Looking for the students of Mary Dell Morrison
She was on the mathematics faculty at Columbia High School from at least 1965 until at least 1985, and she sponsored the mathematics team. In 1983 she went to the White House to accept the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Teaching, as New Jersey’s mathematics recipient in the program’s first year.
She taught me FORTRAN on the school’s IBM 1130, and then she put me on the payroll. I was a Computer Lab Aide — one of the students she paid to operate that machine for the rest of the school.
I went looking for her this week, and what I found is that almost nothing about her survives online. No obituary. No Wikipedia entry. Nothing. Everything I now know came out of the Maplewood Memorial Library’s digital archive — the News-Record going back to 1915, and the Columbia High School yearbooks — read one page at a time.
Here is some of what turned up. The IBM 1130 arrived at Columbia High in the autumn of 1970, replacing punched-card tabulating equipment, and stayed in service about eleven years. It came in under the business education department, and yet I was taught FORTRAN on it by a mathematics teacher, which may be exactly why the school needed a student to operate it. Angelo Pantazes, who taught mathematics alongside her, was still there in 1990 and was picked that year for IBM’s Teacher of the Year program. In January 1985 the News-Record reported that the mathematics team she sponsored had “once again showed its superiority.”
There is one thing I have not been able to establish. She was born around 1926 or 1927. She moved to a retirement community in Hackettstown in 1999. I cannot find a death notice for her anywhere. I do not know whether she is alive.
I am writing about her, and I would like to hear from anyone who knew her — students, colleagues, anyone on those mathematics teams, and above all anyone else who was a Computer Lab Aide. If you remember Miss Morrison, or if you know what became of her, please write to me.