The 1957 Awardees

Rev Msgr. Christopher Clark

AB 1927
Newark, NJ

Msgr. Christopher Clark, Assistant Chancellor of the Diocese of Newark, NJ, received the John Carroll Award in ceremonies held at the Hotel DuPont, Wilmington, DE on May 25, 1957.

Limited archival information exists on Msgr. Clark. He attended Georgetown from 1923-1927, where he was vice president of the senior class and an active participant in the Sodality and the Gaston Debating Society. He was ordained in the Newark diocese following law school in the area, and also served as chaplain to the Georgetown Club of Metropolitan New York.

Paul T. Coughlin
(1902-1984)

BSFS 1927
Washington, DC

Paul Coughlin, founder and Chairman of the Board of the Overseas Service Corporation, received the John Carroll Award in ceremonies held at the Hotel DuPont, Wilmington, DE on May 25, 1957.

A 1927 SFS graduate, Coughlin was a beverage distributor in the Washington DC area and served in the Navy in World War II. Returning stateside, Coughlin saw potential in a company that provided commissary services to the growing number of U.S. overseas installations following the War. In 1947, he founded the Overseas Service Corporation, which provides commissary and post exchange services worldwide, bringing popular American brands and products to servicemen and their families stationed abroad.

Coughlin moved the company to West Palm Beach FL in 1969 but continued to lead it until his death in 1984 at the age of 82.

William A. Glavin
(1910-1972)

AB 1930
Albany, NY

William Glavin, an Albany attorney and alumni volunteer, received the John Carroll Award in ceremonies held at the Hotel DuPont, Wilmington, DE on May 25, 1957.

Glavin served as the Georgetown Club of Albany's representative on the McDonough Gymnasium fundraising drive from 1948 to 1950.

Sr. Mary E. Markham O.S.F.
(1899-1973)

Nursing Diploma 1920, BSN 1926
Wilmington, DE

Sr. Mary Euphrasia Markham, administrator of St. Francis Hospital in Wilmington, DE, received the John Carroll Award in ceremonies held at the Hotel DuPont, Wilmington, DE on May 25, 1957. She was the first woman to receive the award.

Born Therese Markham, she joined the Sisters of St. Francis and received a nursing diploma from Georgetown in 1920, according to references in the Alumni Association magazine. She served as principal (director) of the nurses working in Georgetown Hospital from 1929 to 1939.

At the time of the award, she was administrator of St. Francis Hospital in Wilmington, DE and superior of the nurses there. A subsequent citation in the Alumni Association magazine in 1959 noted she had earned a master's degree in health administration from Saint Louis University.

The September 1956 edition of the Georgetown University Alumni Magazine refers to her as follows:

"We also have a woman graduate among our community leaders...Sister Mary Euphrasia (Sister Mary Markham) C'26, is administrator of St. Francis Hospital, the only Catholic Hospital in the diocese of Wilmington. She is also Superior of the Franciscan community at the hospital. She is known among alumni as former director of nursing at Georgetown University Hospital and later as administrator at St. Mary's Hospital and St. Agnes' Hospital, both in Philadelphia. Today she sparks an ambitious drive for public contributions of a million dollars with which she intends to provide Wilmington with a three million dollar addition to St. Francis Hospital."

Georgetown College did not admit women until 1969 and the Nursing School did not award a degree in course until 1946. Markham is one of two religious sisters, along with three nuns from Sisters of the Visitation, to have been awarded degrees in the College between 1919 and 1926, and may have been tutored by the Jesuits privately as opposed to enrolled in classroom study.

Dr. Willard F. Preston
(1897-1990)

MD 1925
Wilmington, DE

Dr. Willard Preston, former Chief of Obstetrics and Gynecology at St. Francis and Wilmington General Hospitals and member of the Delaware Board of Medical Examiners, received the John Carroll Award in ceremonies held at the Hotel DuPont, Wilmington, DE on May 25, 1957.

