Categotry Archives: Education

Charles Walter John Scaife, a chemistry professor who made learning fun, died on Aug. 24 from liver cancer. He was 65.
As a child, Scaife wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a math teacher. While attending college at Cornell, however, he was so inspired by an innovative science professor that he switched majors and received his bachelor’s degree and doctorate in chemistry.
After serving a three year stint in the Navy, Scaife became a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of York in England. In 1972, he landed a teaching job at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and began teaching the wonders of science. While wearing brightly patterned lab coats, Scaife encouraged students to understand chemistry by doing experiments with balloons and Alka Selzer.
In 1986, he helped student Rich Cavoli develop an experiment that focused on growing crystals in space, and received permission from NASA to have the project placed on the Challenger space shuttle. When the shuttle exploded, Scaife toured the country, talking to elementary and middle school students about the experiment. The project later flew on the Discovery mission.
After 20 years in the classroom, Scaife applied for a sabbatical and created a traveling science show. He and his wife Priscilla drove all over the country and performed for over 40,000 students. He conducted these shows on his own dime until the National Science Foundation and the Dreyfus Foundation offered him funding.

Willa Beatrice Player, the first black woman to run a four-year college in the U.S., died on Aug. 27. Cause of death was not released. She was 94.
Born in Mississippi, Player earned a bachelor’s degree from Ohio Wesleyan University, a master’s from Oberlin College and a doctorate in education from Columbia University. When she was only 21, Player was hired to teach Latin and French at Bennett College, a private Methodist school for black women in Greensboro, N.C. After working for the school for 26 years, Player was promoted to president, a position she held for a decade.
Two years after she was tapped to run the school, Player organized a speech with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Two thousand people attended the event and civil rights protests ensued. At one point, approximately 40 percent of Bennett’s student body was placed under arrest for trying to integrate restaurants and theaters in Greensboro. In response, Player and several other professors held classes and exams in jail. She also convinced the guards to grant access to the school nurse so injured students could be treated.
After she left Bennett, Player became an education consultant for the Agency for International Development, where she worked with women educators in Kenya and Nigeria. In 1962, she became the first woman elected president of the National Association of Colleges and Universities of the Methodist Church.

Connie Douglas Reeves, a legendary cowgirl whose motto was “Always saddle your own horse,” died on Aug. 17 of cardiac arrest. She was 101.
Reeves graduated from Texas Woman’s University. She was the first woman to study law at the University of Texas at Austin, but had to drop out during the Depression to work as a teacher at her old high school. For years, her teaching salary was her family’s only source of income.
In 1936, she became a riding instructor at Camp Waldemar for Girls, where she spent six decades teaching more than 30,000 girls to ride horses. She also met her husband at Waldemar; Jack Reeves was a rodeo star and keeper of the camp’s horses.
Reeves was inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame for exemplifying the “pioneer spirit of the American West.” She was its oldest living member. Her autobiography, “I Married a Cowboy,” was published in 1995.