DOROTHY T. SPOERL:
MINISTER, EDUCATOR, EDITOR 1906-1999
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Abridged
from an interview with Margaret Gooding and Helen
Zidowecki, with illustrations drawn from Hands
by Dorothy T. Spoerl. This book by her as a religious
educator displays hands as symbols of Dr. Spoerl's
own deep unification of science and religion, mind
and body, practice and theory.
Dorothy
Mary Tilden was born on March 20, 1906 in Brooklyn,
N.Y. to Joseph Mayo and Gertrude Estelle (Bennett)
Tilden. In addition to her older brother, Sidney
Edward, Dorothy had a twin brother, Donald Mayo,
who later taught chemistry at St. Anselms College
(the only Protestant on the faculty).
In June 1916, Dorothy's father became President
of Lombard College, Galesburg, Illinois. He was
active in the Universalist Church of America.
In 1927 Dorothy received a B.A. in Religious Education
from Lombard College. In 1928 she received a M.A.
with a major in Religious Education from Boston
University. She became the DRE Assistant in the
First Universalist Church in Charlestown, Massachusetts.
I am a native New York State Universalist, having
been born into the All Souls Church in Brooklyn
some years back. I remember little of the church
school or the church services (children went to
church with their families in those days), except
for learning the Five Principles of Universalism
[established in 1899 by the Universalist General
Convention], which we recited each Sunday morning
from a tender and uncomprehending age. I found them
comforting, at least the fifth, the final harmony
of All Souls with God, and felt fortunate to be
a member of All Souls Church. Imagine my surprise,
at the age of ten, upon moving to Illinois to find
that the Galesburg Universalist Church also believed
in the final harmony of All Souls with God, and
that it really meant all souls, not just the members
of our Brooklyn parish. It was then, perhaps, that
I began to learn that interpretation is important,
and that the process of interpretation often changes
one's understanding of words, phrases, principles,
It was an important learning, for I have since discovered
that such change is a continuous process. ("We
Do Not Stand, We Move", New York Universalist
Convention, 1976)
Brought
up as I was, I could hardly escape a "career"
either in the church or academia. From the age of
ten, I lived in Galesburg, Illinois, on the campus
of Lombard College. Galesburg is on both the Sante
Fe and the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy railroads,
both of which were then the major transcontinental
trains. My father was not only the president of
Lombard, but through many of the years on either
the state or national Universalist boards or committees,
and a "popular" speaker at many events.
Anyone who was going anywhere on denominational
business went through Galesburg and was apt to be
invited to stop off and speak at the college chapel.
Therefore, a lot of dinner talk was of denominational
affairs, and I met many of the "important"
people of Universalism, but also of Unitarianism,
because the Western Conference, centered in Chicago,
was not unknown in our academic halls. Furthermore,
we children went with our folks to many affairs,
conventions, and what not, and got a good "dose"
of enthusiasm.
Of course, when old enough to go on my own, I went
first to state conventions of the Young People's Christian
Union and then, as a high school graduation present,
to a two week conclave at Ferry Beach, one week a
national YPCU convention, the other a General Sunday
School Association week at that beach. At the end
of that I was convinced that I had made my choice
at long last between the three things that I had thought
of as career: journalism (my highest hope to work
for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, or to be a teacher,
or to be a minister).
My
father was a little conservative on the subject of
women in the ministry (he thought they had no future
there), so he said I could go to Boston University
to study Religious Education, but discouraged my "dream"
of St. Lawrence and the ministry. On the other hand,
by then I knew a lot of Universalist types in the
Boston area, and the year I graduated from college
and went to Ferry Beach before starting in at Boston
University, I fell in love with a young "minister
from Vermont," whom Mary Slaughter (later Scott)
had said "I think you will like him." Between
having an apartment with Mary (who was then field
worker for the Universalists), and having met Roger
Etz at Ferry Beach, at mid-west conferences, and at
Murray Grove, he offered me the part time job in Charlestown
Massachusetts..
