ALMA'S STORY: ~THE STORY~---related-pages---site navigation
A brief and incomplete biography of Alma:

Alma was the second of the five Stokey siblings, and the oldest daughter.  If you were to make a 30-second video of each of the five and show the videos to a random stranger, the one they would remember would be Alma.  She was intelligent, talkative, funny, vivid, and incredibly active.  And she loved to write intelligent, funny, vivid letters, so it is tempting to quote any and all of them here.

Here is Alma in 1918:
I think the picture was taken at a day-before-Thanksgiving picnic.  Alma loved picnics, even in November in New England.  Of course, as a botanist, she would love looking at whatever plant life was available.  AG described Alma’s explanation of what to do if you’re asked about a plant you don’t recognize at all.  You screw your face up in an intelligent looking fashion and say, “I think it must be a member of the geranium family.”  Or whatever.

But let us try to be a little more organized.

Alma was born on June 17, 1877.  Here is the first picture we have of her, age eight or nine, with her younger sister Laura:

She looks stuffed and sedate to me - very un-Alma-like.  But her eyes are bright.

I don’t have much information about her childhood.  She had happy memories of the days before Papa Charles became impossibly abusive.  She liked the weather station he had for the government.  And at the moment, that’s all I’ve got.

After she graduated from Canton High School, she taught in that high school for a while.  I don’t know how long; I do know she didn’t like it.  But she saved her money and started at Oberlin College in 1899, when she was 22 years old.  She was there for only a year before spending another year back at home, teaching and saving more money for Oberlin.  But she was surely helpful at home as well, since 1900 was the year in which her mother divorced her father.

Alma went back to Oberlin in 1901, and didn’t have to spend any more time away before she got her BA.  We are fortunate that in 1903 her older brother, Will, was sent by the US Army to the Philippines: Alma wrote him regularly and Will kept the letters, so we know a lot about her activities starting in April 1903.  There’s quite a bit about money matters, because, besides helping to support his mother and the siblings at home, Will was also sending money to Alma.  For example, in April 1903:

Before Mama wrote to me I had decided to relieve you a little as I had negotiated a loan from Lil of $25.  She has lots of pupils now so it was no inconvenience to her.  I won’t have to pay it until after I graduate.  I will need about $40 more to see me through this time but I don’t want you to worry about it.  I can get it somewhere.  I just told you so you would know my circumstances.

Lil was Lily Love, a friend from Canton who also went to Oberlin.

More about Alma’s finances.  In June 1903 she wrote to Will::

Perhaps I had better tell you now about what I will need for next fall.  I ought to have some mun some time this summer, if you can spare it, for clothes - $25 or so.  If you haven't it don’t bother about it for I can get along without it.  When I go back I will need $55 for tuition, lab fees, and books.  That is what I have to have.  If you can spare $20 or $25 more I will be very glad to apply it on my board for we are expected to pay in advance although we don’t have to.

And there you have Alma’s priorities: School stuff was essential, clothes and food not so much.

But then, later in 1903, she started making money at Oberlin.  She wrote about the job to Will from Canton during summer vacation:

I have such a piece of good news that I will burst if I don’t tell it right away.  I have received an offer of the position as assistant in the Botany laboratory at Oberlin.  Professor Grover wrote and asked me if I would take it.  I will have to give from 3 to 5 hours a day to it and take about half my regular college work.  I can’t graduate then until 1905 but they will give me my degree as with the class of 1904.  For the two years I teach as an undergraduate I get $250 a year, paid monthly.  If I keep on after I graduate I will get a raise and can do post graduate work for the A.M. degree.  I think it is a splendid chance and I accepted it at once.

The position was quite an honor.  After more details about money, Alma noted:

Prof. Grover said it was very unusual to give the place to an undergraduate but my work in Botany and my record in my other college work fitted me for the place.  It is always given to a post-graduate student who is working for her second degree.  As I am not a P.G. he said they could not remit my tuition or pay me the usual salary.

