Mary Jane Roach Masters Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

A. Well it was very shocking emotionally and financially because I had just started Washington
University on a scholarship so that I had no real financial backing and he died in December.of my
freshman year so that it was a personal loss and such a financial loss that when I was a student at
Washington University I was always busy doing outside jobs. Tutoring and that sort of thing. My
first two years after shifting from a girls preparatory school to a big city university were fairly. . . I
think as I look back, fairly troubled, but I survived them and my academic output was not as good
as it was in the last two years, but I got everything in hand then and I could become a really good
student.
Q. What was your background as a student? Where did you go to school?
A. Washington University in St. Louis, and I went to Mary Institute which is a fine day school
founded when Washington University was by William Greenleaf Eliot, T. S. Eliot's grandfather.
It's a very old school and a very fine one. A day school. Non sectarian.
Q. But you continued through that for your preparatory?
A. I prepared four years, my high school years there and then I went as a freshman to
Washington University, and I had won a competitive scholarship given by Scruggs-Vandenvoort-
Barney so that I had a four year scholarship to the University and it was really a bonanza because
it paid my lab fees and my gym fees as well.
Q. What was the scholarship exactly?
A. The Melville Wilkinson Scholarship it was called.
Q. Which was?
A. For four years at Washington University.
Q. Through what competition?
A. The competition was to write an article combining the history of Scruggs-Vandervoort-
Barney, a seventy five year old department store in 1925, with the history of St. Louis which was
the topic of my essay, and apparently everyone was interested.
Q. Now this was when you were in preparatory school?
A. A junior in high school.
Q. That was lots of insight for one seventeen, eighteen years old?
A. Well it was a good project. I was interested in writing when I was at Mary Institute, drama,