I
went to work for Roger Etz in Charlestown, including
some preaching, discovering some thirty years later
that Charlestown was Starr King's father's church
and later his (Starr King's). But my introduction
to Unitarianism came in summer conferences, which
included 'those dreadful Unitarians,' as our Galesburg
people said. I met Curtis Reese, whom I adored with
all the zeal of a high school girl and who "made
a liberal out of me," as to religion. He, along
with Waitstill Sharp (head or the Religious Education
Department at American Unitarian Association and later
with the Unitarian Service Committee) and Robert Dexter,
took time to talk to an aspiring young church worker.
Going into the church was inevitable.
What made me a "liberal" as related to social
action was moving to Boston on the night Sacco and
Vanzetti were electrocuted; the influence of Clarence
Skinner (at Tufts University), who came up to Ferry
Beach weekends to help us understand social issues;
and a wonderful social ethics teacher at Boston University,
David Vaughan.
At mid-year of that year at Boston University, we
had a Ferry Beach reunion, and I met again the "young
minister from Vermont." That summer I went to
Ferry Beach as a celebration of having my M.A. in
Religious Education and left at the end of the week
engaged (on the pier at Old Orchard Beach) to the
"young minister" [Howard Spoerl].
In 1928-1929 Dorothy was Director of Religious
Education at Detroit Universalist Church under Frank
Adams. Her mother went to Detroit with her, as her
father had died in February 1928.
1929-1930 Dorothy was the President of the Young People's
Christian Union.
That year in Detroit tied me closer to UUism. The
Religious Education Director in the Detroit Unitarian
Church was Frances Wood (later field worker for the
American Unitarian Association and then the UUA),
and we became lifelong friends. Frances had the ability
to take people where they were and to move them beyond.
On July 28, 1929, Dorothy married Howard Spoerl, Minister
in Bath, Maine, in Ware, New Hampshire. Dorothy was
a minister's wife as well as the Religious Education
Director. She was ordained in Bath before they moved
to Orono, where Howard was minister at a Congregational/Universalist
Church. He obtained a M.A. from University of Maine
in Philosophy, transferring credits that he had obtained
from Harvard University.
My husband, Howard, and I were at the church in Orono,
Maine. Prowling in the excellent University of Maine
Library, I ran into the twenty or so volumes (or was
it twelve) of Frazier's The Golden Bough (first
published in 1890) and read it through with mounting
excitement. I began to devise a course on mythology
for the Orono church school. I wrote it up for the
Christian Leader. The editor wanted to know if I was
sure that I wanted him to print it, as he was afraid
that it would "close many doors in the denomination"
to me and Howard. I said "yes" anyway. Sophia
Fahs read it, was already of the same mind, and invited
me to come and talk with her about working with her
on Beginnings of Life and Death.
Two years as a minister's wife and we decided that
Howard was more academic than ministerial, so we threw
in the sponge and moved to Boston so he could get
his Ph.D. in Psychology and Philosophy at Harvard
(and thereafter we shifted between preaching and teaching
for the balance of our lives). What you can do with
and for young people in one is the same as the other,
but there are different approaches and a wider area
of trust sometimes from the young for teachers than
for preachers.
Dorothy worked for the Benevolent Fraternity in Boston,
which included Bulfinch Place Unitarian Church under
Christopher Eliot, father of Frederick May Eliot,
then Chester Drummond. She worked with children in
the North End Union one day a week. Abigail Eliot
(Frederick's sister and cousin to T. S. Eliot) also
taught in the church school. She was one of the leaders
in nursery school education.
So Howard could go to Harvard (we had, of course,
saved nothing on our munificent $2000 salary, par
for those days), I wrote to Waitstill Sharp, who was
then head of Religious Education of the American Unitarian
Association and asked if he could get me a full time
job in the Boston area. I was sent to an interview
with the Benevolent Fraternity of Unitarian Churches.
This was the strangest interview of my life. It went
like this, "You want to be RE Director?"
Me: "Yes." He: "Where did you go to
school?" Me: "Lombard and BU." He (a
high official in the Boston Edison, I think it was):
"I never interviewed anyone before. What else
should I ask you?" Me: "Why don't you ask
me if I want the job?" He: "Do you?"
