that she would find God, appreciation for the fellow nuns who broke the rules to befriend and comfort her. Her nun's training came at the wrong time. Second Vatican Council reforms (1962-64) were being debated but not yet implemented. Had she entered a few years later, her training would have been lighter and brighter. All would have been different.
 
BJP: Glowing reviews of her Through the Narrow Gate, a best seller, brought her to the attention of a specialized London college and led her to another teaching job, this time about religion. In 1982 she was asked to teach about Christianity at London's Leo Baeck College for the Study of Judaism and the Training of Rabbis and Teachers. The door of opportunity had opened to her next career as a historian of religion.
 
FP: The program manager at England's then new TV Channel 4 asked her to write scripts for a six part TV series about the life and work of St. Paul. She worked for some years with an Israeli film crew in Jerusalem. She interviewed Jews, Christians, and Muslims. A successful TV series resulted, along with a book on St. Paul titled The First Christian, 1984, and two other books of interviews she had with Israeli Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Thus, in her late thirties and early forties, she found herself and her life's work. Each succeeding book made her a better known researcher and writer on the histories and conflicts of the major religions.
 
BJP: Frank, what if Vatican reforms had been in effect when she entered? What if her training as a nun had been more humane and she had remained a nun? What if her superiors had not sent her to Oxford to study? Any other "ifs"?
 
FP: What if neurologist Dr. Wolfe had not diagnosed her epilepsy? What if medication had not controlled it? What if she had not come to the favorable attention of Leo Baeck College officials, and to England's Channel 4 TV officials—what would have happened?
 
BJP: We would not have Karen Armstrong, author of some international best sellers on religion and religious conflicts. Here are some of her major books and their themes: 1981, Through the Narrow Gate; and 1983, Beginning the World, her two autobiographical books already mentioned. 1984, The First Christian, about St. Paul; and Varieties of Religious Experiences; 1985, Tongues of Fire; the last two books based on her interviews in and around Jerusalem.
 
FP: 1986, The Gospel According to Woman: Christianity's Creation of the Sexual War in the West. Armstrong showed how the medieval witch craze, sex-denying Victorian England, and today's Christianity have all perpetuated mistrust of the human body and fear of women. She criticized theologians, scholars, and others who have made women, including herself, victims of Christian dogma about the inferiority of women.
 
BJP: 1988, Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World. Armstrong wrote that in waging wars against each other the three major religions have wasted lives and treasure; that false images, ridiculous perceptions, and absurd demons have haunted them. These three religions, she wrote, must learn to look at the world from one another's viewpoints.
 
FP: 1992, Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet. Armstrong's respectful, reverential life of Muhammad tried to correct the West's misconceptions about Islam and its founder. Many Westerners believe wrongly that Islam is a violent religion. It was not violent in origin. About 610 A.D., Muhammad, a merchant from Mecca in what is now Saudi Arabia, saw that his squabbling tribesmen needed a holy book, as the Jews and Christians had the Bible. He gave them the Koran, as revealed to him, stressing that Arabs were descended, like Jews and Christians, from Abraham; that Allah, which means God, is the same one God of the Jews and Christians. The Koran, Armstrong stressed, urged prayer, good works, justice, and charity.
 
BJP: 1993, The End of Silence: Women and Priesthood, is Armstrong's defense of women as being as capable as men. It is a plea for all religions to allow women to serve as priests and ministers. Also in 1993, her A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is her best known international best seller. It traces the changing concepts of God: from pagan times, to the Hebrew prophets, to the Greeks and Romans, to early Christians, to Islam, to the 16th century Enlightenment thinkers, to the l9th century Death of God philosophers, to our time. This tour de force is not an easy book. But its rich detail and historical coverage make it worth the try.
 
FP: 1996, Jerusalem, One City, Three Faiths, traced the frictional relations of Christians, Jews and Muslims in the holy city over the last 5,000 years. She is not optimistic that the knotty Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be easily or quickly solved. An Israeli critic, writing in the Jerusalem Post, accused Armstrong of being a pro-Muslim apologist who disparaged Jews and Christians.
 
BJP: 2000, The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is a history of religious fundamentalism since 1492. It appeared before the horror of September 11, 2001 and was snapped up by readers as a plausible explanation. Religious fundamentalists, Armstrong explained, are militant splinter groups who break away from major religions when they (splinter groups) see the parent religion turn unalterably from original principles. Fundamentalists are true believers who when they see themselves marginalized, pushed aside, and about to be eliminated lash out at change, progress, modernity. Determined not to be wiped out, they organize, plot how to survive, and the more radical misguided few use violence to destroy those who, they believe, have wronged or betrayed them.
 
