Downer, Sara B. (Sara Boddie), 1896-1987

College teacher in China, Hong Kong, and the United States.

Sara Boddie Downer was born on February 22, 1896, in Durango, Colorado. Her father, B. R. Downer, was a Baptist minister and teacher in a theological seminary in Kansas City, Kansas. She attended the Kansas City high school before enrolling at Mount Holyoke College in 1914. At Mount Holyoke she majored in physics with a minor in economics and sociology. After receiving her B.A. in 1918, she worked as a sample clerk at the Faxon and Gallagher Drug Company in Kansas City, Missouri, from 1918-1919. From 1919-1920 she worked at Mount Holyoke as Physics Department assistant. In 1920, she sailed to China as a missionary for the Woman's American Baptist Foreign Mission Society. In 1924, she became an assistant professor of physics at a newly-opened women's college at the West China Union University in Chengdu. Her duties included teaching astronomy, physics, English and music. During her furlough, May to December of 1927, she was a student at the University of California and she received her Master of Arts in physics in 1928. In 1930, she published two physics laboratory manuals in Chinese. She was promoted to Associate Professor at West China Union University in 1932. She spent her furloughs in 1934-1935 and 1945-1946 assisting the Physics Department at Mount Holyoke. She taught at West China Union until the Communist takeover forced her to return to the United States in 1951. She taught at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia until 1955, when she went to Hong Kong to head the Physics Department at the Chung Chi College in Hong Kong. In 1962 she retired to the United States. Downer died on December 4, 1987 in Oakland, California at the age of ninety-one.