Me: "Yes, very much." And he hired me. When
I went there, it had had three ministers in the past
150 years.
Howard
graduated from Harvard, and he and Dorothy went to
St. Johnsbury, Vermont, returning to Boston because
of the low salary. Dorothy worked for Houghton-Mifflin
Company, and Howard taught at Northeastern part time.
A brief notation in the Christian Leader states that
Howard was settled in the church in South Weymouth,
Massachusetts on September 27, 1931.
1937-1939 Dorothy was Minister, Second Universalist
Church, Springfield Massachusetts. Howard taught philosophy
and Dorothy, psychology at American International
College, Springfield. Dorothy was also Religious Education
Director at Unitarian Church, under Whitman Emes.
She feels that she paved the way for the later joining
of the churches.
1940 Dorothy and Howard moved out of Springfield during
wartime because many of the business were related
to guns and ammunitions. They were ministers in the
combined Methodist/Congregational Church in Jeffersonville,
Vermont, and alternated with the church in Cambridge,
Vermont.
1942-1944
when the American International College got a new
and liberal president, Howard and Dorothy returned
to Springfield, where he remained the rest of his
life. Dorothy returned as minister of Second Universalist
Church and Professor of Philosophy at AIC. She attended
Smith part time, then Clark full time, receiving
her Ph.D. in Psychology from Clark in 1942, with
major work in child development and a thesis on
the impact of a bilingual childhood at college age.
Around
1946 Dorothy represented the Universalists on the
Joint Curriculum Committee. Dorothy was appointed
in 1954 as one of four Curriculum Editors for the
Council of Liberal Churches (CLC), with Edith Fisher
Hunter, Lucile Lindberg, and Robert Miller under Ernest
Kuebler. The CLC included Unitarians, Universalists,
American Council for Judaism, and the Ethical Society.
She was a speaker at numerous institutes, such as
at Ferry Beach in 1948.
From
1955-1960, Dorothy was Editor of the Beacon Series.
Howard died in 1957, as did her mother, who had been
living in Florida, and her brother, Donald. In 1958,
Dorothy built the house at Witches Meadow, and taught
in a 2 room school (expanded to 3 rooms) in Ackworth,
New Hampshire (36 children, grades 3-6).
When Howard died, and Walter, who was 15 years old,
wanted to "live in the country," I built
my house at Witches' Meadow in Langdon, New Hampshire.
It got its name the night I had bought the land. When
I approached the land, it was hazy, with the moon
shining faintly through the mist. "Witches' Meadow"
seemed like the perfect name.
1960-1964 Dorothy was curriculum editor of the
Unitarian Universalist Association. This included
editing the Beacon Science Series.
I got a phone call from Ernest Kuebler. By then I
had been on the curriculum committee of the Council
of Liberal Churches for many years, and had been for
a time one of four part time editors for the Council
of Liberal Churches. He wanted to know if I would
like to come to Boston to do research in religious
education and be curriculum editor. I said, "yes"
and went. He told me later (half in jest) that I was
"the only person he could hire (it was the year
of merger) because the Unitarians all thought I was
Unitarian and the Universalists knew I had been brought
up a Universalist, therefore I wasn't controversial
at that point in history." (As a person I "merged"
long before merger/consolidation.) Whatever his reasons,
I enjoyed the work. Ernest was marvelous to work with,
and I would have stayed had he not left. I could not
work with Henry Cheetham, but as long as I worked
for him (Cheetham), I supported him.
1965-1966 Dorothy was on the faculty, Starr King,
1 day/week, and was West Coast field staff for Religious
Education
1965-69 Dorothy worked on Adult Education under Royal
Cloyd.
It was a joy when I was invited to Starr King to teach
one course and do the West Coast field work. I was
not sure that I could survive the California highways.
When Royal Cloyd offered me a job in Adult Education
working for him, I said "yes." Royal was
the most creative man I have ever worked for.