"This hard working doctor seems to spend most of his life in his office and in maternity wards, except in the early morning hours when he is a frequent visitor at the Communion rail at St. Ann's," wrote the Georgetown University Alumni Magazine in 1955. "He was the first graduate of Georgetown Medical School to take the Delaware State Board Examination and his mark was the highest made. He spent nearly five years in the Army during the war, two of them being in Normandy and Germany. There is no alumnus more enthusiastic, more loyal and more interested in assisting young graduates than this distinguished doctor."

A 1919 graduate of Mount St. Mary's College and a 1925 graduate of the Medical Center, Dr. Preston was a member of the American College of Surgeons, a Certified Fellow of the International College of Surgeons, and the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Dr. Preston died in 1990 at the age of 93.

Hon. Clarence A. Southerland
(1889-1973)

LLB 1913
Wilmington, DE

Clarence A. Southerland, a former attorney general of the state of Delaware and the first Chief Justice of the Delaware Supreme Court, received the John Carroll Award in ceremonies held at the Hotel DuPont, Wilmington, DE on May 25, 1957.

Judge Southerland was born in Baltimore in 1889 and received his baccalaureate degree from Princeton in 1909 before enrolling in Georgetown, receiving his law degree in 1913. After private practice and military service in World War I, he was named deputy attorney general for the state of Delaware and served one term as a Republican attorney general from 1925-1929.

Southerland returned to private practice for the next 22 years, until he was called upon to solve a judicial crisis facing the state. A state constitutional amendment established a new supreme court for the state in place of the prior system, which involved a "court of last resort" and not an appellate one. Two of the leading candidates, both Democrats, were offered the chief justiceship but both declined, since neither wanted to serve under the other. Instead, Gov. Elbert N. Carvel offered the position to Southerland, one of the most well respected corporate attorneys in the state.

"I realized that if [Southerland] accepted he would be making a large financial sacrifice, but his service on the Court...would give Delaware the finest Supreme Court in the country," Carvel wrote.

Chief Justice Southerland served for 12 years on the bench and another decade in private practice before his death in 1973 at the age of 84.

William K. Wimsatt, Jr.
(1907-1975)

AB 1928, MA 1929
New Haven, CT

William Kurtz Wimsatt, an internationally recognized professor and literary critic, received the John Carroll Award in ceremonies held at the Hotel DuPont, Wilmington, DE on May 25, 1957.

Born and raised in Washington, the seven foot tall Wimsatt could have been Georgetown's first basketball star in an era when few players even passed six feet. Instead, Wimsatt starred in the classroom, graduating summa cum laude and dominating nearly every subject he enrolled in. An English major and managing editor of the College Journal, he won the College's top honors in physics, theology, and the odes of Horace.

"The mind of a Kant and an Aquinas, seeing directly through labyrinthian warp and devious woof," wrote the 1928 Ye Domesday Booke. "Writer of brilliant critiques, controversialist and disputant, indefatigable pursuer of Chestertonian paradox and Bellocian banality and withal, a javelin hurler par excellence. Seven feet tall and every inch a syllogism."

The 21 year old was only getting started. A graduate degree from Georgetown followed and his journey took him to Yale, where he pursued studies in Old English (the Anglo-Saxon language from 450-1066) as well as studies in French and English literature. He received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1939 and joined the faculty immediately thereafter, teaching there for 36 years.

A internationally recognized editor on the works of Samuel Johnson and 18th century literature, Wimsatt was also known as a leader in the "New Criticism" movement at Yale, coining the phrase "intentional fallacy" to describe the impact of disregarding the intention of the author in reviewing his or her work. "Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine," Wimsatt wrote in 1954. "One demands that it work. It is only because an artifact works that we infer the intention of an artificer. A poem should not mean, but be."

In addition to his published works, Wimsatt received Guggenheim and Ford fellowships, was a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received five honorary degrees. Wimsatt died of a heart attack in 1975 at the age of 68.