And of course she was thrilled not to have to take further time off to save more money:

I am so glad I am going to be in Oberlin for a few years more.  I was so afraid I would have to come back here to teach and I hated the thought of it.  The High School here is rotten.  I may never have to teach in a High School now.  All my predecessors in that place have college positions.  Anyway I won’t have to do it soon.  I am so relieved.  I know I shall like the work at Oberlin.  I know what it is like.

The job made her very busy; she wrote to Will in October:

I am very busy this year.  I never was so busy in my life.  I don’t waste much time - I can’t get any to waste.  I spend all my afternoons except Saturday in the lab.  I have seven hours a week of recitation work in the morning and the rest of the morning I spend in lab work.  I do my studying at night but I am usually so sleepy at the night that I can scarcely ever study more than two hours.  I am taking ten hours work - ⅔ regular work. 3 hrs of Botany, 4 hrs of German, 2 of Bible (required) and one of English Composition.  I wish I hadn’t anything to do but work at Botany.  The Eng comp and the German are both practical but I don’t want Senior Bible though doubtless it is very good for me.  I need composition, for I may want to write a book some day and I need German to read scientific German.

But, being Alma, she still found time for extracurricular activities.  In May 1904 she wrote to Will:

We are going to have a Mock Republican Convention next month.  It will be a great affair.  It lasts two nights.  There will be delegates from all the states.  Booker T. Washington is to lecture here tonight and I am going to hear him.  We have so many colored people here who are not bright that it will be refreshing to hear one who is.

Oh, well.  Nobody was expected to be politically correct in 1904.

What was probably more important to her was basketball.  She never mentions it in her letters, but her yearbook entry says she was on the women's basketball team all four years that she was at Oberlin.  It also identifies as team members all three of the female classmates who are mentioned in the letters, and one of them, from Massachusetts, came home to Canton with Alma for a visit in the summer of 1904.  So I get the impression that she was more interested in spending time with her basketball teammates than with the students who shared her botanical interests, who seem to have been mostly if not all male.

Her youngest sibling, Eva, graduated from Canton High School in 1903, and in 1904 Mama Margaret decided to move to Oberlin, along with Eva and Fred, who would both be attending Oberlin.  Alma put a lot of work into this enterprise, first finding the Oberlin house in late June:

I finally found a house.  Eva and I got blue as indigo while we were hunting.  There aren’t any houses built to rent.  I finally got one with a bathroom, a very nice bathroom but no furnace.  There is a large nice range in the house.  The house is on Lorain St very near the college buildings but in the same yard with another house.

Then she worked with Mama Margaret in Canton on the move:

We are getting ready to move.  We hope to ship our goods the first of next week.  I packed the books to-day.  You will be surprised, pleased and charmed to see how completely we have destroyed the trash.  Mama destroyed all that her conscience would allow and then I continued the good work until the limits of my very elastic conscience were satisfied.

As she told Will in 1903, she had to stay at Oberlin until 1905 to finish her coursework because of the time she spent on the lab assistant's job, but she must have less schoolwork to do, so she had more time for fun. acting in a French play and in a farce.

She went on to the University of Chicago, and received her Ph.D. in botany from the University of Chicago in 1908.

After she got her Ph.D. she went to Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.  I don’t know the details of how she ended up at Mount Holyoke, several hundred miles from her Ohio roots.  She had mentioned in a letter that she would like to live in New York.  Maybe she couldn’t get find a good academic job in New York, and settled for a place reasonably close to it.  Or maybe she decided, on second thought, that the plays and concerts of New York were all very well and good, but as a botanist she wanted to be someplace more rural.  Quite possibly the thought of being in women's college, where she could teach women botany instead of men, appealed to her.

However it may have been, Mount Holyoke worked out very well for her, and she remained employed there for the rest of her working life, eventually becoming the head of the botany department - although she didn’t stay put.  One could say she inherited Mama Margaret’s love of travel, but that’s far too mild a way of describing Alma, who was never, ever mild.  She was always doing something!  Her last trip around the world was in 1956, when she was 79 years old.

Alma's first trip abroad was in the summer of 1910.  She went to a scientific conference in England, but sailed to England long before the conference so as to have lots of time for sightseeing.  But the conference was certainly as exciting as the sightseeing; she met fellow botanists and got some unexpected public praise for her PhD thesis.

