absence. Helen then contacted a janitor at the Varsity Apartments to check Carolyn’s home.
The janitor unlocked Carolyn’s door that afternoon and found the dean lying on her bed, unconscious. It appeared that she had been stricken while she prepared to retire the prior evening. The newspaper account read: “The lights were burning. The morning milk bottles had not been taken in, and papers at her office, placed under the door, had not been disturbed. Nor her mail touched. She had only one class in English scheduled for 11 a.m. Thursday, and her absence from it had not been reported.”
Physicians were summoned, and Carolyn was rushed by ambulance to St. Elizabeth Hospital in Lafayette. The newspaper stated that after her arrival at the hospital, Carolyn uttered a few words to one of the Catholic sisters on staff, which indicated she was partly conscious for a time, but she never spoke again. Carolyn died of apoplexy and acute uremia that night.
Today, apoplexy is referred to as a stroke. Uremia is a condition that results from kidney failure. Some accounts say that Carolyn passed away from nephritis, which is inflammation of the nephrons in the kidneys caused by infections, toxins, or autoimmune diseases. Carolyn had not complained of feeling ill and had gone about her numerous duties as usual, so her sudden passing stunned all who knew her.
The newspaper headline the day after Carolyn’s death stated, “Community Shocked by Death of Dean Carolyn Shoemaker.” Carolyn’s funeral was at Central Presbyterian Church, where she had taught Sunday school. Pastor W. R. Graham said, “The key to the amazing life of service of Dean Shoemaker was selflessness.” She was referred to as “a student, teacher, executive, club woman, alert citizen, and ‘foster mother’ to an ever changing and ever increasing host of young people.”
The newspaper said of Carolyn: “She was a deep student of human nature, sympathetic and helpful to all. Her philanthropies were so numerous and extensive that she seemed to overlook completely her own comforts and convenience. From her vast store of literary information and understanding, was able to act as guide and interpreter of books and writers. At the same time her own personality served to awaken new interest in the subjects she discussed.”
Carolyn’s casket was covered with a blanket of red roses, a tribute from the University she loved. All of the student organizations of Purdue honored their cherished dean with a huge spray of calla lilies and roses. Relatives and University officials asked that all others omit flowers and instead give to the newly established Carolyn E. Shoemaker Scholarship fund. Carolyn was buried in Springvale Cemetery in Lafayette.
Purdue held a memorial service in Eliza Fowler Hall on April 19, 1933. President Elliott presided. He and Harry G. Leslie, the governor of Indiana who was born in West Lafayette, spoke to the crowd of their personal loss.
Marion L. Smith, a student, recounted a story that Carolyn had told during a speech to a group of coeds the previous October. Paraphrased, the story describes a morning when Carolyn was walking down State Street, the main avenue through Purdue’s campus, when a child and her mother approached. As they were about to pass, the child recognized Carolyn and spoke to her. The mother did not know the dean. Perhaps the child knew Carolyn from time spent at the New Community House and Industrial School and Free Kindergarten. The mother asked the child who the passing woman was, and the youngster looked up in surprise and said very emphatically: “Why, Mama, she is the mother of all the Purdue girls!”
Dean Emeritus Stanley Coulter spoke of Carolyn, whom he had known since she was a student nearly forty-five years before. He had watched Carolyn metamorphose from student to professor to dean of women. He said:
During all of those years that “faraway’ look in her eyes deepened, and those same years brought its interpretation to me. You may have visited Atlantic City.… You may have wearied of its meaningless monotony and turned your eyes seaward following the long line of a great pier. There, at its uttermost limit, you may have seen a few, perhaps only one or two, who, utterly unmindful of the gay throngs, gazed steadfastly seaward, seemingly striving to penetrate far, far horizons. What lay beyond those horizons of opportunity for growth and service?
Dean Shoemaker was one of those who constantly gazed upon far horizons. Apparently removed from the bustle and confusion round her, she gazed steadfastly into the future. What did it have for her of opportunity and service and growth? But it loomed larger and larger before her, and she grew into and became a part of those far horizons.
DOROTHY STRATTON FINDS A BIBLE
IT WAS DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION, as thousands of Americans were unemployed and a decade-long drought helped to create the Dust Bowl, when Dorothy Stratton, age thirty-four, received a phone call. She had just finished her PhD at Teachers College of Columbia University in New York City and was happily employed as dean and vice principal of girls at Sturges Senior High School in San Bernardino, California. The president of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, was on the line.
Edward C. Elliott invited Dorothy to interview for the position of Purdue’s first full-time dean of women. Soon after that fateful call, Dorothy journeyed by train across the parched countryside to Purdue where she was introduced to, as she said, “everybody from the president to the janitors.”
It is not clear how Elliott knew of Dorothy. One speculation is that Elliott obtained Dorothy’s name through mutual Columbia University connections. Elliott had received an honorary degree from Columbia in 1929. Dorothy received her PhD from that institution in 1932. Perhaps President Elliott asked his friends at Columbia to recommend someone for the position of dean of women to replace Carolyn Shoemaker.
Decades later, Dorothy said good-naturedly, “I came from California to be looked over.” She met with R. B. Stewart, vice president for finance, and Mary L. Matthews, the dean of home economics and the only female dean at Purdue. Dorothy accepted the offered position and became Purdue’s first full-time dean of women.
Dorothy was outdoorsy, easygoing, and attractive, with short, dark, wavy hair, thin lips that smiled pleasantly, and confident almond-shaped blue eyes. She wore the latest dresses or two-piece, knit business frocks with cowl necks and shin-length skirts or a herringbone wool blazer over a white blouse. To look at Dorothy was to see a woman comfortable in her own skin.
After Dorothy was offered the dean of women position, she purchased her first car, a $200 secondhand Dodge. Her parents, Reverend Richard Lee and Anna Troxler Stratton, lived with her. The three drove from California to Indiana in the used car, which sporadically lost its brakes during the cross-country trek. The trio discovered late in the trip that “a suction cup had been put in the wrong way.”
Dorothy was born on March 24, 1899, in Brookfield, Missouri. Her broad-minded father was a Baptist minister who had been born in Rothville, where Dorothy’s grandfather had a large plantation during the Civil War. Her mother was a homemaker from Louisville, Kentucky, who met her husband when he was attending a Baptist seminary there. When Dorothy was growing up with her brother, Richard, the family moved every three or four years to small communities throughout Missouri and Kansas as her father ministered from church to church.
Dorothy entered grade school a year earlier than the average child back then. She said, “I was always very fond of school. In fact, my father took me to visit when I was only five, and I was so crazy about it, they never could get me away. So the teacher finally gave up and let me enroll.” Dorothy was a bookworm, spending time in the library rather than with groups of friends who may have seen her as the minister’s daughter who would put a damper on their social lives.
Dorothy was a lifelong learner, and her love of reading and knowledge would continue as she lived into the twenty-first century. Her academic prowess was combined with a fervent independence likely fostered as she moved from town to town, school to school, always the new girl in the classroom.
Dorothy had a strong devotion to her parents. She said, “From my father I learned to have an abiding interest in people and to want to be of service to my fellow