Daughter of Circuit Rider [Mary Ellen Macleod Strawson] Stresses Family EducationThe Standard-Star [New Rochelle, NY], Dec 4 1959, P. 23Extract: "College Degree is spelled with capital letters in the Stanton M. Strawson family and education is written like this: EDUCATION.
Strawson is commissioner of public welfare in Westchester but this story is about Mary Ellen Mac Leod Strawson, his wife. About her, that is, as much as it is possible to disengage the tapestry of a woman's life which is woven warp and woof into the lives of her husband and children.
Mary was born in Boston but when she was eight months old her family moved in 1900 to the prairies of Colorado for the health of her tubercular father.
A Methodist minister, the Rev. George R. MacLeod drove a horse and buggy on a 60-mile circuit from Monday morning to Thursday night, then preached in Burlington, their home town, on Sunday. When he died in 1910, Mrs. MacLeod was left with three daughters.
== Girls Enter College ==
They remained in Burlington for seven more years then, in 1917, she and the girls moved to Denver, for one reason: education. Remember?
Getting a job as manager of the University of Denver cafeteria, Mrs. MacLeod got the three girls registered at the university and, giving them a figurative pat on the back, told them to get busy with an education and not stop short of a college degree, and they did and didn't.
Mary not only finished college in three years, majoring in English and education, but she met her future husband, a tall young man who was a fellow student.
A native of Wall Street, Colo., Stanton Strawson had something else in common with Mary besides Denver University and a natural attraction. Her grandfather and three uncles mined for gold at Silver Plume and Georgetown and his father gold-mined at Cripple Creek and Wall Street. But it is not to be presumed they spent too much time discussing gold mining relatives.
== 5 Hold Degrees ==
Now we skip a few years during which they both do social welfare work and he graduates from the New York School of Social Work and they rear five children.
Education, remember? Every one of those five Strawson children has a college degree-no small feat when you consider all the red herrings such as romance, disinterest or a job that might interrupt the four long years involved in getting a degree.
Stanton Moore Strawson Jr., is a Harvard graduate. With the Civil Service Commission in Washington, he is father of Lucia Jean, eight, Carol Anne, four, and Stanton Moore III, two.
Frederick MacLeod Strawson, graduate of Cornell, is a chemical company salesman in Avon, N.Y. His children are Phyllis, five. Freddie, Jr., four, and Karen Ellen, three.
== Husband a Poultryman ==
Mary Ellen Strawson Jr., is Mrs. David N. Ross, Cornell graduate, wife of a Westfield. N.Y., poultry-man who raises 30,000 broilers at a time and grows Concord grapes which he sells to a grape juice-making firm (219 tons last year). Her children are David Stanton, seven, Steven, five, and Jean Carolyn, two.
David George Strawson and Jean Cameron Strawson are twins.
David, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, lives in Silver Spring, Md., and does nuclear work for Allis Chalmers, His daughter, Joan Ellen, had her first birthday anniversary Oct. 28.
Jean, a graduate of Simmons College and also a graduate in nursing at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, is Mrs. Charles W. Tenney Jr. of Auburndale, Mass., and is doing nursing at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton, Mass."