World War I put a crimp in Alma's style; one couldn't travel to Europe when men were dying in the trenches.  So in 1915 she found a conference in California and travelled there with her mother, visiting the Panama-Pacific Internation Exposition and meeting various relatives of her mother's here and there.

When Alma wasn’t teaching at Mount Holyoke or globe-trotting, she spent her summers in Woods Hole, doing research at the Marine Biological Laboratory (associated somehow with Mount Holyoke) and living at Fernbank, the cottage she built in 1922.  The cottage was small, but designed to accommodate the maximum number of guests, with cubicle-like bedrooms and a huge living room.  Her siblings and nephews and nieces visited her there, and her many friends.  There was a very irregularly produced newsletter called Fernbank News.  Here is a list of guests and events reported in the edition of August 3, 1932:

Tuesday 6/12 Alma arrives with her Mount Holyoke friend Fredda Reed
Thursday 6/23 Eva arrives
Monday 6/27 Fredda leaves
Saturday 7/2 Elizabeth Rodhouse Creglow arrives
Tuesday 7/12 Elizabeth Rodhouse Creglow leaves
Friday 7/15 Miss Gertrude Cushing, Eleanor Doak, and Mabel Augusta Chase arrive
Monday 7/18 (or maybe Sunday evening) Miss Gertrude Cushing, Eleanor Doak, and Mabel Augusta Chase leave
Thursday 7/21 Rumana McManis arrives
Monday 7/25 Rumana McManis leaves
Saturday 7/30 Ethel Jackson arrives
Saturday 7/30 evening picnic at Buzzards Bay beach
Sunday 7/31 day trip to Nantucket - Alma, Eva, Ethel
Monday 8/15 planned local concert with solo by Eva

In addition, a couple of picnics at Nobska were reported.  Always picnics.

There was also a regular feature of Fernbank News: Fallings In.

But that's getting a little ahead of the game.  Alma went to Europe again in 1926, this time with her younger sister Eva, who was doing some musical thing in Rome.  The one postcard we have from that trip is from Scotland, however.

Alma's biggest trip, however, was a two-year sojourn in India, from 1929 to 1931, teaching at the Women's Christian College in Madras (now Chennai), with lots of excursions during vacations.  We have lots of letters from Alma's time in India, but I haven't looked at them much yet.  The number of them is sort of daunting.

The Women's Christian College has a Wikipedia article, which says:
The Women's Christian College was founded in 1915 with 41 students and 7 faculty members, as a result of the joint venture of 12 missionary societies of interdenominational and international nature located in England, in Canada and in U.S.A., with a mission to provide higher education to women of India in liberal arts and sciences. 
Also:
Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, U.S., has been Women's Christian College's sister college since 1920.


I learned how Alma came to go to India from a 1957 newspaper article about her.  The article said mentioned Alma's latest visit to the Women's Christian College, and said:

Miss Stokey's connection with that college extends back 26 years, when she was asked to find a competent teacher to organize a department of botany there.  She became so interested in the project that she took a two year leave of absence and taught there herself, as visiting professor of botany, from 1929-31.  Five years later, she returned to teach for another year, and her interest in the college has continued until the present day.

Alma loved India, and was there again from 1936 to 1937.  After both of the times in India, she came home by way of Indonesia, spending time working in the Foreigners’ Laboratory at Buitenzorg, West Java.

Shortly after she came home in 1937, her sister-in-law Sibyl - the wife of her Alma's younger brother Fred - died, leaving an 18-month-old daughter behind.  The daughter was passed around a bit because Fred was out of work, but in 1941 he got a job in the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts, and he and the daughter, now aged five, came to live with Alma.  And so Alma, in her 60s, became involved with raising a child.  Alma was never a maternal or domestic sort of person, but she was there for Fred and the child, AG (short for Alma Grace).  Somewhere or other there is a diary that Alma kept around that time.  (It must be around somewhere.  One more thing to look for.)  It was one of those five-year things, with the same date for five years on succession on the same page.  And on the date for the day after AG’s birthday, Alma would always write: “Tired after party.”  AG’s birthday is in April, so I hope for Alma’s sake that at least some of the parties involved a picnic.

