Hettie Jones ’55 pens her poetry at the $4 writing desk she bought in 1960 in New York City’s East Village. The desk shares a room with burgeoning bookshelves just off the entrance of her fourth-floor walk-up at 27 Cooper Square, the old tenement Jones has called home for 50 years. The man who sold her the little carved oak table called it a secretary. And that’s what it is, Jones says now, although she despised the word at the time. It conjured up images of office help, and Jones had bigger plans. She’d left her Queens, N.Y., home for Mary Washington College at age 17 because she longed for independence. Her parents had hoped the journey would land her a husband. Jones had no use for such conventional expectations. She was going places. The desk would help get her there. But like most things in life, it didn’t happen the way she’d planned. … [Read more...]
Job Suits Editor’s Wanderlust
MJ Figel Day ’97 has cuddled a koala in Australia and lounged with a lion in the African nation of Zambia. The senior editor at Sports Illustrated Swimsuit has traveled to Tunisia, Turkey, and Thailand, to Costa Rica, Canada, and Croatia, stepping on every continent except Antarctica in just over a dozen years. As a college freshman, Day had never so much as boarded an airplane. Childhood vacations were confined to the East Coast. Day chose the University of Mary Washington in part because it reminded her of her small hometown in New Jersey. “Bigger universities scared me,” she said. Plus, “I didn’t want to go to a party school. I was in it for an education.” Day made up her mind after one tour of the picturesque campus. “I’m an aesthetic person. I was drawn to it. Academically, it was a really good match. I didn’t go on any more college tours after Mary Washington.” Day, who had planned to become a lawyer, majored in political science. But a trip to Chicago to visit her … [Read more...]