Harriet Colfax
American lighthouse keeper
Category Archives: Maritime
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Dr Margaret Williams Weir
The first Aboriginal person to matriculate to an Australian university. In January 1957 the University of Queensland offered her a scholarship and she commenced an arts degree.
Gretchen Van Tassel
Gretchen Van Tassel (1918–2011) was hired by the War Relocation Authority’s “Reports Division” in Washington, D.C., where she worked from 1943 to 1946. Van Tassel was the office manager in charge of editing, filing, and distributing official WRA still and moving images. Because of her background as a photographer, she eventually also went out on shoots and supplemented the WRA Photographic Section’s (WRAPS) photos on the eastern seaboard.
Gretchen Van Tassel was born in New York City. Hailing from an old American family with Dutch roots, she had a comfortable upbringing. Perhaps in contrast to the practices of the day, her parents and a favorite aunt encouraged Van Tassel to make the most of her abilities.
After high school, Van Tassel studied at Bennington, an innovative, arts-oriented women’s college. Majoring in art, Van Tassel studied photography and architecture at Bennington, and learned to both shoot and develop in the darkroom while she was an undergraduate.
Graduating in 1939, Van Tassel went to New York to work. First finding employment with a fashion photographer, she next worked for Mattie Edwards Hewitt who specializing in architectural photography, and then worked for a well-known photographer, Jeffrey Marmes.
When the U.S. entered the war, Van Tassel moved to Washington D.C., where she was employed for a time as a draftsperson at the Naval Research Laboratory there. When she heard about the WRA, however, Van Tassel was interested and applied for a job. She was hired by the Reports Division that among other things managed all of the official WRA images that were being produced by the WRA’s Photographic Section in Denver, Colorado. Van Tassel began by keeping the photo files, which consisted of the original negatives of approved shots plus a print, in order. When media, civic organizations, or authors requested images, it was her responsibility to select and send them the size and number of required. She was also involved in the Reports Division’s film projects, and the issuance of PR publications such as a RD pamphlet on Nisei soldiers in the U.S. Army.
As of 1943, resettlement became the WRA’s main objective, and Van Tassel went out on assignment. Although she took some shots of the WRA camps, her main focus was on the Japanese Americans who had left camp and moved to the eastern seaboard, in part because she was closer to these sites, and it was more difficult for the WRAPS photographers based in Denver to come out to the east coast to shoot.
Van Tassel has a little over 200 images online at the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive (JARDA) web site. Although her photos are largely portraiture of resettlers and discharged veterans, she also took a series of shots at Jerome and Rohwer, the easternmost of the ten WRA camps.
After the WRA closed in early 1946, Van Tassel continued to do photography for the Federal Housing Authority and the International Bank. When she married and eventually had children, Van Tassel retired and devoted herself to being a mother. Of interest is that one of her children, Alison Shaw, followed in her mother’s footsteps and became a well-known American photographer working out of the Northeast.
Gretchen Van Tassel-Shaw passed away on January 11, 2011, at her home in Brunswick, Maine, just a few weeks short of her 93rd birthday.
Dr Doris Honig Merritt
1978: Dr. Doris H. Merritt was the first woman to chair the Board of Regents for the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, where she was instrumental in establishing the library’s electronic information system.
Inspiration
I was being discharged from the U.S. Navy after World War II and wanted an interesting and useful profession that would allow me to live independently.
Biography
Doris Honig Merritt, M.D., the first woman to chair the Board of Regents for the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, helped establish the Library’s electronic information system in 1978. During her career in university administration, Dr. Merritt coined the term “grantsmanship” to describe the art of procuring grants, and herself brought millions of dollars in grants to the Indiana University School of Medicine and the Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis.
As World War II was coming to a close in the mid 1940s, so was young Doris Merritt’s two-year stint in the Navy Officer Corps. As she looked for an interesting job alternative, an interesting and useful profession that would give her some measure of financial independence, she decided on medicine. She had graduated cum laude with a Phi Beta Kappa in English literature from Hunter College of the University of the City of New York in 1944, and had to take pre-medical courses from 1946 to 1948 before she was accepted into medical school at The George Washington University School of Medicine. When she earned her doctor of medicine in 1952, she and her physician husband Donald Merritt went to Duke University for residencies—she in pediatrics, he in internal medicine. She was an assistant resident in pediatrics at Duke University from 1954 to 1955, and a fellow in pediatrics from 1955 to 1956.
