Series I. Eleanor Herz Swent papers, 1940-1945

Eleanor was born in Lead, South Dakota, June 4, 1924. She attended Lead High School, 1940, and Dana Hall School, Wellesley, MA, “sub-collegiate”, 1941. She graduated Wellesley College, with a B.A. in 1945, with Phi Beta Kappa and Honors in English Composition. At Wellesley she was also a Durant Scholar, Shakespeare Society President, and won the John Masefield Library Prize. She conducted an independent study on Pine Ridge and Rosebud Sioux reservations. She worked as Assistant to the President, Elmira College, Elmira, NY, from 1945-1946. She received her M.A. cum laude in English in 1947 from the University of Denver, where she also worked as an Assistant in the Communications Clinic. She received her LL.D. from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in 1998. On June 22 1947, Eleanor married Langan Waterman Swent, who was born in 1916, in Oakland, CA, and passed away in 1992 in San Francisco, CA. Eleanor provides this historical background:

Lead, SD, was a cosmopolitan, industrial city, home to the world’s largest gold mine, the Homestake mine, foundation of the Hearst fortune. The Phoebe Hearst kindergarten, established in 1900, taught children from the age of three. Miners came from all the world. There was a wide variety of churches, including several that had services in languages other than English, and almost everyone attended a church. We were active members of the Methodist Episcopal church. Lead thrived during the years of the dust bowl and depression and had outstanding schools and teachers.

My father, Nathaniel Herz, was born in New Haven, CT, and graduated from Yale as a mining engineer before going West to be metallurgist for Homestake Mining Company. He played the flute in the Yale orchestra and in a local orchestra in Lead, and sometimes gave private flute lessons. He was a second lieutenant in the army during World War I, was a member of the American Legion, Kiwanis, Masons, Shrine, and the Methodist Church. My mother, Janet Kimpston Herz graduated from the University of Iowa and met my father when she was on a geology field trip to the Black Hills. She taught in Iowa high schools before marrying. She was active in AAUW, PEO, WAAME, and the Methodist Church, as well as sewing and bridge clubs.

Dinner parties were elaborate affairs with flowers, candles, formal dress, but no alcoholic drinks. Sometimes there were bridge games. I overheard discussions of Cambrian vs. pre-Cambrian geologic formations; I didn’t know the meaning, but I liked the musical sounds, Pahasapa limestone, micaceous schist, countercurrent decantation. One of the dinner groups was the “C&G Club” [cap & gown]; all the members were college graduates. Bright, ambitious girls from farming communities came to Lead high school to live in as members of the family, and helped with childcare, house cleaning and cooking. For dinner parties, they wore uniforms and served as maids. Most of them went on to college, with the support of their former employers, and in turn became teachers. People in Lead were aware of the distress of the “Dust Bowl” and the Depression, as hundreds of destitute men looked for work in the mines and came to our door in the evening to ask for food.

My mother had fragile health and made many trips to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota; she prepared me to be independent and motherless. When I was twelve, I learned to drive a car and shopped for my own clothes. [In fact, she lived to be 95.] I was an only child, and graduated from Lead High School at sixteen, valedictorian of my high school class, editor of the school newspaper, “The Nugget,” and president of the South Dakota High School Press Association. In summer vacations, I went to the Methodist church camp at Pactola, SD, and the Lap Circle Ranch camp near Spearfish; most of the campers there were from Chicago or Ohio. In 1939 I participated in a National Forensic League [now the National Speech and Debate Association] competition in Beverly Hills, CA. In the summer of 1940, I attended the National Journalism Institute at Medill School, Northwestern University. Some boys in my high school class had signed up for the National Guard and were called to active duty immediately after graduation. We worried about a coming war.

My parents went with me by train to Boston when I entered Dana Hall, and returned to Lead, South Dakota, where they were building a new house. Since I would be so far from home, my father gave me carte blanche to write checks for anything I needed. At Dana Hall I was in a sub-collegiate class, living in a house across Washington Street from the main school. We had all graduated from high school and were far from home. I made lasting friendships there, especially Mary Elizabeth Kinner Shoemaker, from Elmira, New York. I visited her on vacations, and after graduating from Wellesley College, was Assistant to the President of Elmira College. A highlight of my year at Dana Hall was the Religious Emphasis Week, led by Howard Thurman. His influence on me has lasted all my life. On Sundays at Dana, I usually attended the Congregational Church. The next year, I was a freshman at Wellesley College, living in Elliott House. Noanett is another freshman house. My letters chronicled the war experience, from December 1941, to the victory in Europe in 1945. War Production Board Limitation Order L-208, issued on Oct. 8, 1942, closed gold mines, as it was considered a non-essential mineral. Lead became nearly a ghost town. The miners left to work in copper mines in Arizona or the shipyards on the West Coast or joined the armed forces. A few stayed in Lead and were employed making hand grenades in the Homestake mine shops. My father had a high-level security clearance with what later became the Atomic Energy Commission and traveled to the areas where uranium and vanadium were mined, principally Idaho and the Colorado Plateau, and Baja California. In 1945, he spent several months at a manganese mine and processing plant near Mulege, in Baja California, Mexico. There was some doubt whether he could attend my graduation. There were army and air force bases near Lead and my mother was busy as a Red Cross “gray lady” helping in the hospitals and entertaining lonesome and homesick young men. Social life both in Lead and Wellesley was hectic, as I dated men who were training for or returning from battle.