Tech Topics - Winter 2007 - (Page 17) LivingHistory A Full Century Anne Marie Eaton tallies innumerable life achievements By Karen Hill W the next day, he called and said so-and-so had been drafted and ‘we need women.’” After the war, Eaton helped her husband build hen Anne Marie Reis Eaton was a child, she an import/export business. In 1948, he joined Tech’s expected to grow up to become a hostess and faculty. He would become a Fulbright professor in housewife, like her mother and grandmother. That industrial engineering and rise to international didn’t happen. prominence before retiring in 1972. Eaton, who turns 100 on Nov. 26, has lived a life In the early 1950s, Eaton returned to work as a full of unexpected experiences as well as one wellmethods analyst for Lockheed. She would later do planned exodus from Nazi Germany to the United similar work for Rich’s department store. In 1968, at States in 1938. She reinvented herself several times — the urging of another Tech as a wife and mother SCOTT DINERMAN professor, she began volunmaking do with few of teering at a nursing home, the accustomed comforts which led to full-time work but also as a methods anain patient relations and recrelyst, import/export manation. In 1972, at age 65, she ager, Tech faculty wife, retired. college student, expert on “Then I entered a field gerontology and author. with which I could identify,” She knows what she’s Eaton said. She enrolled at talking about when she Georgia State, studying the says of aging: “You must new field of gerontology, and replace anything you lose at age 70 earned a master’s with something else.” degree in sociology with a Eaton learned hard minor in gerontology, the lessons about resilience first such degree awarded at early in life. World War I Georgia State. She put her disrupted her childhood thesis to work, helping start with frequent bomb the nation’s largest Life attacks on her hometown Enrichment Center for senof Mannheim, an industriiors in DeKalb County that al hub. Her father was provided everything from called to military service recreation to nursing care. and her mother died. A That work led to the reversal in family fortune Georgia Senate naming her forced her to substitute 1999’s Distinguished Senior plans for law school with Georgian. She also representmore practical — and less Georgia Tech’s oldest living alumna, Anne Marie Eaton, her husband and three children left Nazi Germany in 1938 to start a new life in Atlanta. She and her husband enrolled in Tech’s evening school to study industrial engineering in 1942. ed DeKalb and Rockdale expensive — commercial counties at a White House art studies. Conference on Aging and was a representative on In 1929, after working as a rare female among in Atlanta’s Virginia-Highland neighborhood. Alaging issues to Amerika Haus, the U.S. cultural commercial artists, she married Paul Eaton, an econothough she spoke English, her husband did not. It organization in Germany. mist and mining engineer whose family owned a took him five weeks to find work, as a gofer bringing Following the death of her husband in 1987, steel mill. She settled into a comfortable life with her Cokes to a construction crew. A Catholic priest had to Eaton studied psychology at Tech for two years, with husband, three small children and extended family. explain that Jim Crow rules meant she couldn’t enroll an eye toward a doctoral degree. She left after decidLife tensed with the ascent of the Nazi party, her children in his school for black children. Eaton ing that one of her professors had a bias against older which Eaton likened to “living with a bad smell.” learned how to cook, how to make do without maids students and unfairly graded her too lowly. Her husband was arrested twice — once for arguing and nannies, how to stretch her husband’s initial $15 She regrets that decision now but has filled her with his Nazi car mechanic, then for taking pictures weekly paycheck across seven days. time writing books. The first, for her children, was a of Nazis beating someone in the street. In 1942, the Eatons saw a newspaper article family history. Others deal with aging or personal Allowed to emigrate with just $200 in cash, the about Georgia Tech’s evening school offering classes philosophy. Eatons shipped by ocean liner everything they in industrial engineering, then a new field of study. After surviving a stroke and cancer, she is conthought they might need — a washing machine, Because the program was paid for by the federal govsidering writing a book advocating that doctors refrigerator, dishwasher, six years of clothes for each ernment under the War Manpower Act, Eaton was “form a team for the benefit of successful health child, heirloom books, seven rooms of furniture, even able to enroll, along with her husband, even though maintenance” for their very old yet still functioning a convertible. Tech at the time banned female students. She studied patients. Even with those precautions, she recalled, when the subject for two years before applying for a job as “It takes me a year to think about it, then I sit a government inspector came to make sure they fola methods analyst with Sears. down to write it,” Eaton said of her books. “If I’m lowed packing rules, they plied him with beer. “‘A woman? In industrial engineering?’” she going to do that one, I’d better get on with it.” GT The family traveled first class to New York City. recalled her interviewer asking. “He just laughed. But A relative living in Atlanta offered free use of an apartment, so they headed south in their convertible, its German license tag drawing stares, some animosity and some warm greetings from those who understood that they were not enemies. “To this day, it’s unbelievable to me what we did. We crossed the ocean? We got off and drove through New York City? And with all that stuff?” recalled Eaton. The family settled into a three-room apartment TECHTOPICS | WINTER 2007 17
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