Barbara (Norris) Andersen ’46 was a member of the first class of women to enroll in Clark’s new Women’s College in 1942. She’d learned about Clark while waitressing in the summer of 1942 at The Inn in West Falmouth, Mass. Among the guests was Dr. Loring Dodd, professor of English and fine arts at Clark, who regaled her with stories about the University, which was preparing to admit its first class of women. When she told her family she would be attending Clark, her mother hit the roof — no daughter of hers was going to attend this small school in a gritty mill town. Barbara’s defiance so enraged her mother that she soon disowned her daughter, and would never speak to her again. When 17-year-old Barbara Norris stepped onto the Clark campus holding her one suitcase, she was truly alone. It was here that she would have to find a new family.
Excerpted from “A League of Their Own,” published in the fall 2010 issue of Clark magazine.
Barbara Norris did find a second family at Clark, with her [basketball] teammates, her classmates, and a fellow student named Roy Andersen ’43. The two met at Barbara’s first-ever dinner as a freshman in the Clark dining hall, where she encountered the tall, lanky senior working the steam table. (Her first magical words to him: “No potatoes, please.”)
They fell in love, and the romance accelerated with typical wartime speed and passion. The couple married at the end of Barbara’s sophomore year, with Dr. Dodd giving away the bride, and Roy soon shipped off to serve aboard the Navy destroyer U.S.S. Mannert L. Abele near Okinawa. Barbara wrote often, and when Roy’s letters arrived at Clark, custodian and mailroom attendant Harvey Curry made sure they found their way into Barbara’s hands. Harvey was even known to interrupt class to deliver letters to Clark coeds eager for news from their soldier sweethearts.
A league of their own
As World War II raged on, Clark’s first women athletes brought their A game to campus
On the afternoon of April 12, 1945, two kamikaze planes rammed into the U.S.S. Mannert L. Abele, sending the ship to the bottom of the Pacific within three minutes. Barbara read the news of the sinking in the Worcester Telegram, but for weeks knew nothing about the fate of her husband. She continued on with her studies and her sports.
“One night we were playing Fitchburg State. I was no star, but I’d made a couple of baskets, and was doing pretty well. Then Miss Hughes called me off the floor, and I was thinking, ‘Why take me out now?’ She said, ‘There’s a Navy man in the front hall who wants to speak to you.’ I thought, ‘It’s Roy. He’s alive!’ And I went tearing out of the gym.”
The man in the hall was not Roy. He was Walter Nylund, a fellow Clarkie who served on a ship that was part of the recovery effort for the U.S.S. Mannert L. Aberle. He told Barbara that Roy had been plucked out of the ocean, wounded and wet, but alive.
“He said when he saw Roy he hardly had any clothes on,” she smiles, “and he was drinking a big glass of medicinal brandy.” A letter from Roy finally made its way to Clark in early June bearing good news: he was coming home.
After years spent on the West Coast, Roy and Barbara Andersen returned to Clark in 1961 when Roy was hired as chairman of the Physics Department. Roy passed away in 2014 at the age of 92; Barbara died two years later at 91.