Henry Cheetam demanded that I turn down all religious
education invitations for three years after leaving
UUA initially and to not tell people why. When Royal
went through Dana Greeley (1967?), Henry permitted
me to accept the invitation to spend time working
with the Remonstrants in the Netherlands to introduce
the Dutch translation of Sophia Fahs' Today's Children
and Yesterday's Heritage. The UUA paid my salary and
the Remonstrants paid the expenses. I gave 21 speeches
in 3 weeks.
When
I was speaking at the Haag, three men in the back
row nodded and agreed with my speech. They told me
that is was about time that someone said the things
that I had said. They introduced themselves as the
"Pope's bad boys." They were three Catholic
priests!
1970-72 Dorothy was minister at Woodstock and Hartland,
Vermont. She then moved to Charlestown, New Hampshire,
then moved to Sanford, Maine, basically to be near
her son and his family. She continued to speak at
conferences and religious education gatherings.
In 1987, she received UUA Distinguished Service Award.
In 1994, she received the Angus MacLean Award in Religious
Education.
Retirement brought constant contacts with Sunday church
services and organizations after the merger. This
included participation in the St. Lawrence District
Conference, "Revolving Door Syndrome." For
six weeks in the fall of 1972, I worked for the Department
of Extension on the "front range" of the
Rockies, doing a quick demographic study of each town
where there had been a Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
or church, speaking in each church and fellowship.
This included three weeks in Colorada Springs.
In 1973, I was awarded the degree of Doctor of Sacred
Theology from Starr King School of Ministry. I was
the theme speaker for the Starr King Summer School.
In 1977, I conducted a West Coast "safari"
doing a three day workshop with lectures on curriculum
past, present and future for church school people
in the Santa Monica, California, area. I was then
theme speaker at Seabeck for the Northwest, followed
by a month as minister in residence at the Vancouver
Church while Phillip Hewett was on sabbatical writing
and researching his history of the church in Canada.
In 1979, I was presented a Doctor of Divinity by Meadville/Lombard
Theological School, and gave the commencement address,
"To Keep Man's Spirit Free." In 1980, I
was the Spring Term Minister in Residence at Meadville/Lombard
where I taught a course in religious education. From
there I went to Galesburg to the Lombard Alumni Reunion
and spoke of the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary
of the closing of Lombard to assure them that the
charter was "alive and well" and doing splendidly
at Meadville.
I was Minister of the Week at Starr Island in 1979
and 1985. I am also a member of the Ferry Beach Park
Association, serving on the Board until 1987.
In
1982, I participated in the ordination of Corelyn
Senn in Charlottesville, Virginia. I also did the
Theme Talks for the week each at UUMAC in Easton,
Pennsylvania, and Ohio/Meadville Conference at Kenyon
College. The theme of these weeks was community,
but each one was different.
In 1983, I participated in the dedication of the
Oakcliff Church in Dallas, and had a workshop the
day before at First Church and a talk with children
on atomic war.
In 1986, I participated in the hundred and fiftieth
anniversary of the founding of the Woodstock, Vermont,
church, giving the anniversary sermon (not preserved
in written form).
Since
retirement I have preached or spoken to religious
education groups on numerous occasions until a few
years ago when bus service out of Sanford/Springvale
(Maine) was discontinued and my eyes forced me to
give up driving, so I could not get to most of them.
I did have a session at the Religious Education
Week at Ferry Beach in July 1995.
Dorothy fell and broke a hip in January 1993, followed
by rehabilitation for that and subsequent falls
in various nursing facilities in southern Maine.
She maintains extensive correspondence, in spite
of visual impairment. Dorothy retains her concern
for quality in religious education.
May 1999 Dorothy has moved to Sullivan County Home,
Claremont, New Hampshire, to be close to her family.
She appreciates phone calls and letters. She is
an avid "reader," a great customer of
the Talking Books Program, as her vision is very
poor.
Henry Hampton, in his Fahs lecture (1987 General
Assembly) put it well: "Thus far in her long
and productive life of service, she has helped educate
our children, build a denomination, save more than
a few intellectual souls, and, without a doubt,
she has changed the course of the world...Dottie
Spoerl is the best we have to offer...(Her) life
of service testifies to the tremendous difference
one individual can make......"
