It was gratifying to see (“Bowdoin inaugurates its first woman president” Oct. 16) the names of the three women who taught at Bowdoin College in 1943. My mother, Marion Holmes, was one of them. My father, Cecil Holmes, was a professor of math at Bowdoin and my mother had been a high school math teacher. These three women, faculty wives, were not regular faculty members but were called to serve as replacements for younger (male) faculty, who had been called to military service during World War II.

I remember my father coaching my mother in the evenings to prepare her for her Bowdoin classes the next day. Bowdoin was still a mens’ college (women were not admitted until the 1960s) and the administration could not bring itself to admit that there were women on the faculty. Their names were never listed in that years’ college catalogue. An article in the Boston Globe was the only written account of their presence on the teaching staff.

Janet Carper
Cornish