University of Delaware Office of Public Relations The Messenger Vol. 6, No. 1/1996 Sketches of a lifetime Perhaps it's time for Nancy Sawin, Delaware '40M, to write an autobiography. Her life is too large to be contained in a single magazine article. There are too many facets and dimensions. She's done too many things well. Here, there is only room for a sketch of her life- like the pen and inks for which the artist side of Sawin is so well known. It will take a book to color in all the shades and hues, to paint a full portrait of this athlete, scholar, educator, administrator, feminist and historian. Sawin grew up in a home that stressed education and equal rights. Her grandmother, Ada Gould Quigley, was at one time leader of the Delaware Suffragettes. Her father, Sanford Wales Sawin, Delaware '03, was one of Delaware's first civil engineering graduates. Her mother, Ellen Quigley Sawin, Delaware '38M, was one of Delaware's first women to obtain a master's degree, writing a thesis on the tar-paper shanties and horrid living conditions of railroad workers. Ellen Sawin is best known in Delaware as the founder of The Sanford School in Hockessin, named after Nancy's brother, Sanford, who died in 1916 at the age of 10 from muscular dystrophy. Three other family members received their master's degrees at UD and Sawin's sister, Marian Stauffer, received her doctorate in 1973. Born in 1917, Sawin started in public school in Marshallton, Del., where classes were held in various locations throughout the town. "People were upset that there was no indoor plumbing in some classrooms," she says, "but I loved walking outdoors, wandering to the outhouse." In third grade, she received a scholarship to Tower Hill School, and in fourth grade, she began to play field hockey. She stayed through seventh grade, then spent a year at Miss Hebbs School in Wilmington. For the remainder of her high school years, she went to Principia School in St. Louis, founded by Mary Kimball Morgan, a Christian Scientist. It was 19 hours away from home by train. In high school and her early college years (three at Principia College in Illinois and one at Syracuse University), Sawin was torn between her abilities in math and science, her talent in art and her love of athletics. She decided to major in art, but she was also known as an outstanding field hockey player. After graduation, she was offered a job as head of women's physical education at Principia College, but she declined and, in 1938, came home to the Sanford campus, where she spent more than 35 years working as a teacher, coach and housemother and, eventually, head of the school. "It was a different era," she recalls. "I coached sports-field hockey, tennis, softball, basketball, riding and lacrosse. I even coached the football team one year when my brother, Phillip, was off in the war." Introducing girls at Sanford to lacrosse was one of Sawin's joys, and she is happy boys now play, too. She was so dedicated to the sports program that she often drove the team bus to and from games. She also worked tirelessly to establish women's intercollegiate sports in Delaware, sometimes sneaking UD's four women "phys ed" majors out of their dorm to play field hockey at Sanford with the Delaware Hockey Association. "Who would have hired them as coaches if they'd never played intercollegiate games?" she asks. As Sawin developed the hockey program at Sanford, she joined the Philadelphia Hockey Association, as the Delaware association had not yet formed. "As soon as the war ended, some of my friends began to play hockey in Philadelphia on Saturdays and Sundays. In the fall of 1947, we had a four-day national tournament. "I made the first reserve All-America team," she says. That spring, as part of the war rebuilding effort, The Netherlands held an invitational tournament and Sawin made the touring team. "I can still hear the Spanish fans chanting, "Remember Plan MarshallCheer USA!" she recalls. Before her hockey-playing days were over, Sawin would make the All-America Team seven times, serve twice as captain of the touring teams and make the reserve team three times. She served as coach on the team's fourth overseas tour, coached at famed women's field hockey coach Constance M.K. Applebee's camps for more than 20 years and ended up being inducted as a charter member of the U.S. Field Hockey Hall of Fame and into the Delaware Sports Hall of Fame. And, all the while, the artist side of her was being quietly nurtured. Sawin's mother arranged for her as a child to take lessons with Delaware artist Frank Schoonover. "During the Depression, we couldn't buy presents, so I made wood carvings, pottery and paintings for friends and relatives," she says. "Over the years, I never went any place without my sketch pad. I took it along on 20 senior class trips to Williamsburg, Va., that I chaperoned for Sanford." Additionally, Sawin went on to earn a master's degree in American history from UD and her doctorate in education administration from the University of Pennsylvania after commuting to classes for seven years. Her thesis developed evaluation criteria for boarding schools. Sawin eventually served as the second woman president of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools. After her mother retired, Sawin assumed more responsibilities at Sanford and, in 1962, was officially appointed head of the school, which had come a long way from its early beginning with seven boys and girls who were taught in the family home. In the '30s, '40s and '50s, Sanford was a prestigious, coed boarding school, heavily used by the Washington, D.C., foreign service contingent as a home-away-from- home for their children. As head of the school, Sawin perpetuated its philosophy that the school could not be run on tuition alone. "That would mean we could only educate the children of millionaires," she says. She also foresaw a time when her family would need to let others run things. "I'd seen other schools decline when the founding family held on for too long," she says. In all, Sawin stayed at the Sanford for more than three decades, teaching, coaching, taking out the tractor and mowing the fields of the former family farm, driving the bus when needed, painting buildings, raking leaves and picking apples. Eventually, as Hockessin became suburban, the boarding school was phased out and Sanford became a private, country day school for grades K-12. Throughout these busy years, Sawin kept planning some day to have more time to paint, sketch and write. In 1972, she requested a sabbatical from Sanford, with the understanding that, upon her return, the board would appoint a new head of the school. "I had to find out if I could be a really good artist," she says, "so I went to Europe with my sketch pad." Visiting friends and staying here and there, she had her first art show "on a clothesline outside a small condo on the Mediterranean." Her confidence buoyed, she returned to Sanford in 1974 and officially retired. As a going-away present, grateful parents gave her a two-week safari in Kenya. From there, she toured Egypt and lived in Devon, England, on a farm for three months, studying the sketches of the owners' father, a member of the British Watercolor Society. "They were a great education," she says. Back in Delaware, Sawin worked for UD's Division of Continuing Education, running career exploration workshops and doing counseling. Little did she know she would eventually practice what she preached. "I gave seminars to women to convince them of their abilities," she says. "I had an exercise where I asked them to pipe dream. I'd say, 'If you had all the time and talent in the world, what would you do for the next five years?' I realized I had a pipe dream, too. I knew I loved art and loved local history, and it was then that I got the idea for combining those into books." The first one, Delaware Sketchbook: Text & Sketches of Delaware, produced with friend and former student Janice Carper, was so successful that a string of others-16 so far-have followed. Writing about and drawing illustrations of areas from the Bahamas to Chesapeake City, Md., has become Sawin's passion. Most of the books deal with Delaware, which has caused one local newspaper editor to refer to Sawin as "a treasure of Delaware heritage and history." Her work has been widely exhibited and is included in many public and private collections. She continues to travel, recently going to France with a group from the Delaware Daughters of the American Revolution to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy. She also has become a collector of country primitive antiques, exhibiting and selling them in shows and from her home, North Light Studio near Hockessin. Nearing 80, Sawin has the energy of someone half her age. She's currently involved in three new projects-a sketchbook of Delaware's Main Streets due out in 1997; a book called Vanishing Points, due out next fall, which will feature silos, one-room school houses and other points that are disappearing from Delaware's countryside; and, maybe, that autobiography, tentatively titled Pets, People and Places. -Beth Thomas