Wilda Van Dusen

Wilda Elizabeth Van Dusen Wilda Elizabeth Van Dusen died on March 14, 2005 after a lengthy and very courageous struggle with metastatic breast cancer, which she battled with characteristic strength and grace. Wilda was born on February 14, 1923 to Marvin Clyde Reep and Ruth Wilson Reep in Durham, North Carolina. She attended Durham public schools and graduated from Durham High School on the eve of World War II in 1940. She excelled in history, English, and three foreign languages: French, German, and Latin. In her senior year, she won first place in the state-wide Latin examination and was asked to take over temporarily for the French teacher when he fell ill. Tall and athletic, she also excelled in sports and was the center for the women s basketball team. Wilda was determined to go to college and was obviously the kind of student coveted by a local college that had recently been transformed into a major university by the fortunes of the Duke family. Unfortunately, the Duke administration believed that local students did not qualify for scholarships since they were spared room and board charges by living at home. With the country still in the depths of the Great Depression, however, Wilda s impoverished family did not have enough money even for Duke s then-modest tuition, although she had easily won admission. Instead, she worked summers and did a post-graduate year at Durham High School, where she took commercial courses such as typing and acquired the kind of practical skills that made her an effective manager of research and finances. Entering Duke in 1941, Wilda started majoring in modern languages and found employment for her clerical skills in the Duke library. Perhaps fortunately for her, all of the good professors in modern languages had left to help with the war effort after her first semester. She went searching for a more challenging milieu, which she found in the history department, whose faculty was deeply involved in the production of young naval lieutenants through the V-12 program. In her junior year she took a history course with a shy young history instructor named Albert Van Dusen, Van to all who knew him well. Van s dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania on the economic history of colonial Connecticut had been put on hold for the duration of the war when all of Connecticut s valuable state records were placed in bomb-proof underground storage. As the principal support of a widowed mother and two younger siblings, he had been exempted from the military draft and sought to help the war effort as a teacher in the V-12 program. His gentle humor and captivating lectures made as much of an impression on Wilda as his youthful good looks. He, in turn, was not blind to the willowy beauty who seemed to be smarter than all of the other students in his class and was so helpful when he needed to find books in the library. Thus began a romance and a shared life of historical research and teaching that spanned 55 years, including 53 years of marriage from 1946 to 1999. Right after Wilda graduated in 1945, the army s need for manpower was such that even Van was drafted. After basic training he ended up being assigned to a tank unit that was shaping up at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Fortunately, the young lovers did not have to endure the cruel test of overseas combat before the war soon ended. Duke procured Van s early release from military service so that he could teach during the spring semester of 1946, which ended with his and Wilda s wedding on May 3, 1946. With Connecticut s records soon to be unearthed, Van was anxious to return north and finish his dissertation. His old mentor as an undergraduate at Wesleyan, Professor George Dutcher, obtained him a part-time appointment as a visiting instructor for the 1947/1948 academic year with a course load that permitted him to finish his dissertation. Wilda helped financially by commuting to Hartford and working at Connecticut General Insurance Company during the day and professionally by editing and typing his dissertation at night. With the dissertation and the appointment finished in 1948, Van found full-time employment working as an historian for the U. S. Army in Washington, D.C., and Wilda obtained a clerical position at the recently formed Central Intelligence Agency. Neither was happy to leave the academic environment. While at Wesleyan, Wilda and Van visited the rapidly expanding University Of Connecticut to see what possibilities might exist and met Professor Edmund Moore, Chairman of the History Department. When the Department needed to fill a new position in American Colonial history for the fall of 1949, a call to Washington elicited an enthusiastic response from Wilda and Van. Conditions were primitive then. The History Department was still operating out of a Quonset hut, and faculty housing was in short supply. When the promised units in the University s new Mansfield Apartments were not finished on time, Wilda had to make a home for three months out of a rustic cabin with no running water and only a fireplace for heat. Still she and Van throve on the excitement generated by the numerous young faculty couples drawn together in close friendships by a common effort to build the post-war University into a respected regional and national institution. The passing of her generation marks the end of an era when the University faculty formed a tightly knit community that