Across America, women were plodding along and joining forces to bring females’ collective needs to the forefront of higher education.
Helen graduated in 1924 with, as she said, an “AB degree.” AB is an abbreviation of the Latin name (artium baccalaureus) for the bachelor of arts (BA) degree. Yet Helen was not actually expected to do something with her degree. Years later, she said in a speech:
Nobody—not the dean of women, not any of my professors, not anyone in my residence hall—no one, and least of all, I, myself, expected me to do anything with my college education. Exposure to higher education was just supposed to make you a better person for your traditional role as wife and mother. No one asked me what I was going to do when I graduated. As far as I know, no one expected me to do anything except to get married, raise a family, be an upright citizen, volunteer my services wherever needed, and live happily ever after.
With these expectations, or lack of expectations, Helen graduated from Northwestern with her future in question. Helen recounted, “I had no plans to marry. I had no plans to work. I had no plans—period. What was more, I didn’t have a marketable skill in the world. One of my favorite gym teachers suggested that since I liked sports so well, I might go to Wellesley and do two years of satisfactory graduate work in hygiene and physical education for which I would get a certificate. With that in hand, I might get a teaching job in physical education. So, that’s what I did!”
Helen claimed that she had no “marketable skills,” but in her position as president of Northwestern’s Women’s Athletic Association and the speech she gave at their 1922 convention, the seed of her talents was sown. She just did not yet see her own burgeoning abilities. It would take another person to help Helen recognize her potential: Dorothy Stratton.
Helen’s two-year graduate course in hygiene and physical education at Wellesley College also had a marked influence on her future career and principles. Wellesley is a highly selective private women’s liberal arts college founded in 1870 by Henry and Pauline Durant, who were passionate about the higher education of women. Located in Wellesley, Massachusetts, west of Boston, the organization is a member of the original Seven Sisters, a loose association of seven liberal arts colleges in the Northeastern United States that are historically women’s institutions.
Founded with the intention to prepare women for “great conflicts, for vast reforms in social life,” Wellesley is known for cultivating women as global leaders and for its influential alumnae, many of whom are among the most accomplished women in the world in a wide variety of fields. Alumnae include writer Nora Ephron, news reporters Diane Sawyer and Cokie Roberts, and Secretaries of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Madeleine Albright.
Helen became close friends with three other female students in the hygiene and physical education graduate course. They shared a house in the village close to the five-hundred-acre Wellesley campus, verdant with evergreen and deciduous woodlands, open meadows, and scenic Lake Waban. The women wore black stockings and full bloomer gym suits, and they were required to learn precision marching and strenuous Swedish gymnastics. One of the women owned a two-seater, open-air Model T Ford that they all shared. The Model T had to be hand-cranked to start. The four Wellesley women would pile in and make a trip into Boston for Boston Pops concerts or rattle up to Rockport to enjoy the ocean.
This was the Jazz Age, famous for flappers and bathtub gin, but conversely, Helen spent time playing on the Wellesley College Hockey Team and the Boston team in international competition. She and her three roommates shared joint custody of an Irish Terrier named Old Fuzzer, who Helen said “distinguished himself by leading the sedate Wellesley May Day Parade—uninvited!” Helen loved dogs, and Old Fuzzer was one in a long line of furry best friends yet to inhabit her life.
Wellesley did not give a master’s degree for the completion of the two-year hygiene and physical education certificate, so Helen completed coursework during two additional years and earned a master of science degree in 1928. Her first job after graduation was at Ohio State University, where she taught in the Department of Physical Education for Women. Some of Helen’s summers were chocolate-box, with time spent in stunning settings. She lived the summer of 1929 at Ogontz White Mountain Camp in New Hampshire teaching tennis. Ogontz was a camp for “privileged girls,” with log cabins, spacious lodges, and clay tennis courts framed by mountain vistas.
The summer of 1930 was one of Helen’s most memorable. She took a trip to Europe. One might say she “drove” from Columbus, Ohio, to England. She and her car were ferried across the Atlantic Ocean and the English Channel. An article about Helen stated, “A car, she discovered, would cover a lot more of Europe than a bicycle.”
Two summers later, Helen worked as an assistant manager of one of her father’s businesses, Valparaiso Home Ice Company, which made daily deliveries of blocks of ice for the family icebox, the predecessor to the electric refrigerator. Additionally, the company delivered glass bottles of cold milk and cartons of freshly churned ice cream that were placed into small tin boxes kept on customer’s front doorsteps and porches.
The stock market had crashed the year after Helen graduated from Wellesley, and America was in the midst of the Great Depression. Jobs were scarce, yet that fact did not deter Helen from shifting gears and looking to other goals. Unlike most, Helen had the backing of her father and his many businesses. After six years at the Ohio State University, Helen decided that physical education was not what she wanted as a permanent career. She quit her position and went home to Valparaiso to work with her father and brother in various business enterprises, but perhaps, ultimately, to finish writing a book.
Practically born with a golf club in her hand, Helen, age thirty-one, penned her knowledge and experience onto paper and, in 1933, wrote, Group Golf Instruction, which was published the next year by A. S. Barnes and Company of New York. The manual was considered pioneering in the theory of teaching golf to large groups. Looking back, Helen said, “That was at a time when golf was just beginning to be a very popular game for a great many people. It had always been a rich man’s game up to this point, but physical education departments were beginning to teach it to many people in groups, and there needed to be some methods worked out for group instruction.”
Helen operated her family’s Forest Park Golf Course during the summer of 1933, and she held volunteer classes in group golf instruction for high school girls. She may have been testing the teaching methods she was writing about in her book. That October, after deciding she had better “get back into education,” she drove forty miles south to Purdue to enroll as a graduate student in psychology and education.
For many Americans, despair peaked in 1933. It was the worst year for unemployment in the history of the United States. Tens of thousands traveled the road and rail looking for work. Hobos camped in shanties and knocked on families’ doors for handouts. The country’s banking system was propped up with the United States Banking Act in an attempt to stop panicking people from withdrawing their money. Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany and opened the first concentration camp at Dachau. The country’s collective sadness resonated in newspaper headlines, Philco radios, and newsreels that preceded the showing of movie house films like Little Women, staring Katharine Hepburn.
Yet an hour’s drive from Helen’s family home in Valparaiso, the opulent 1933 Chicago World’s Fair had opened that summer to celebrate the windy city’s hundredth anniversary. A Century of Progress International Exhibition became a “break in the clouds” of America’s overcast economy and gave the world a ray of happiness and pomp as people looked toward the future of innovation along the shores of Lake Michigan.
It was during the autumn of 1933 that Helen Schleman, age thirty-one, arrived at Purdue University with degrees from Northwestern and Wellesley, plus a soon-to-be-published book under her belt. She found a part-time job refereeing women’s basketball games—a position she said she was lucky to find—and she met thirty-four-year-old Dorothy Stratton. Together, the two women would begin making what would become wide, sweeping marks in history for Purdue and America.