FP: 2000, Islam, A Short History, is another attempt to show Islam in its best light. She shows how Muhammad the Prophet gave Muslims the Koran; how in it he stressed peace, good works, and charity. She again countered as incorrect the West's misconception of Islam as warlike. Followers of Islam, she explained again, are urged to create a just and charitable community.
 
BJP: Karen Armstrong has written much and lectured widely. There is repetition. One can get lost. Can you pin down her core beliefs about religions and their conflicts. What are her passions?
 
FP: She has four passions: 1-She is passionate about wanting to correct stereotypes and misconceptions we Westerners have about Islam. 2-She passionately wants us to know what fundamentalism is, how the term is used, why it has arisen recently; why we've been shocked by its violent eruption among Islamic extremists. 3-She passionately wants readers to understand that concepts of God have changed over thousands of years; that how we think about God has changed as human problems have changed. 4-She passionately believes that the test of a good religion is its compassion, how it treats its have-nots, its sick and its poor. And now, for another perspective, we condense the content of two TV interviews with Karen Armstrong seen and heard by millions of viewers.
 
BJP: Here is the gist of the Brian Lamb-Karen Armstrong interview on C-Span, Booknotes, Sept. 22, 2000. Lamb asked her: when were you first interested in writing about God? Armstrong answered, repeating facts already mentioned: I never intended to be a writer. After I left the convent I thought I had finished with God. I was tired of religion. I fell into writing about religion by accident. I lost my teaching job because I'm an epileptic. I wrote my first autobiography, Through the Narrow Gate, 1981, to make sense out of my life. The program manager of a new British TV station who read it asked me to write the scenario for and help film a documentary series on St. Paul's life. I needed the work, lived in Jerusalem with an Israeli film crew, and was at first skeptical about the authenticity of the St. Paul story. But in Jerusalem, seeing the three faiths living side by side, interviewing Jews, Christians and Muslims, seeing how each adhered to his or her faith, [quote] "I came back to a sense of the divine." [end quote].
 
FP: Lamb asked her: What is your religion now? Armstrong answered: I say jokingly that I am a freelance monotheist. I draw strength from all three religions and am open to wisdom from any other faith. I see my former Catholicism as part of a great human search for meaning in a flawed and tragic world. I search after God, after the divine, after the ultimate about which there is no end. Lamb asked her: What has been the biggest problem in your life?
 
BJP: Armstrong answered: Adjusting. As Catholics in England my family were a minority. We lived in a tight subculture, a ghetto, like the Jews. In the convent I was cut off from the world. After seven years, I went back to a totally transformed world. Everyone was protesting the war in Vietnam about which I knew nothing. I gave up on religion after leaving the convent. After working on religious documentary films in Jerusalem, I adjusted to researching and writing the history of religions. Adjusting has been my hardest but necessary problem.
 
FP: Lamb said: You wrote your first autobiography, went to Jerusalem to write about St. Paul, and have written ten or so other books. Are they all still in print? Armstrong answered: My second autobiographical book, Beginning the World, is out of print. The publisher wants to reprint it but I resist. I was then in grief, was suicidal, was utterly miserable. I still need to come to terms with that horrible time in my life. Lamb asked: Which of your books has sold the most and how many? Armstrong answered: A History of God, no idea how many, but there are over half a million copies in over 30 languages.
 
BJP: Lamb said: There are some six billion people on earth: two billion are Christians, of which just over a billion are Roman Catholic, 1.2 billion are Muslims, and only 15 million are Jews. Why have so few Jews written so much and had so much written about them? Armstrong answered: Jews have had a tragic history. Their very existence has been threatened in the last thousand years since the Crusades. So they continually ask themselves and write about: Who am I? Why am I here? Is there a God? Why be Jewish when it brings so much suffering and pain?
 
FP: Lamb asked: Why have the Jews been so persecuted? Armstrong answered: Anti-Semitism is a terrible European disease. Consider how it arose: the Roman Empire fell; barbarians overran Europe; Europe fell into the Dark Ages; European civilization came to a virtual halt. Europe struggled for a comeback on the world stage, with the Crusades as its first cooperative act. Europeans felt inferior, an out group, afraid, and truculent. So they projected this fear into hating others. They hated the Muslims because Muslims had the Holy Land; hated Greek Orthodox Christians because they escaped the Dark Ages, hated Jews because Jews, wanderers without a homeland, had learned how to survive, some even to prosper.
 
