It's All Relative
With fourth-generation student, family finds that Mary Washington is in its genes.
By Susan Scott Neal
Nobody pressured Annie Morris, Class of 2011, to come to the University of Mary Washington. The National Merit Scholar from York, Pa., had her pick of highly regarded colleges, and her parents felt the decision was hers to make.
Everyone thought she’d wind up at a big, urban Northern school, such as the University of Pittsburgh.
But Annie surprised them all by focusing on her parents’ alma maters, the University of the South at Sewanee and Mary Washington. She loved them both.
In the end, Annie realized after an impromptu tour of Mary Washington that the campus on the hill overlooking Fredericksburg was where she felt most comfortable.
And it’s no wonder – a fondness for Mary Washington is in her genes.
Annie represents the fourth generation of her family to matriculate at Mary Washington. She is following in the footsteps of not only her mother, Caroline Sutton Morris ’79, but also her grandmother, Mary Anne Kimman Sutton ’46, and great-grandmother, Mary Griffin Kimman ’14.
The family tradition spans nearly the entire century-long existence of the University, and most of its incarnations, from two-year to four-year state normal school, from teacher’s college to liberal arts college, from all-women to coed, and finally, to university.
Mary Washington helped set those who came before Annie on the paths of their lives.
“I think it will be a stepping stone for me, too,” Annie said.
Founded three years earlier, Fredericksburg Normal School was only a building or two isolated on a hilltop when Annie’s great-grandmother was a student between 1911 – the year the school opened – and 1914. At that time, it was “in the country,” surrounded by farmland and linked to the town center about a mile away by a narrow dirt road.
Mary Griffin was the daughter of Irish immigrants who ran a store in Fredericksburg’s small, bustling commercial area centered along William and Caroline streets. The family lived about three blocks from the store in a two-story frame house at 307 Caroline.
At a time when few young women had the opportunity to go to college, Mary was the daughter of immigrants who strived to provide better educations and more advantages for their children. The presence of the new normal school just outside of town made college a reality for the petite Irish lass.
If an old black-and-white photograph is any indication, Mary enjoyed college. She lived in Virginia Hall despite the fact that her home was so close. Someone took her picture leaning out of a dorm window. She’s smoking a cigarette and talking to the milkman, probably a “townie” or local farm boy who loved his job delivering milk to the college.
Family members don’t know whether Mary got in trouble for such unseemly behavior.
They do know that she studied at Mary Washington and left in 1914.
Mary undoubtedly helped out some in her father’s store, but her life’s endeavor shifted to domestic pursuits after she married Jack Kimman and had two children. Jack was in charge of a family farm in the Post Oak area of Spotsylvania County, Va., so the family spent part of the year there and the rest of the year at the Griffin family home in Fredericksburg.
Following her own parents’ example, Mary valued education, so she and Jack arranged for the children and several cousins to be taught at home by local teachers. Their son, Bill, would go on to graduate from Virginia Military Institute, and their daughter, Mary Anne, would go up the hill to Mary Washington as a member of the Class of 1946. She was only 16 when she started.
By this time the school had grown significantly and had transitioned from normal school to Fredericksburg State Teachers College and then to Mary Washington College. Paved streets led up the hill, and many local girls attended the school as day students. After World War II, there were even a few male students on campus who were given special permission to take classes there, thanks to the GI Bill of 1944.
Despite the college’s reputation for turning out excellent teachers, Mary Anne wasn’t interested in pursuing that profession. She just wanted to get out of Fredericksburg.
But first, over nearly three years, she hopped in the car every morning with her daddy when he left home to go to the farm. He dropped her off at the college, saving her a long walk to campus from Caroline Street, but putting her in the library early every morning waiting for classes to begin.
“Not that it improved my grades at all,” she said with a chuckle. “I wasn’t grown up enough for college.”
Mary Anne took a variety of the requisite courses and still remembers several teachers with affection and several with fear.
“I was scared to death of Mrs. Bushnell,” she said of the longtime dean of students, Nina Bushnell. “But fortunately she knew Daddy, and when she found out who I was, she said, ‘Oh, you’re Jack’s daughter!’ From then on she wasn’t so frightening.”
There were strict standards for dress and conduct, and severe consequences when rules were broken, Mary Anne recalls.
“There was a young married woman in my psychology class one year, and she got pregnant. She was asked to leave, even though she was married.”
Blessed with an adventuresome spirit, Mary Anne also left school before graduating.
“Daddy always had a stack of National Geographic magazines around, and I read them from cover to cover,” she said. “I wanted to go anywhere I could.”
But she needed work, so she used the shorthand and typing skills she’d learned at Mary Washington to land a secretarial job with William Gibson, a Fredericksburg lawyer.
Soon she ventured to Washington, D.C., to take a civilian job with the Navy. That’s where she saw a posting for a secretarial position at a Navy depot in Turkey.
“I begged and begged for that job,” she said, “and finally I got it, so I was off to Turkey quick as could be.”
She loved it there, but the rest of the world was calling, so she took another job in Germany for three years, then a job in France, where she was the only American girl in the Verdun depot.
There was also a brief first marriage to a handsome American aviator she met in France. The marriage ended in divorce but introduced her to the domestic side of military life and gave her two precious daughters, Georgia, born at Fort Bragg, N.C., and Caroline, born in Nebraska. After the marriage fell apart, she and the girls moved to Arlington, Va., and she supported them by working in Washington.
