The year Bernice Elsie Bombardier ’27 graduated with a degree in Home Economics, Vermont flooded.

By then she had already lived a remarkable life: immigrating to the U.S. from Canada at age 10, backpedaling into first grade material to push forward with her English, adapting to life on a Williamstown farm, working her way through high school as a live-in. Bernice would soon find her way through and out of her one-room schoolhouse.

Somewhere along the way, a love of learning burgeoned that catapulted Bernice to the top of her class.

This triumph caught one neighbor’s attention.

This woman came out on her porch one day and flagged the teenage Bernice walking to school.

“She said, I read in the Daily Times yesterday that you’re valedictorian," Mary Ann Mooney Chaffee '60 shares of her mother, "and you should go to college."

“And she gave her an envelope with $75 in cash in it. And that’s how my mother went to UVM.”

That neighbor “made such an impression on my mother," Mary Ann reflects. "And her last name was Ainsworth. And I noticed, when we've driven through Williamstown, it's the Ainsworth Public library. So obviously this woman had means and believed in education, and she wanted to do something incredible.” And that she did.

As did Bernice. Once at UVM, Bernice had to work in order to earn room and board. Her first year, she worked for a professor and his wife.

“But then after that,” Mary Ann recalls, “her last two years, she lived with Bertha Terrill and Sarah Holbrook.”

Dr. Bertha M. Terrill (1870 - 1968) was UVM’s first female faculty member and a native of Morristown. She taught home economics for 31 years before her retirement in 1940.

Like Dr. Terrill, Sarah Holbrook was a UVM education professor and clinical psychologist. She founded the Sarah Holbrook Community Center in 1937 to aid low-income and immigrant families. Holbrook’s entanglements with the eugenics movement, promulgated by UVM professor Dr. Henry Perkins, have since come under public scrutiny.

Terrill and Holbrook lived together. As a home economics major, Bernice was a perfect fit as their housekeeper.

"They became close friends," Mary Ann recounts, "and Sarah Holbrook and Bertha Terrill used to come and visit us when I was a little girl. And we had to be on our very best behavior, as you can imagine."

When Every Penny Counts

When Bernice wasn't studying -- home economics, biochemistry, nutrition -- she was hard at work.

“With Bertha and Sarah, she had certain things she had to do. And if they asked her to do beyond that,” her register would read, “‘extra duties, $4.’”

While Bernice reaped the rewards of her labor, it also conferred sacrifices.

Bernice “couldn’t do what other students would be doing because she was always having to work,” Mary Anne shares. “She was busy. Always concerned about money.”

Out of necessity, Bernice kept detailed record of every expense and earning, down to the penny. Mary Ann recalls a ledger which read, ‘Car fare: $1.76. If I lost a penny, I couldn’t go on the car.’ 

From her hard work came a college degree. Upon graduation, Bernice was hired as a Home Economics and Science teacher in 1927 “at the salary of $500 a year.”

Ipsa Historia Repetit

Mary Ann feels tethered to the past.

We met Mary Ann and husband Robert Wesley Chaffee '53 on the one-year anniversary of the 2023 Vermont floods. Later that July 10th evening, Vermont would flood again.

One couldn’t help but think of cycles.

A neighbor's generous scholarship launched Bernice’s career, enabling her to build a better life for her family. Bernice was glad to leave farm life behind. “You’re always tied to the cow’s tail,” she would tell her children.

After earning her Home Economics and Science degree, Bernice was hired to teach high school in Wallingford, Vermont.

"She taught, from ’27 to ’33, and paid back UVM her loan, $50 at a time,” Mary Ann recounts.

Then Bernice met Mary Ann’s father, Lawrence J. Mooney. “[My mom] had to leave [teaching] because she was pregnant in 1933." Pregnancy and employment were thought mutually exclusive at the time, defying logic and equity.

“And my father worked [as a clerk] for the True Temper Inn and he got transferred to Dearborn, Michigan. And so they lived there, and my brother was born there. And at eight months they came back to Vermont.”

The family settled into their life in Barre, where their second child, Mary Ann, was born.

“Little Barre was very cosmopolitan because of the granite industry,” Mary Ann recalls, attracting many workers from Italy and Scotland.

Bernice then pivoted to work for the Bureau of Farms Security. Her job was “to go to farms that were applying for federal aid at that time and to assess how the woman managed the budget and the household.”

