Teach Outreach
What's in a name? Self-assertiveness, a commitment to social justice and some family history, among other things, for Lucille Pickles Haworth '57.
Haworth tells her story in a soft, gentle voice that belies the strength evident in her narrative. As Lucy Pickles from Rhode Island, she lit out for Maryland in the early 1950s to attend Hood College because she was eager to participate in college athletics, and only the all-women's colleges like Hood offered much of a program then. She transferred to Colby and made her own opportunities for sports, going into the then-new Alfond ice arena early in the morning to skate, "when the ice was smooth and I had it all to myself."
An English major, she took a job as children's librarian in the Providence Public Library after graduation but soon decided she could do more to help children enjoy reading if she were a teacher. So she went to Brown University and earned a master's degree that included her teacher's certification. She taught English at St. Johnsbury Academy in Vermont for seven years before marrying and staying home (as Mrs. Lucy Moulton) for a decade to raise her children.
During those years she did some volunteer tutoring at a local jail, and when the Northeast Regional Corrections facility later advertised for a full-time teacher she applied and got the job despite a last-minute application and several dozen competing candidates. "They couldn't believe I wanted it," she said. Since then she has spent more than 16 years teaching inmates and finds the work challenging and rewarding. "I found a great need in the prison system," she said, describing inmates' educational deficiencies as well as adjustment problems. "They have such large gaps; they're not a part of the culture and that's often the problem. If you can get beyond that tough, swaggering exterior that many of them carry to cover up a lot of hurt underneath, then you can make a lot of progress."
Divorced for a dozen years, she was happy to keep her married name, Moulton, while her children lived at home. But once they left the nest for college, Haworth was ready to change her surname. Growing up she came to accept her birth name, Pickles, "but I really didn't want to go back to that." (It's English, she said; a derivative of Picts-Hill.) She liked her father's middle name, Haworth, and discovered it came from a great-grandmother, Mary Haworth. On her grandfather's English birth certificate she found a small "X" identified as "the mark of Mary Haworth." Realizing that her great-grandmother, with most other Victorian English women, had been denied an education because of her class and gender, Lucy Haworth decided, "all the more reason I should take her name, as many of the people I teach cannot read and write. I thought it was a little recompense for her."--Stephen Collins '74