Dr. Doris Merritt came to be a high-powered fundraiser for academic medicine almost by accident. “I was introduced to administration simply by following my husband, which women were expected to do then. ” When her husband took a position at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland in 1957, Dr. Doris Merritt didn’t find work in pediatrics, her specialty. Instead, she found a new career. Dr. Merritt took a position as an executive secretary for the Division of Research Grants at the National Institutes of Health. Through this introduction to grants work, Dr. Merritt realized she could serve as an effective facilitator, and that she loved to watch the progress of different projects. She devoted the next forty years to “grantsmanship”—a term she coined in the 1960s to describe successful approaches to fundraising for research.
In 1961, Dr. Merritt accompanied her husband to the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, where she was named director of medical research grants and contracts. Instead of reviewing grants applications as she had done at the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Merritt directed applications. She was very successful: two of the project grants received by Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM) that Dr. Merritt secured in her first year as director were still ongoing more than thirty-five years later.
The following year, when Dr. Merritt became assistant dean for medical research at Indiana University School of Medicine, she was one of the first women in the United States to be assistant dean of a coeducational medical school. Between 1961 and 1978, Dr. Merritt was instrumental in bringing $55 million in new construction grants to the Indianapolis campus. From 1961 to 1997, under her guidance, IUSM research dollars grew from $1.8 million to nearly $105 million.
In 1978, Dr. Merritt returned to Bethesda and was appointed special assistant to the director of the National Institutes of Health for research training and research resources. In 1978, she was the first woman to chair the National Library of Medicine Board of Regents, Dr. Merritt helped create the library’s electronic information system. In 1986, she was named the first acting director of the National Center for Nursing Research of the National Institutes of Health.
Following her husband’s death, Dr. Merritt returned home to Indiana and in 1988, became dean of the Indiana University School of Medicine. She also held positions as interim dean of the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, and vice chancellor for research and graduate education at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. After officially retiring in 1998, Dr. Merritt served on the Indiana University School of Medicine’s National Center for Women’s Health and the Women’s Fund of Central Indiana. She also designed and created databases for student research in drama, short stories, and biography as a volunteer for the North Central High School.
After 1994, three schools of the Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis designated annual honors, awards, and lectureships in Dr. Merritt’s name. Dr. Merritt also received the National Institutes of Health Director’s Award and the Governor of Indiana’s “Sagamore of the Wabash” citation. While proud of all this recognition, Dr. Merritt said, “In some respects, I have been most touched by the Certificate of Recognition I was awarded by the Washington Township School Board for the volunteer work I have done in the North Central High School Information Center. The staff has been wonderful in allowing me the privilege of working there at my own speed for the past three years, and I will continue to do so as long as I have the energy and wit to function productively.”
Question and Answer
What was my biggest obstacle?
Because my bachelor of arts degree was in literature and philosophy, I had to make up two years of pre-medical requirements.
How do I make a difference?
I helped by advising and mentoring countless individual investigators and trainees and by keeping the administrative rails greased in my positions as dean and vice chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis and as research training officer and first acting director of the National Center for Nursing Research at the NIH. Now I make a difference by consulting and serving on community boards and in a local high school as well as at the Indiana University School of Medicine.
Who was my mentor?
There were no mentors fifty years ago.
How has my career evolved over time?
After receiving my boards in pediatrics, I became involved in federal research administration at the National Institutes of Health, as well as in academic research administration at Indiana University. Opportunities continued to arise that advanced me through the ranks to distinguished university professor with honorary degrees from both Purdue and Indiana Universities.
Elaine Toms
Working in the field of nuclear physics, Toms put everything into career and the work that she did had value, most especially for the women who followed her.
Commander Darlene Iskra
In December 1990, she became the first woman to take command of a U.S. Navy ship, aptly named the Opportune.
Jo Ann Hardesty
One of the first women to serve onboard Navy ships, activist and politician
Lula Mae O’Bannon
Lula Mae O’Bannon (Choctaw) used the opportunities in joining the US Coast Guard SPARS during World War II to expand her horizons and serve the United States’s war effort.
Lula Belle Everidge
Lula Belle Everidge served in World War II as one of the few Native American SPARS.
Dr Frederica de Laguna
Dr. Frederica “Freddy” de Laguna was an influential archeologist and anthropologist who worked extensively throughout Alaska.