Alma retired from Mount Holyoke in 1942, but she spent another year teaching at Smith College.  It was the middle of World War II, and they probably were short of teachers.  Other than that, I don't think Alma had much involvement in the war.

One January night in 1947 Alma slipped on the ice on her way home from a PTA (Parent Teachers Association) meeting (an unexpected thing to be attending at age 69, but there was AG, now ten years old) and broke her left arm.  It was a bad break, but it didn't stop her.  When she went to New York for something or other a few months later, Fred (a doctor) told her that she must remember to wear a sling when she was walking around in public.

Alma loved music and talking, and there was often a cat in her house.  And she wrote poems.  Not poetry, but poems.  For a long time there was a Christmas tradition in my family that you had to write a poem for every present that you gave.  I asked my mother how it got started, and she told me Aunt Alma started it.  "She was always writing poems!"  Oddly, the only poem I have from her generation was written by Eva, not Alma.

Oh, and she was an Anglophile.  In 1953 she drove from South Hadley to Boston with her friend Fredda Reed to see a newsreel of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, staying overnight.  (Perhaps I should mention that there was no internet back then.)  She and Fredda enjoyed the newsreel so much that they stayed an extra night so they could see it again.  The reason I know this story is that while she and Fredda were enjoying the extension of their Boston stay, my parents were having fits because the Worcester Twister had blown through Massachusetts and my parents worried that Alma and Fredda had been caught in it on their drive home.  My parents called and called Alma's South Hadley number to make sure she was OK, but nobody answered.  And all the while, Alma and Fredda were sitting in a movie theater soaking up the British pageantry.  In technicolor!

There was more travel.  She went to Jamaica a couple of times in the early 1950s, and noted approvingly that it smelled like India.  She went around the world in 1956-7 with her friend (everybody's friend!) Gladys Green, revisiting old friends in India.  AG was with them for some of the time in Europe, and noted that Alma, very much the oldest of the three of them, was the only one who climbed a hill in Norway to see the sun rise.  Maybe that was at the solstice?  I should ask AG.

Another detail from AG about that trip: when they arrived in Europe, Glady bought a car, and AG drove it.  Nearly seventy years later, AG remembered the wonderful Danish pastries in Denmark (which, we noted, aren't called Danish pastries in Denmark) and how, driving from Sweden towards England, the languages changed and became more and more like English.  I don't know why they were driving from Sweden to England, but I daresay AG had a boat to catch in England to get home to the US.

In 1959 Alma, her college friend Clara (who had played basketball with her) went with her colleague Lenette Atkinson and Lenette's husband to Hawaii for the winter.  I still have to go through the Hawaii letters, so I can't tell you much about that except that they drove across the country to California and took a ship there.

There was trip with Eva to Oberlin for Alma's 60th reunion.  I don't have any details at all about that, just a newspaper item noting that they went.  Did they fly?  It seems to me that I might have a vague memory of going with my mother to pick Aunt Alma up at the airport, but I'm not at all sure.

In the late 1960s, Alma had a stroke.  Back then, they didn't do as much to help stoke victims to recover.  If you had a stroke, that was that.  I think she was able to communicate, but basically it was the end of her life.  (Apologies to anybody who knows more about the history of stroke recovery.  This is what I remember.)

Her apartment in South Hadley was cleared out.  My sister Betsy, in her late teens, helped.  She enjoyed seeing all that was in the apartment.  Nearly sixty years later, she particularly remembered a box labeled: BLUE CHINA UNDER THE BED.  I laughed with the others upon hearing the story, but later it occurred to me, as an obsessive organizer of documents on this website, that it was excellent labelling.  What is in this box?  Blue china.  Where should you put it?  Under the bed.  Good job, Alma!

Alma died on March 18, 1968.

As I have worked on documenting the history of my family, I have wondered: How was Alma as a botanist?  I didn't notice much online for her - or perhaps there was more there than I noticed.  I'm not a botanist.  Biology in general does not float my boat.  My eyes may have glided over several articles.  So: was she any good?

I got the answer from someone who saw this website, and the answer was: Yes.  She was good.  Take a look at this:
So Alma's story is not yet finished.
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