Alice Firman Van Ess, a student, secretary, United States Naval Lieutenant and United States Foreign Service assistant was born December 26, 1919 in Basrah (now Basra), Iraq. The daughter of American educational missionaries Dorothy Firman Van Ess and John Van Ess, she attended schools in India, Switzerland and New Jersey before graduating from Northfield (Massachusetts) Seminary in 1937. She went to Mount Holyoke College from 1937-1941, earning a B.A. in religion. She attended a business school after graduating and worked as a secretary until 1943, when she joined the the United States Navy and served as a Lieutenant in the Supply Corps. She was stationed in New Orleans and San Francisco. She entered the United States Foreign Service in 1947 and was posted to the United States Consulate in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. A year later she was transferred to the United States Legation in Beirut, Lebanon where she met William Dodd Brewer, a Foreign Service officer of the American Legation. They married in 1949 and had three children. She accompanied her husband on assignments to Saudi Arabia, Syria, Kuwait, Washington D.C., Afghanistan, Mauritius, and Sudan. The Brewers returned to the United States after his retirement from the Foreign Service in 1978 and lived in Los Angeles, where he was a professor at Occidental College. They moved to Falmouth, Massachusetts after his retirement in 1986. In 2005, they moved to Hingham, Massachusetts. She died in Weymouth, Massachusetts on February 26, 2006 at the age of eighty-four.
From the guide to the Alice Van Ess Brewer Papers MS 0848., 1937-2006, (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)
