A Love Discovered Through Academics,
July 2010
They were born 11 years apart on the same day – March 7 – and were passionate about gardening and travel. From the moment they met at what was then the Connecticut Agricultural College, Lydia ‘Ann’ Green and Harold Schwenk Sr. shared chemistry – in the classroom and in love.
He was a chemistry professor at UConn, she was a home economics major. In 1925, her sophomore year, she enrolled in his class. A 1916 horticulture graduate of the college, Professor Schwenk was a scholar whose search for agricultural knowledge took him to California via motorcycle after graduation, and to Cornell University and Yale for further studies in chemistry. He was reserved and quiet. She was intelligent, attractive and cultured.
On her graduation day in 1928, Ann Green walked with her class to receive her bachelor’s degree in Home Economics. She accepted it, said a few congratulatory words to fellow students, then hurried over to her sister Nettie’s house on Route 195 in Mansfield Center. There, just a few hours later, she married the professor in the front yard. “My mother enjoyed telling people that she got two degrees in one day,” says her son, Harold Schwenk Jr. “She got her bachelor’s degree in the morning, and her M-R-S. degree in the afternoon.”
The couple had challenges particular to their marriage: Their firstborns, twins, lived just one day. Then they lost a daughter when she was just 13. The surviving child, Harold, lived a life unlike typical children. “Storrs was a great place to grow up,” he remembers. “I could go out one door and play in the woods, and go out another door and listen to the Boston Symphony.”
Professor Schwenk came home each evening to read his newspapers and books, and to play the piano. The more sociable Ann Schwenk ably ran the household, joined bridge and garden clubs, and worked part-time at UConn’s Cooperative Extension Service. The couple gardened extensively at their home on Hillside Circle in Storrs, and traveled throughout the country on educational trips with their children.
“They did have a strong marriage by any measure,” Harold says. “Dad did not have poker night with the boys, or bowling night. He served on committees within the University, and was for a number of years on the committee of the Storrs Cemetery Association. He was an individual who represented values I would always try to emulate: honesty was paramount, as was the idea of wanting to be a good neighbor to people, always happy to loan a tool or share a good word.”
Harold went on to marry Paula Johnson, the niece of a UConn agriculture professor, Robert E. “Bob” Johnson. “Bob was still around campus too, later in life, like my parents were in retirement,” he says, “so there was that fabric, that connection to UConn.”
To honor that connection and that history, Harold and Paula Schwenk established the Harold S. Schwenk, Sr. Distinguished Chair in Chemistry in 1996, and the Fund for Innovative Education in Science, which enhances many programs in fundamental science offered through the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The couple also have supported the Robert E. Johnson Scholarship Fund in honor of Professor Johnson.
They give, Harold says, because at an early age, their lives and the campus’s became irrevocably intertwined.
“I think there’s a shared sense of gratitude between my wife and myself,” he says, “for the richness that UConn has brought to so many members of our family.”
