Mr. and Mrs. Walker
The Walker family offers three scholarships at Jefferson Community College: the Walker Family Engineering Scholarship, the Wendy Walker Nursing Memorial Scholarship and the Constance Walker Monroe Liberal Arts Memorial Scholarship. The scholarships have been established by T. Urling and Mabel B. Walker in memory of their two children and to help students in need of financial aid. While the criteria for each varies, the scholarships are competitive, two-year awards.
The Constance Walker Monroe Liberal Arts Memorial Scholarship was established in 1988 in memory of Constance Walker Monroe by her parents, T. Urling and Mabel B. Walker, and provides funds for full-time study by a student in the Jefferson Community College liberal arts program. It is a two-year scholarship, providing the recipient maintains satisfactory academic standing. Students must submit to the college a high school transcript, three letters of recommendation, a 250-word essay and visit the Outer Coffeen Street campus as part of the application process.
Constance Walker Monroe was born on August 18, 1950, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She attended Watertown High School in Watertown, New York, and graduated from Walnut Hill Preparatory School in Natick, Massachusetts, in 1968. She received a bachelor’s degree in English from Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, in 1972, and a master’s degree in anthropology from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in 1977.
In 1974, she spent the year traveling throughout India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Then in 1976, on a National Science Foundation grant, she spent a year cataloging artifacts in Botswana in southern Africa.
She married Wilbur Francis Monroe of Massachusetts, an international economist, on October 1, 1977. The Monroes raised two children, Hillary and Peter (Perrin) and lived in Washington.
‘Connie was not destined to be a small town girl,’ said Mr. Walker. ‘She liked the big city — the flash and glitter it provided. She enjoyed her life as a wife and mother in a large, sophisticated city.’
Mrs. Monroe was employed as a book editor for the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., and had been an instructor of anthropology at George Washington University.
According to Mr. Walker, Mrs. Monroe did freelance editing for a professor of anthropology who was studying aboriginal people of South America. ‘He would come back to Washington with his scribbled notes and have Connie decipher them,’ Mr. Walker said. The professor also asked Mrs. Monroe to edit his book manuscript, but because of her commitments she could not undertake the project. Another editor was hired and the book was completed, Mr. Walker said, but the professor wasn’t satisfied. ‘He went to Connie to see what she thought of it. Connie indicated that the public would not read his book because it was too esoteric. She agreed to rewrite the manuscript so it would be in the vernacular of the average reader.’
She was a member of the First Presbyterian Church of Watertown, and St. Columbo Episcopal Church and the Victorian Society, both of Washington, D.C.
Mrs. Monroe died of cancer September 1, 1987, at the age of 37.
The Jefferson Community College Foundation is grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Walker for establishing this scholarship.