Agnes Scott College - Silhouette Yearbook (Decatur, GA)

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After twenty-nine years of teaching at Agnes Scott, Dr. Margaret W. Pepperdene, the chair of the English department from 1967 until 1984 and the Ellen Douglass Leyburn professor of English, retires this year. She never expected to make a career of teaching college. If anyone had told me that I would end up in the academic world I would have laughed in their face, she comments humorously. She earned her undergraduate degree at Louisiana State University and them took some time to play. You can ' t do that your whole life or people call you a bum, but everyone should take that time when they ' re young. I ' ve never regretted those years, she tells her students, who frequently appall her with their deadly serious career plans. She illustrates her paint as she reminisces about the time she lived in San Francisco. Everybody took care of us. The director of the Symphony-Orchestra would take us all home after the concert and his doctorate. Really? Oh, okay. She received a Fulbright fellowship in 1950 to research her dissertation at The Queen ' s University of Belfast, Northern Ireland, and the next year she received a Ford Foundation Graduate Fellowship to teach at Vanderbilt. In 1952 she joined the faculty of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She recalls some of her early wife would feed us dinner. I think he knew that that was the one good meal we ate! During the war she served as a naval communications officer in New Orleans. After the war she worked on her Masters at Vanderbilt, and at the suggestion of her major professor, Walter Clyde Curry, she went on to earn her doctorate. She laughingly recalls that momentous conversation: Jane, I think you ought to go fro your teaching experinces with a certain wry humor. I was teaching this reverse English class, which meant DUMB! Most of my students were football players who were obviously never going to pass this class. She caught one student plagirising and called him in to see her. Bart, she queried, what do you really want to do with your life? I wanna drive a TRUCK! he replied eagerly. She encouraged him, and was shortly thereafter visited by a highly irate football coach who was not happy to see his star linebacker leaving practice to go drive a truck. In 1954 Dr. Pepperdene was named a fellow by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and granted a fellowship by the American Association of University Women. Two years later Walter Clyde Curry recommended her for a position at Agnes Scott. When she came to Atlanta to interview she met professors who impressed her with their attitude toward their students and their subjects. They were students also, she recalls. Drawn to this atmosphere, she joined the faculty that fall, the same year that she was awarded the coveted John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Dr. Pepperdene is painstakingly prepared for every class she teaches, from freshman and sophomore English to The Canterbury Tales, Old English, and Troilus and Criseyde. All her lecturese are fully typed out and delivered with an elegance and grace that is difficult to depict. She is quick to interject examples from daily experience, to recount anecdoted, and to tell stories, all of which convey to her students the immediate relevance of the poetry. Her ready humoir lends a freshness to every class that enhances the serious purpose of coming to terms with the text. Dr. Pepperdene is asn anxious to learn from her students as they from her, and therefore each class is a pilgrimage that teacher and students make together. Each class is distinguished by the unaffected love that students and teacher share for each other and for the poetry. And, as Dr. Pepperdene has so often observed, where there is love, there is always a quest.

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' -rill III UlHI

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avy men and Agnes Scott women together on the same stage. What an event! Well-trained voices collaborating in song. Melody and harmony nev- er sounded so good! Both groups professional organizations trained and disciplined to make beautiful music — technically and feelingly. Did you ever think singing could be this much fun?! And all those men in uniform . . . ! Glee Club, London Fog, Madrigals. These chor- uses and ensemble groups feature some of the best musical talent in the South. For those inter- ested in music you can take your pick from tradi- tional choral and religious music to jazz to age- old madrigal tunes. Music is a hobby for some, a budding career for others, and more often than not a welcome respite from studies for audience and participants alike.