• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1444 0

her PhD from the University of Chicago, was “the smartest woman at that college,” she took her course in European History. As a member of an honor society, the International Relations Club, she attended evening meetings in Dr. Greene’s faculty apartment in Beeson Hall on Montgomery Street; afterward, another student would walk the “very carefully brought up” girl home. “My survey of European History was of special interest to her, I thought,” Dr. Greene has reminisced, “because the author of our textbook, one of those widely used, was a noted professor at Columbia University who, while working on his studies of Martin Luther in Germany, had changed his membership to the Roman Catholic Church.”

SPRINGTIME WAS TREATED as a happy cliché at GSCW. Each year, the Spectrum yearbook published a few pages of black-and-white shots with a caption, much like that in the 1945 edition: “Springtime brings with it Dogwood blossoms and flowering Iris.” One entry, a few years earlier, had filled in the scene with more local color: “Elms form a stately avenue for academic processions, dogwoods flaunt their beauty in Terrell Court. The formal garden accentuates the classic architecture of the buildings.” M. F. O’Connor added to the spring theme, while purposely getting it backward, in “Effervescence,” an ode printed in the spring 1943 Corinthian, in which the sun rises on dogs sleeping beneath dogwoods. Its opening line, “Oh, what is so effervescent as a day in the spring,” was a parody of “And what is so rare as a day in June?” in “The Vision of Sir Launfal” by the American Romantic poet James Russell Lowell, a granduncle of Robert Lowell.

The spring of 1945, as O’Connor began her final quarter at GSCW, felt, even more than usual, to the young women and their guests, the Waves, as if the world was making a historic turn on its axis. During the previous summer, the D-day invasion had taken place with 155,000 Allied troops landing on the beaches of Normandy, opening a wedge in the Nazi domination of continental Europe. On February 23, 1945, Joe Rosenthal snapped his iconic photo of a group of marines and a navy corpsman raising a huge American flag over the Japanese island of Iwo Jima. By March 1945, Hitler was confined to his bunker in Berlin while American bombers attacked the city, and American troops liberated the first Nazi concentration camp, Buchenwald. Within two months, on May 8, 1945, VE-day was declared, marking the official end of the war in Europe.

In the midst of so many positive historic events, the sad news came on April 12 that Franklin Roosevelt, recently inaugurated to an unprecedented fourth term, had died in Warm Springs, Georgia. “My roommate and I went to an afternoon movie, returning to campus around five, and someone told us ‘The president has died,’” remembers Betty Anderson Bogle, a student from Atlanta. “We assumed she meant Guy Wells. When we realized she meant Roosevelt, we were stunned beyond belief.” A performer at one of the GSCW Monday musical events had been Navy Chief Petty Officer Graham Jackson, a black accordion player. When Life magazine appeared, many of the women recognized him in a photograph, playing “Going Home” on his accordion, tears rolling down his face, as the president’s hearse rolled past the steps of the Warm Springs polio hospital.

As she prepared to graduate, at twenty years old, O’Connor was far more active on campus than might have been expected. She had made enough of a name for one classmate to remember her as a “B.W.O.C.” (“Big Woman on Campus”). The girl whose only campus activity her first year had been the Newman Club was now editor in chief of the Corinthian literary magazine, feature editor of the Spectrum yearbook, and art editor of the Colonnade newspaper, as well as having been elected to all the honor societies — the Phoenix, Who’s Who in American Colleges and Universities, and the International Relations Club. The tone of her first Editor’s Letter in the fall 1944 Corinthian, titled “Excuse Us While We Don’t Apologize,” was unmistakable: “Although the majority of you