'Where I belonged'
$5 million university center donor went to 'all girls' Hamline during second World War.
Serri Graslie
Issue date: 1/26/10 Section: News
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Rather than spend hours a day traveling to and from school, she paid tuition to attend a nearby boarding school for American Indian students.
Although federal policies mandated a thin curriculum and many of the school's students were very poor, Anderson says she didn't find the experience unusual at the time.
"As a kid I didn't know that it was that much different but it probably was," she said. "I do think we had good teachers."
Even though her early education may have been lacking in its depth or breadth, Anderson said college had always been in her sights. She first started looking for schools on a visit to the Twin Cities in the early 1940s.
"I rode in with my uncle who was taking in a load of grain to St. Paul, and he left my friend and I off on Snelling Avenue," she said. "And of course, somewhere we had heard that there were colleges - in particular Macalester - and we stopped there to look around, but I didn't like what I saw at all."
She described finding Hamline as "pure luck" after the disappointing Mac visit where she was unimpressed by an interviewer. What sealed her decision to attend Hamline was simple.
"I loved the looks of Manor House," she said.
Anderson enrolled in the fall of 1942 when the United States was plunging head first into World War II. By her second semester, she said Hamline had turned into a "girl's school" because the majority of its male students had been drafted.
"It all happened kind of fast and of course everyone was just waiting for the war to be over and hoping that things would be normal again," she said.
But Anderson didn't feel the major shift hampered her time at Hamline. In fact, she said she felt enlivened in the classroom.
"I felt stimulated by what we were learning and by the way our professors handled things," she said. "Hamline always knew the boys would come back."
At school, Anderson majored in social work - something she didn't intend to pursue when she started.
"I guess it just happened naturally," she said. "I didn't know about it before I went but I learned that's where I belonged."
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