BJP: Lamb asked: How did the lies about the Jews originate? Armstrong answered: Jews were easy scapegoats To remember their past, their reason for being, they clung to ritual, holidays, customs. It was easy to single out Jews by dress and manner and tar them with bizarre myths, such as Jews kill little children at Passover and use their blood to make unleavened bread to remind them of their escape from Egypt. This ridiculous myth showed the disturbed European mind. This prejudice persisted against all common sense. Hitler used it and other lies to fuel his Nazi Holocaust.
 
FP: Lamb asked: Why did you write your book titled Islam? What does the word "Islam" mean? Armstrong answered: Islam means to "surrender" to Allah (Arabic name for God), to give up posturing, to stop calling attention to one's self, to surrender ego. Muhammad (c.570-632), the Prophet, asked fellow Muslims to prostrate themselves to Allah, the same one God of the Jews and Christians. Now, Christians often presented God in human terms like themselves and ascribed to God some of their own prejudices. Christian Crusaders went into battle crying, "God wills it," as they murdered Muslims and Jews. Muslims, wary of this behavior, speak of Allah, God, ultimate reality, as a state of purity. Islam's basic values are peace and good works. Because a few Islamic extremists are violent, we in the West, see all Islam as violent. This is not so, said Armstrong.
 
BJP: Lamb asked: What about Buddha, about whom you are now writing a book? Armstrong said: Buddha stressed self abnegation, continuous effort to lose one's ego, to empty one's self. That's why all we know about him can be put in a thimble. Few can achieve total abnegation. But in so striving, one sees things ever clearer. Lamb asked: Well, Karen, now back to Islam and Muhammad the Prophet. Who was he?
 
FP: Armstrong answered: Muhammad was a concerned merchant of Mecca, in what is now Saudi Arabia. Around 610 A.D., Arabia was a desert without crops or resources. Tribes fought within and among themselves for survival. Muhammad knew that Jews and Christians looked down on Arabs as barbaric pagans who had no prophets, no Bible. Claiming revelations from on high, Muhammad dictated in beautiful poetry insights that formed the Koran. That book stressed that Allah required Muslims to humble themselves by prayer, to live righteously, and to dispense justice and charity. [End of Lamb-Armstrong interview].
 
BJP: Here is the gist of the Bill Moyers-Karen Armstrong interview on his PBS TV program NOW. Moyers asked Armstrong: if you were God, would you do away with religion? Armstrong replied: The test of a good religion is its degree of compassion. When religion concentrates instead on ego or on belligerence, God must weep. Moyers asked: Why have there been so many atrocities in the history of religion?
 
FP: Armstrong replied: Some extremists are angry enough to kill. Examples: the 9-11 Islamic fanatics, the European Crusaders, the orthodox Jew who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin. When fanatics commit atrocities in the name of God, or for the glory of God, that's bad religion. When you ask fanatics, "what about compassion?" They answer, "what's the point of having religion if we can't use it to hurt people who are hurting you?"
 
BJP: Moyers asked: Why do fanatics have this attitude? Armstrong replied: Fear. It comes from cold fear. Fundamentalists are true believers. Convinced that their basic beliefs are being crushed out of existence, they strike back. Such violence was associated with religion from the beginning. The Hebrew Prophets and later religions, seeing every single human as sacred, transcended this barbarism.
 
FP: Moyers asked: How do you value the sacredness of others? Where does compassion come from? Armstrong replied: Compassion comes when you put yourself in another person's position, when you make a friend of a stranger. Genesis tells how Abraham sat outside his tent in the hot afternoon and watched three strangers approach. Most of us would not bring strangers who might be dangerous into our home. Abraham welcomed them into his home. Abraham asked his wife to prepare an elaborate meal for them.
 
BJP: Armstrong continuing: It turned out that one of the strangers was Abraham's God. Abraham's act of compassion led to a divine encounter. In Hebrew the word for holy, Kadosh, also means separate or other. Sometimes the otherness of a stranger, one not of our ethnic or ideological or religious group, instead of repelling us, can bring us out of our selfishness and give us insight into the otherness which is God. [End of Moyers-Armstrong interview].
 
FP: Betty, despite Karen Armstrong's trials and tribulations, she has achieved success. Born in 1944 she is now in 2003 age 59. What does she say about her lifestyle as a professional single woman?
 
BJP: She answered that in her article, "The Loneliness of the Intellectual Woman," New Statesman, Vol. 129, Issue 4489 June 5, 2000), pp. 23-24. She begins (I paraphrase): I sometimes smile wryly when I hear myself described as an 'ex-nun'. True, I no longer observe poverty, chastity and obedience, vows I kept for seven years as a nun. I am no longer poor and am certainly not obedient. But I have never married, continue to live alone, pass my days in silence as I did in the cloister, and spend my life writing, thinking, and talking about God and spirituality.
 
