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 difficult to choose which to quote here - or, rather, to choose which leave out.

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 there 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.  I think that she was saving money again for another year at 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; as well as 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.

A note: Lil, who loaned Alma $25, was a friend, mentioned several times over the years in Alma’s letters.  Alas, I haven’t been able to determine Lil’s surname.  It’s a pity, because quite a few of Alma’s friends turn out to have memorable people, who even have Wikipedia articles about them, so very possibly there’s a wealth of information out there about Lil, if only I knew her full name.  Maybe someday I’ll figure it out.

Back to Alma’s finances.  In June 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 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.

She played a French maid in a play - I need to find the letter about that.

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.

…and then working 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.

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.  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.

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 and living at Fernbank, the cottage she built in 1922.  (I'm pretty sure it was 1922.  Need to check.)  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 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.

[I Need to rework this paragraph.  There’s good stuff here, but we’re beyond Mama Margaret at this point.]  I think Alma was in many ways different from Mama Margaret: scholarly, efficient, and impatient of housework, which she called “dumbwork”.  But they got along very well together.  There was a joint trip across the country to California in 1915, in which Alma attended a botanical conference and both Alma and Mama Margaret visited the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.  (Eva, the youngest sister, took care of Will and the toddler granddaughter while Mama Margaret was away.)

And Alma’s life echoed Mama Margaret’s in an unexpected way.  In 1937 her younger brother Fred found himself, like his older brother Will a quarter of a century before, widowed with a very young motherless daughter, Alma Grace.  Of course by this time Mama Margaret had been dead for over a decade.  So little Alma Grace went to Will and his wife Kathleen.  Then Kathleen died, and after a time with her maternal grandmother, Alma Grace came to Alma, who was in her early 60s.

Fred lived with or near Alma in Massachusetts, and did not remarry, so Alma Grace - later renamed AG - was raised by the two of them.  I’ve never been clear on the details.  But I do remember looking at Alma’s diary years ago.  (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 loved music and talking, and there was often a cat in her house.  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 soaking in the British pageantry.  In technicolor!

Alma died in 1968, after a stroke.