Mutual friends in Washington introduced her to Jim Sutton, a career Army officer who would turn out to be the husband she was meant to have. He adopted the girls, and the four of them became a military family and hit the road again.
They spent a number of years stationed in Heidelberg, Germany, a convenient location for weekends in London and camping trips in the countryside around Paris.
Returning to the states in 1973, the family settled in Northern Virginia, and the girls both found themselves academically ahead of their peers at Annandale High School. Georgia graduated a semester early and started her freshman year in January at the College of William & Mary. Two years later, Caroline would also graduate a semester early and enter Mary Washington in January. She had just turned 17.
“I don’t know that I really considered going anywhere else other than Mary Washington,” Caroline said. “Even though we lived in Europe for a long time, Mary Washington had always seemed a part of our lives and it was a known commodity. We’d often come to visit with our grandparents on Caroline Street and there was always a drive or a walk through the college.”
Caroline double-majored in English and economics. English was a given, because her family had always placed a strong emphasis on writing clearly.
But she’d never even heard of economics until she got to Mary Washington. She took a couple of economics courses out of curiosity and then signed up for an accounting class taught by Steven L. Czarsty, a professor who became one of her favorites. When she was a senior, he took her aside and insisted that she go to graduate school.
“I’d never even considered graduate school, but
Dr. Czarsty said he thought I should be a teacher, and he was instrumental in my getting a full scholarship to Drexel.”
Caroline didn’t become a teacher, but she earned an MBA in finance and banking at Drexel University and embarked on a financial career that has led to jobs in banking, food distribution, investments, and private education. She took some time off while her two daughters were small, and several years ago she opened her own business in York, a specialty gift shop called Kimman’s.
She said two specific lessons she learned from
Dr. Czarsty have stuck with her throughout the years.
“Dr. Czarsty always said the best trait to have, no matter what kind of work you’re doing, is creativity, the ability to look at a situation in a creative way. And the other thing he said is that you always have the option of doing nothing. Imagine that – you can just do nothing! Here it is 30 years later and I’m still remembering those comments he made and using them in my daily life.”
Caroline was not completely shocked when her daughter Annie said she wanted to go to the University of Mary Washington. The family’s ties to Fredericksburg had become even stronger through the years. Caroline’s grandparents had died in the 1970s, but her parents, Mary Anne and Jim Sutton, had moved to Fredericksburg after retirement and lived a block away from campus. Mary Anne had even become a student again, enthusiastically taking advantage of the college’s new offerings in historic preservation.
Caroline’s sister, “Auntie Georgia,” had also settled in Fredericksburg after law school, and the Morrises themselves – Caroline, husband Fred, Annie, and younger daughter Carrie – lived in Fredericksburg for a year until Fred’s banking career took them to York.
“I’d stroll the girls at the college when they were tiny, and when we come back for visits with Mom the campus is right there,” Caroline said. “Family has always meant a lot to Annie – she’s very close to her grandmother and to Auntie Georgia, and she has used the word ‘comfortable’ more than once. I think that has a lot to do with it.”
Annie says it’s true that comfort was a big factor in her decision, but she also cites some classic reasons students choose Mary Washington.
“The campus is so gorgeous, and it’s just the right size – not too big and not too small,” she said. “I just knew I’d fit in.”
After Annie settled on Mary Washington, Caroline learned that there were many more family connections to the school than anyone realized. In addition to her mother and grandmother, a number of other family members either graduated from or attended the University through the years – even some male relatives, including her mother’s brother, Bill Kimman of Fredericksburg, who took classes there on the GI Bill after World War II.
The Morrises also learned that Annie would have a relative on campus this year – her cousin Matthew Elliott is a senior.
The comfort level went up even more when Annie got her dorm assignment. She’s in Mason, where her mother lived her freshman year.
Annie says she loves Mary Washington and she’s excited about the many possibilities it offers. She’s not sure yet what paths she’ll take, and she’s still considering how she wants to become involved on campus.
“I enjoyed a very eclectic career in high school, but I was so involved with activities I decided to take a bit of a breather for a while.”
Musical theater and sports are two of her favorite pursuits, she said. She has been acting professionally since she was 7, doing commercials, voice-overs, community theater, and summer dinner theater. She played field hockey, basketball, and soccer at York Suburban High School, and she’s not accustomed to not playing, despite a serious ankle injury her sophomore year.
“I’ll just see how it goes and think about possibly getting involved in sports again,” she said. “I really do miss it.”
Annie has taken some theater courses, but otherwise she’s following a typical freshman year schedule of liberal arts classes along with a couple of business classes.
She has no idea what major she’ll choose, but she fully expects to go to graduate school since both of her parents earned advanced degrees. She also is interested in some type of internship in Washington, and she believes the University’s reputation will help her find one.
For now, she’s enjoying college life. She loves walking downtown with her friends for a bite to eat or some socializing at Hyperion coffee shop, and she gets together with her grandmother at least once a week for a meal or a shopping trip.
When Annie graduates from UMW in 2011, exactly 100 years will have passed since her great-grandmother enrolled at the very same place.
Little did Mary Griffin know that she wasn’t just a carefree young college girl hanging out of a dorm window flirting with a townie – she was the start of an enduring family tradition.
Rumor has it that another great-granddaughter might extend the legacy. Annie’s 15-year-old sister, Carrie, heads to college in three years.
She says Mary Washington is the only place she wants to go.
Susan Scott Neal is a staff writer with The Free Lance-Star.