FP: Armstrong continued: Being solitary holds no terrors for me. A writer must spend long hours alone. Somebody once called me a 'gregarious loner.' I enjoy company, but I feel lost if I do not spend time by myself each day. I love my work. I can't wait to get to my desk. I can't wait to get to the library.
 
BJP: She continued on marriage: I have always assumed that, one day, I would find somebody to love and would get married like everybody else. But I have been unsuccessful with men. Yet I also realize that, had I had a normal family life and responsibilities, I would not have written as much. Perhaps to succeed as a writer, it has been necessary for me to fail as a woman. She continued: I have to live a good deal of the time inside my own head. It takes an immense effort to drag a book from sources into my mind and then from my mind onto paper. It demands concentration. For months, I retreat from the outside world. The real drama is enacted in my head.
 
FP: She continued: Now, in a man, this concentration is regarded as noble and inspiring. But in a woman it is often condemned as selfish. Why? Men think women must be primarily caregivers and serve the family. I am taken to task for appearing unfriendly, impenetrable, and inaccessible when producing a new book. Others scold me for remaining single. But I [she must have smiled] have h dad no choice in the matter. Betty, as we end, what do you think is Karen Armstrong's value to us, to the reading public, to scholarship?
 
BJP: She is a phenomenon, a valuable contributor to our understanding of religious conflicts. We admire her gumption in rising above adversity. We admire her ability to write and to lecture widely. She has given us fuller understanding of problems on religious differences. Frank, what is Karen Armstrong writing now?
 
FP: Two books to be published next year in 2004: one is another autobiographical book; the other is on the Axial Age, from 600 BCE to 200 BCE, which saw an explosion of religious ideas from Confucius, Tao, Buddha, the Jewish prophets, Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. She continues to probe and to share that mysterious mystical unknowable intelligence called God.
 
BJP: Where does she find that mysterious mystical unknowable intelligence called God?
 
FP: She says she finds God where ordinary people are concerned about others. Where the lowly are lifted, the sick healed, justice reigns, peace is made universal. Where transformed people work together to make future generations healthier and happier. Where the test of a good religion, a good faith, is its capacity for compassion. Compassion leads a person, family, society or country to correct wrongs and do justly. For her, so far, where there is compassion, there is God.
 
BJP: Let's stop on that note. END

About the Authors

1. For biographical account: "Betty & Franklin Parker Looking Back Since 1946,"
access: http://bfparker.blogster.com/betty_franklin_parker_looking.html
or: http://ourstory.com/story.html?v=10919

or: http://www.progressiveu.org/182455-betty-franklin-parker-looking-back-since-1946-57-years-of-a-good-idea-thanksgiving-2007-bfparker-frontiernet-net

or: http://bootlog.com/index.php?cat=travelogs&aut=bfparker


2. For a list of 153 of authors' publications go to: http://www.worldcat.org
type in: Franklin Parker, 1921- and you should get the following URL:
http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=Parker%2C+Franklin%2C+1921-%2C&=Search&qt=results_page



3. To access free E-Book full contents of Franklin Parker, George Peabody, A Biography. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995 rev. edn., go to:
http://books.google.com/books?id=OPIbk-ZPnF4C&dq=franklin+parker&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=qxV3RqTk1k&sig=sXAmDL_CyCYd-Sl0n_IRl7g1S1I#PPP1,M1

or:
http://books.google.com/books?id=OPIbk-ZPnF4C&dq=franklin+parker&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=qxV3RqTk1k&sig=sXAmDL_CyCYd-Sl0n_IRl7g1S1I#PPP1,M1

E-mail corrections and comments to: bfparker@frontiernet.net END OF MANUSCRIPT

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James Albert Michener (1907-97), Writer & Novelist

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

May Cravath Wharton, M.D. (1873-1959), Founder of Uplands Retirement Village, Pleasant Hill, TN, USA

Arthurdale, West Virginia, 1933: Historic First FDR New Deal Homestead Community, By Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Ezekiel Cheever (1614-1708), New England Colonial Teacher, by Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net

May Cravath Wharton, M.D. (1873-1959), Founder of Uplands Retirement Village, Pleasant Hill, Tennessee, USA.

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Karen Armstrong (1944-) as Master Teacher: A Dialogue on the British Ex-Nun, Author, and Historian of Religion, by Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net

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