Issue No. 84 Winter 2018 From the Editor Mimi Gardner ‘52 Anne Lockwood Romasco, SAS 1951, loved China and all her connections with it, which were many. Her Happy New Year wishes would most certainly have referred to this as the Year of the Dog. Because she was so important in the creation of SASA and in the growing relationship with Shanghai American School as it is now, we dedicate much of this issue to Anne. She was my friend. We worked together in the last 10 years on everything SASA-related. We visited in each other’s homes – she taking the bus from New York to Boston; we doing the same in reverse and then the subway to Brooklyn and a few blocks on foot to the precious old brownstone on Hall St. It was so very Anne! Nothing fancy – just comfortable and inviting and breathing its interesting history, with book shelves wherever possible, newspapers on the coffee table, and Senta making something delicious for us to eat. She liked old things that had history, including her coffee grinder that is cranked by hand. She loved sailing with us on Goodnight Moon, our nothing-fancy 30-year-old day-sailer, a Cape Dory Typhoon, and sharing the sights of this old, old town of Marblehead. Our last precious time together was in China in September when Anne, in the great company of her son Calem, seemed totally herself, charging around to and enjoying all the events planned by SAS and relishing the times on our own in be- tween – great food, nice walks, good conversations – all good. The important details of her life are in this loving obituary by her much- loved nephew, Law- rence MacDonald. Those at the D.C Reunion in 2015 will remember Lawrence as the very able stand-in for Ambassador Stape Roy in the discussion following a reading of Stape’s talk. Stape was home very sick at the time. The story of Anne’s life is rich indeed. In this issue also are messages from you and messages about other dear old friends who have passed on and an interesting couple of articles about energy in China. We hope 2018 starts off well for you. Keep in touch. A Very Big Apology In the last issue of SASA News, we wrote about the passing of Margaret Staats Pola (SAS 1937). With it I mis- takenly put a picture, not of her, but of Dorothy Stannard Noyes(SAS 1944). As her brother, Ted Stannard wrote, Doro- thy is “still vibrantly alive at her 90th birthday last February, and still lively Dorothy Stannard Noyes and restless in her Keizer, OR home. Margaret Staats, 1937 Columbian The SASA News 2 The SASA News Winter 2018 Anne Lockwood Romasco 1933-2017 By Lawrence MacDonald Anne Lockwood Romasco, who was born and raised in south- ern China during the tumultuous years before the Communist revolution, was active in the 1960s Civil Rights movement and served as the managing director of the James C. Penny Foundation, died in her home in Brooklyn on November 29, 2017. She was 84 and had suffered a massive stroke a week before, shortly after returning from a five-week trip to China. Anne is survived by her son Calem and daughter Senta, a handful of cousins, and a large number of nieces and nephews and grand nieces and nephews who were inspired by her keen sense of fun, her deep appreciation of nature and the arts, and her fierce dedication to social justice. She will be deeply missed by her many friends, including former high school classmates from the Shanghai American School, which she attended through her sophomore year and then had to leave on the eve of the Communist takeover of the city in 1949. Born in Canton (today’s Guangzhou) on May 10, 1933, Anne had vivid memories of her child- hood in China and retained a lifelong affection for Chinese people and the country of her birth. Her father, Edward Lockwood, served as the general secretary of the Canton Chinese YMCA, an outpost of the American Protestant missionary organization. Edward had two children, Marion and Richard, by his first wife, who died of a tropical fever. His second wife, fellow mis- sionary Muriel Webb Lockwood, adopted Marion and Richard and gave birth to two daughters, Dorothy and Anne, the youngest of the four Lockwood children. As a child in the family’s home on an island in the Pearl River delta, Anne was happiest in the company of the servants in the kitchen. Her first language was Cantonese and she formed a close bond with the cook, who fed her Cantonese treats, including her favorite—duck tongues. When Anne was about eight-years-old, the Lockwoods relocated to Kukong (today’s Shaoguan), the wartime provincial capital, where Edward served as the relief director of the Kwantung Provincial Government. Muriel home schooled Dorothy, Anne and the