From the March 2011 issue of Our Moment, the UConn Foundation's e-newsletter.
Carolyn Ladd Widmer never wanted the spotlight. But it followed her anyway, as she excelled at Wellesley and Yale, brought public health nursing to Colombia, South America, and established the Collegiate School of Nursing at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon before she had reached the age of 30. But by 1940 the Second World War had begun in Europe, and with the Middle East still in question she left Lebanon with her two infant children, and sailed across the Pacific for the safety of American shores.
She was a nursing pioneer with a quick wit and an enduring commitment to patient care. Albert Nils Jorgensen, the then-president of the University of Connecticut, noting her star power, asked her to found a nursing school at UConn. She agreed, and in 1942, she became the first dean of UConn's School of Nursing.
This spring, on April 13, when the first shovel hits the dirt for the new Widmer wing of Storrs Hall, the spotlight will again be on Widmer. Her sons, Michael and Eric, who grew up on the Storrs campus, will be present to pay tribute to their mother, who died in 1991 at age 89. And they too will be recognized for their generous gifts in her honor to the School of Nursing. Read more on the groundbreaking here.
"My mother wanted her students to be nurses in the grand tradition of nursing, in which bedside care was the most important thing," says Eric Widmer, a pseudo-retired Brown University professor and dean, former headmaster of Deerfield Academy, and just recently the founding headmaster of King's Academy in Jordan. "She had a great interest in the humanities as well as the sciences, and two distinct groups would descend on our house in Storrs, one from the English department ─ they loved my mother, who was so beautifully educated, widely read and with a great sense of humor ─and the other, all the nurses, both faculty and students. My boyhood was full of these interesting people, most of them women, and all of them orbiting around my mother."
That connection to Storrs and UConn remains to this day. "This recognition is deeply moving to me, my brother and our extended families," says Michael Widmer, the longtime president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, a highly regarded public policy organization that has been nationally recognized for helping to bring about Massachusetts' health reform law. "Our mother would be thrilled that the new wing will expand the learning opportunities for nursing students, carrying forward her profound commitment to the education of nurses and the fulfillment of their aspirations to bring change and improve others' lives."
At 3 p.m. April 13, UConn School of Nursing Dean and Professor Anne R. Bavier will serve as master of ceremonies for the groundbreaking at the School of Nursing at 231 Glenbrook Road. From 3:45 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., a reception and research poster presentation will be held at the School of Nursing.
Please visit uconn.edu/storrs-campus.php for a map and directions. To attend, please RSVP to rsvp@uconn.edu or call 860-486-1038.
To make a gift to the School of Nursing, please contact the Foundation's development department.