Through this work, Bernice travelled Vermont – often for days or weeks at a time – helping local farmers and assessing their enterprise. Mary Ann and her siblings would stay home with their father, who would eventually work as Captain in Barre’s Police Department but was not employed in those days.

It was unusual for a woman to be breadwinner and to travel for work. But it agreed with Bernice.

With her first earnings working outside the home, Bernice bought the family a piano. “We all had to take piano lessons. Even my poor brother who didn’t like it.”

“I almost felt about my mother that she really loved working and being out and using her education.” But the 1943 birth of the third and youngest in their brood, Mary Ann’s sister, Monica Shattuck, changed things.

“That was the end. My father wanted her to stay at home. And we had a lovely house.”

In between her work at home and with her young children, Bernice would write articles for The Barre Daily Times about child rearing, nutrition, fashion, holidays, and trends.

“She used her education in various ways, but I think she would’ve preferred to be really out in the business world […] to use it in a more concrete way.”  

“But it was always the one thing that, because my mother got to go to college, she was always thinking that we would all go to college that my sister and I did. My brother did not. And so you could certainly see the influence of the opportunity to go to college on her.”

A Life in Records

When we shared the ’24: Then and Now project with Mary Ann, she was excited – and already familiar with UVM Special Collections.

Bernice, not surprisingly, never gave up the discipline of tracking her expenses. These ledgers are now available for viewing at among the stacks at the Jack and Shirley Silver Special Collections, thanks to Mary Ann and her family's donation.

In Bernice's student days, she dutifully logged every gift from her mother and father -- most, small gifts between $1.00 and $5.00. On a thoroughly written-in ledger, this section takes up but two pages and catalogues the span of five years (1923-1927).

That Bernice made it through UVM with little help -- save these occasional allowances and her neighbor's generous scholarship ($75 in 1923 is roughly $1,400 adjusted for inflation) -- speaks volumes of not just Bernice's tenacity, but of her scrupulousness.

Bernice could not afford to let one penny slip without careful consideration.

That anxiety, and the care at its core, is felt through these pages -- and those that would follow.

In her 1936 Family Financial Records ledgers, income and rent is tediously tracked alongside utilities, dry goods and clothing (oil cloth, $0.20" on February 11), entertainment ("show, $0.50" on February 8), and miscellany ("glasses, $4.00" on February 4).

These pile through the decades and could be read as diary entries ("Milk of Magnesia, $0.45" on February 10). 

Later, even with the kids out of the home, Bernice kept up her records in spiral-bound notebooks and with just as much detail.

It stands in stark contrast with the banquet menus and party souvenirs we found in the pages of her classmates.

As for her Memory Book, Bernice didn't have one. What outside-of-school activities would have warranted memorializing? 

Instead, we are left with the record of a few million decisions, an archive of thought processes, and a steadfast recollection of Bernice's can-do nature. And a testimony of what she most esteemed.

"May 8, 1926," one entry reads. "Gift to Mother, 70 cents."

Four Generations of Catamounts

Mary Ann sees a direct line between this neighbor’s act of generosity and her own successes.

Following her days at UVM, culminating in her 1960 commencement, Mary Ann, too, became a teacher. She traded home economics for ancient texts – a scholar and teacher, of French and Latin, for nearly forty years.

Mary Ann’s own daughter – and now her granddaughter – have since followed in Bernice’s pursuits of a college education at UVM. Like Mary Ann, they’ve all majored in Education.

Her daughter Maureen teaches 5th grade in Manchester, Vermont. Emma Hayes Chaffee, Mary Ann’s “one and only granddaughter,” is on the brink of graduating with an emphasis on Special Education.

Emma plans to pursue a Master’s Degree in Special Ed immediately following graduation.

“Certainly my mother’s influence and the idea of teaching and the woman working and all, trickle down to all of the females. And so we will be, when [Emma] graduates, the fourth generation of women at UVM: my mother, then myself, and then our daughter and our son, and then, Emma.”

Looking for Descendants

Did your relative attend UVM in the 1920s? If so, we want to talk to you and hear your story -- and theirs. We're also interested in memorabilia or more scrapbooks from UVM in the 1920s.

Get in touch! Email Lisa Wartenberg Velez to feature your UVM descendant story.