servants’ children, sheltering with them in a trench during air raids. After a Japanese bomb killed a little boy who climbed out of the trench to catch his pet dog during class, Muriel took her daughters further inland, to Chengdu, the capital of Szechuan Province, where the girls spent a year in a Canadian-run school. U.S. forces were flying supply missions from India “over the Hump”—the foothills of the Himalayas—to Chengdu in the world’s first strategic airlift. The crews flew underpowered, rickety planes with crude maps and no radar. Over the three years of the airlift, more than 700 planes crashed and a third of the crews died. Those who made it to Chengdu unloaded their cargos of gasoline, weapons and ammunition and returned to India, mostly empty. (Continued on next page) The SASA News 3 The SASA News Winter 2018 To get her daughters away from the threat of war, Muriel arranged for them to take one of these returning flights. Anne recalled sneak- ing a pet rabbit onboard, hidden beneath the multiple coats she wore as protection from the cold. Anne and Dorothy spent a year at the Woodstock School in the foot- hills of the Himalayas north of Delhi in a close-knit community that included other children of missionaries. The views of the distant Hi- malayas exhilarated her and she later recalled her year there as a time of peace and safety. The year ended when Muriel, who had flown over the Hump to join her children, learned that the captain of a U.S. military ship depart- ing Calcutta for California had agreed to carry civilians. She bought Anne’s Columbian photo the only train tickets available—in a third-class women’s carriage— and recalled years later the kindness fellow passengers extended to her, Anne and Dorothy. Anne attended public school in Claremont, California, a college town west of Los Angeles, where her mother’s parents had bought a home for the Lockwoods. When the war ended in 1945, Edward and Muriel returned to China to rebuild the Canton YMCA. Anne also returned to China, enrolling in the Shanghai American School, a boarding school that, like Woodstock, included the children of missionaries who were Anne’s kindred spirits. In her 1949 SAS yearbook classmates wrote: “See you after Liberation!” Back in Claremont, Anne enrolled in Pomona College and then trans- ferred to Antioch College in Ohio, where the educational approach blended practical work experience with classroom learning. During an off-campus work period, Anne worked for Saul Alinsky, the foun- der of modern community organiz- ing, typing his notes on index cards. Alinsky introduced Anne to Myles Horton, co-founder of the Highlander Folk School in Tennes- Anne at Highlander; Courtesy of Lawrence MacDonald see, an incubator of union organiz- ing and the Civil Rights movement. Anne worked at Highlander off and on for many years. During her time there she became friends with Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks, who credited her experience at Highlander with her famous refusal to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, and with folksingers Guy and Can- die Carawan, who while at Highlander popularized the song “We Shall Overcome,” which was to become the anthem of the Civil Rights movement. (Continued on next page) The SASA News 4 The SASA News Winter 2018 While living in New York City in 1965, Anne met and later married historian Albert Romasco, a Korean War veteran and the son of Italian Immigrants who published two books on the De- pression and the New Deal. When their children Calem and Senta entered P.S. 3, an alternative public elementary school in the West Village, Anne devoted her time to creating the PTA. She invested much of her life in work for non-profit organizations working to improve social and economic conditions of poor and oppressed people, including writing grant proposals for non-profit organizations. After Al’s death from cancer in 1985, she became the Managing Director of the James C. Penney Foundation, a grant-making organization that focused on empowering disenfranchised people. She also served on the boards of numerous non profit organizations, among them the Highlander Research Center, Green Empowerment, The Workers Defense League and the National Center for Healthy Housing, a non-profit research and advocacy organization. Starting in the 1980s, Anne made a series of trips to China, seeking out Edward’s proteges, who had been badly persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. She helped to establish ties between the newly re-opened Shanghai American School and the U.S.-based SAS Alumni Association, raising funds to sponsor an annual lecture.