transcended departmental and disciplinary bounds and whose bonds of friendship were maintained over decades even after some members moved on to other institutions around the country. Wilda brought to this community her Southern sense of manners and gracious hospitality. With a passion for what she had been denied as a child, she loved beautiful things and decorated her home with exquisite taste, elegant, but never extravagant. She liked nothing better than to share this home with people over a gourmet meal that she had prepared from scratch. A perfect size 10, she never received guests or left the house without having her hair neatly coiffed and being impeccably turned out in a classically tailored suit or becoming dress with coordinated accessories. Even in her 80 s men and women alike would stop and compliment her on how beautiful she looked. Wilda worked for a few years as an acquisitions librarian in the University s Wilbur Cross Library and continued to assist Van in his teaching and research. By the time Governor John Lodge appointed Van to the post of Connecticut s State Historian in 1952, Wilda had become his full-time partner in teaching and research. She became an accomplished archival researcher as he worked on his 1961 opus, Connecticut, which has been the standard one-volume work on Connecticut history for over a generation. Her incredible eye for detail made her such an invaluable editor, proofreader, and indexer that Van s publisher, Random House, offered her a job, but she preferred working with him on what they both loved. He could never have produced two superbly edited volumes of The Public Records of the State of Connecticut without her. Her knowledge of the collections in the Connecticut State Library and the Connecticut Historical Society and her ability to ferret out obscure or misplaced documents became legendary. At the time of the U. S. bicentennial, when Van obtained a large grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to edit the papers of Connecticut s Revolutionary War governor, Jonathan Trumbull, Wilda ran the office, trained the research assistants, and did vast amounts of research with Van in archives throughout the U. S., in England, in Europe, and around the Caribbean, wherever Trumbull s ubiquitous commercial and political ties led. Together they unearthed many unpublished and long-forgotten papers. Unfortunately, Van s long battle with Parkinson s disease prevented the final editing and publication of their labors. When Van had to retire in 1985, Wilda and he donated the thousands of pages of material that they had collected to the University s Special Collections Department in the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, where they will be available to future generations of scholars. They also established the Albert E. and Wilda E. Van Dusen Scholarship, which is awarded annually to an outstanding graduate student in the History Department. This scholarship symbolizes the great care and love that Wilda and Van had for his students. Sadly denied children of their own, they opened their hearts and home to generations of students, many of whom remained devoted to them so long as they lived. Wilda loved to host Van s graduate seminars and fill up the students with mountains of rich food, which quickly disappeared. Warm spring and fall weekends would bring games of badminton and croquet on their spacious back lawn before dinner and homemade Southern peach ice cream in season. But more than that, Wilda nourished students academic aspirations by advising them on research, going over their papers with her fine editorial eye, encouraging them to believe in themselves, and pushing them to reach higher. Without her, by their own admission, more than one Ph.D. and accomplished scholar would have failed to materialize. Wilda and Van for many years supported the Palumbo family of Monte Sant Angelo, Italy through the Foster Parents Program. They and the Palumbo children remained devoted to each other throughout their lives. Wilda s gratitude and loyalty to those who showed her kindness and courtesy knew no bounds. After she developed breast cancer in 1998 the wonderful and compassionate care that she received from Dr. Peter Deckers and the staff at the University of Connecticut Health Center moved her to endow the Albert and Wilda Van Dusen Chair in Academic Medicine, which also underscores their devotion to teaching. What is even more remarkable is that she alone, through careful management and conservative investments, starting with a few thousand dollars after Van retired, built up enough over 20 years to fulfill her pledge to the University. Not bad for someone who started out at the age of 17 with nothing behind her but her own native intelligence and the indomitable will to make something of herself. Wilda is survived by many close friends, especially her cousin Julie Jetton, who gave her great love and encouragement throughout her ordeal, and Allen Ward, who was like a son to her and Van and helped to care for them in their long illnesses. She requested that she be buried privately and that those who wish pay their respects by making a donation to the Albert E. and Wilda E. Van Dusen Scholarship Fund. Checks should be made out to the University of Connecticut Foundation with a notation indicating the Van Dusen Scholarship Fund and sent to Allen M. Ward, 85 Ball Hill Rd., Storrs, CT 06268. Please visit www.potterfh.com for online memorial guestbook.