Ruth J. Totman Papers 1897-1999

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Ruth J. Totman Papers 1897-1999

http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/umass/mufs097.html

Trained as a teacher of physical education at the Sargent School in Boston, Ruth J. Totman enjoyed a career at state normal schools and teachers colleges in New York and Pennsylvania before joining the faculty at Massachusetts State College in 1943, building the program in women's physical education almost from scratch and culminating in 1958 with the opening of a new Women's Physical Education Building, which was one of the largest and finest of its kind in the nation. Totman retired at the mandatory age of 70 in 1964, and twenty years later, the women's PE building was rededicated in her honor. Totman died in November 1989, three days after her 95th birthday. The Totman Papers are composed mostly of personal materials pertaining to her residence in Amherst, correspondence, and Totman family materials. The sparse material in this collection relating to Totman's professional career touches lightly on her retirement in 1964 and the dedication of the Ruth J. Totman Physical Education Building at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Supplementing the documents is a sizeable quantity of photographs and 8mm films, with the former spanning nearly her entire 95 years. The 8mm films, though fragile, provide an interesting, though soundless view into Totman's activities from the 1940s through the 1960s, including a cross-country trip with Gertrude "Jean" Lewis, women's Physical Education events at the New Jersey College for Women, and trips to Japan to visit her nephew, Conrad Totman.

7 boxes; (2.5 linear ft.)

eng,

Special Collections and University Archives, UMass Amherst Libraries

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SNAC Resource ID: 6323293

Related Entities

There are 6 Entities related to this resource.

Totman, Conrad D.

http://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6g45549 (person)

Conrad Totman in his office at Santa Barbara. On a wintry 5th of January, 1934, Conrad Davis Totman was born in an upstairs bedroom of the family farmhouse in Conway, Massachusetts. His father, Raymond Smith Totman, declared it too dangerous to drive his wife ten miles on unpaved, unplowed, and unreliable roads to the nearest hospital in Greenfield. Thus, the family doctor made the trek to the farm on that cold and snowy day and helped Mildred Kingsbury Totman deliver h...

Totman, Ruth J.

http://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6p71z7j (person)

Ruth Totman (standing) and Jean Lewis, ca.1935 Excerpted from Recollections of Ruth Jane Totman, By Conrad Totman Ruth Jane Totman was born on the farm of her parents Frederick L. and Jennie (Brower) Totman on November 20, 1894. She was the seventh of ten children, five of them girls, five boys. The farm always loomed large in Ruth's life, the place to which she returned whenever she could, summer after summer and often for Christmas or other vacation moment...

Lewis, Gertrude M. (Gertrude Minnie), 1896-1996

http://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6nj11fv (person)

Drew, Raymond Totman, 1923-1981

http://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6765vvh (person)

Raymond Totman Drew was born in 1923 in Conway, Massachusetts, the son of Ernest Clare and Mary (Totman) Drew. He grew up in nearby Greenfield. He attended the Massachusetts School of Art, Amherst College (B.A., English, 1949) and the University of New Mexico (M.A., 1951). During World War II, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps with hopes of being an aviator, but served instead as a radio operator from 1943 to 1946, with overseas assignments primarily in Brazil and Puerto Rico. In 1958, after var...

University of Massachusetts Amherst. Department of Physical Education.

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University of Massachusetts at Amherst

http://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6vh9sb5 (corporateBody)