Maryann Hartman Awards
1987 Award Winners
Honoring three Maine
women
Doris Twitchell Allen
Born in 1901, Doris Twitchell Allen received her A.B. in Chemistry
and M.A. in Biology from the University of Maine and later her
Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan. In 1951,
acutely aware of the suffering World War II had brought and determined
to promote understanding between nations, she and her husband
Rusty Allen founded Children's
International Summer Villages.
A psychologist and mother, she believed that eleven year olds
would benefit from and and be particularly receptive to living
with and knowing children from different nations. Today more
than forty Children's International Villages dot the globe, and
more than twenty-eight thousand children have participated. In
1977 Allen was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. A tribute
to Dr. Allen's vision of global peace occurred in 1987 when a
CIS Village became a reality in Old Town, Maine, her birthplace
and childhood home. Here children from twelve nations learned
daily, in Allen's words, that "the power of love is stronger
that the love of power." Doris Twitchell Allen passed away in 2002 at the age of 100.
Eileen Farrell
A dramatic soprano, Eileen Farrell was born in Willimantic,
Connecticut, the child of two musicians. After studying voice
with her mother and then with Merle Alcock and Eleanor McClellan,
she began her career at CBS radio where she eventually starred
in her own show. She made her operatic debut in Tampa, Florida,
as Santuzza, and in 1960 made her long anticipated debut at the
Metropolitan Opera as Gluck's Alcestis. Her repertoire includes
Giordorno's Maddalena (Andrea Chernier), Ponchielli's Gioconda,
Strauss's Ariadne (Ariadne Auf Naxos), Verdi's Leonora (Le Forza
Del Destino) Berg's Marie (Wozzeck), and Donizetti's Elizabetta
(Maria Stuarda). She received a Grammy award for her recordings
of two Wagner heroines with Leonard Bernstein and the New York
Philharmonic. The wife of Robert V. Reagan and the mother of
two children, Farrell has been a resident of Castine and Yarmouth,
Maine, since her retirement from teaching at Indiana University.
She has taught master classes at the University of Maine and
performed benefits for AIDS research and for PBS. In her musical
versatility, superb artistry, and sense of community responsibility,
Eileen Farrell is truly a voice of and for our age.
Lenore Thomas Straus
Born in 1909, Lenore Thomas Straus grew up in Chicago and studied
at the Chicago Art Institute, but she was largely as self-taught
sculptor whose medium of choice was stone. Early in her career
she was interested in integrating her sculpture with architecture.
Finding no work in Chicago during the Depression, she went to
New York and from there to Washington D.C. in 1935. Working for
the Resettlement Administration, she made a number of large stone
carvings for their newly built communities. Later, she became
a W.P.A. artist and carved a 12'x4'x4' limestone figure of a
mother and child for the town center in Greenbelt, Maryland,
as well as other small pieces. She showed her work at the Chicago
Art Institute, the Metropolitan and Whitney
Museums, the Corcoran
Gallery, the Baltimore Museum, and at private galleries in Chicago,
New York, Washington, and Maine. The author of The Tender Stone
and Stone Dust, Straus moved to Blue Hill, Maine in 1968, where
she continued to carve and to explore pictorial expression in
handmade paper. Straus died in 1988, at age 78, in her home in
Blue Hill.
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