Newspaper clipping: Ellen M. FitzSimons honored at College of Charleston sesqui-centennial, May 1935
Book 1, Page 523 ·1935
Transcription
[Photograph: half-tone head-and-shoulders portrait of an older woman in spectacles and a beaded necklace.]
—Photo by Marion ELLEN M. FITZSIMONS
[S]HOWN ABOVE are eight of the twenty men and women who will receive honorary doctor’s degrees from the College of Charleston at its sesqui-centennial celebration May 12–14. Dr. Walters is president of the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Bowman is president elect of Johns Hopkins university. Dr. Bryan is president of the College of William and Mary, and Dr. Conant, of Harvard university. Mr. Bingham is am[b]assador to the Court of St. James’s. Dr. Laurens is professor of physiology in the school of medicine at Tulane university. Miss FitzSimons [i]s librarian of the Charleston Library society. Mr. Van Devanter is associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
AI Notes
A newspaper clipping pasted high on an otherwise blank album page. A halftone head-and-shoulders portrait of Ellen M. FitzSimons (older woman in spectacles and a beaded necklace, looking past the camera) is captioned ‘—Photo by Marion / ELLEN M. FITZSIMONS.’ Beneath, a strip of body text — the lower portion of a longer article — describes eight of the twenty men and women who are to receive honorary doctor’s degrees from the College of Charleston at its sesqui-centennial celebration, May 12–14. The college was founded in 1785, so the sesqui-centennial places this clipping in May 1935. The clipping is trimmed; the left edges of each line have been clipped off (initial letter or two of each line missing). The Justice Van Devanter mentioned is Willis Van Devanter (1859–1941), Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court 1910–1937.
The clipping is trimmed at its left edge; the bracketed letters above have been supplied by the transcriber. The photographs of the other seven honorees would have appeared above the caption strip but are not preserved in this fragment — only Miss FitzSimons’s portrait was clipped.
The May 1935 sesquicentennial cohort placed Miss FitzSimons alongside James Bryant Conant (then in his second year as president of Harvard), Robert Worth Bingham (U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, 1933–1937), Willis Van Devanter (Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1910–1937), and Isaiah Bowman, president-elect of Johns Hopkins — extraordinary company for a Charleston librarian, signalling how unusually the College weighted her fifty-year stewardship of the city’s oldest library.