Mount Holyoke College. All rights reserved.
© 2003 Mount Holyoke College. All rights reserved.
Susan Martine Hitchcock was born in Middlebury, Vermont on September 13, 1943 to Harold Hitchcock, a Middlebury College professor, and Grace Cutter Hitchcock, a registered nurse. She attended Middlebury Union High School and then Mount Holyoke from 1961-1965, majoring in zoology. She married Dennis Leslie Kalma of Illinois in May 1966, studied anatomy at Yale University, and taught biology at a private high school in New Haven, Connecticut. She spent about a year traveling in Panama with her husband, returning to Connecticut in 1969. In 1970 she began volunteering at Planned Parenthood of New Haven and received her M.A.T. in biology from Quinnipiac University in 1971. Also in that year she started working at the Cedarhurst School (with Yale Psychiatric Institute) as a part-time teacher of Living Skills. She was Director of the George F. Paton Health Center at Middlebury College from 1982-1985. From 1986-1991 she was an assistant professor at the Memorial University of Newfoundland School of Nursing. During the remainder of the 1990s she served as a Nursing Education Consultant in Tanzania and a Peace Corps Medical Officer in Kryghistan. This return to health education took also took her to Central America, Canada, and Africa. At the time of her death in 2003, she was a nurse practicioner at the United States embassy in Tel Aviv, Israel.
The Susan Hitchcock Kalma Papers consist of a scrapbook, two journals, correspondence, financial records, course records, memorabilia, newspaper clippings, and photographs. The majority of the material relates to her years as a Mount Holyoke student, 1961-1965. The scrapbook contains copies of school songs, a letter describing the Big Sister tradition, and photographs of Kalma and other students. Her journals from her first and senior years chiefly describe her social life, including parties held at Mount Holyoke College and Amherst College. She writes about the Amherst students and other men whom she dated, the events they attended together, and her relationship with future husband, Dennis Kalma. The journal from her senior year includes a description of the Kathryn Irene Glascock Poetry contest of 1964, comments about some faculty members, a description of a visit to Harvard Medical School, and details about Kalma's interest in zoology. That journal also contains verses, poems, and reflections by Kalma as well as well as copies of poems by Robert Browning and Robert Francis. Her correspondence includes cards from the "elfing" tradition between the freshmen and sophomores at Mount Holyoke and two letters from playwright Wendy Wasserstein regarding a speaking engagement that Kalma arranged in 1982 at Bates College. Financial records are from 1961 and list her college tuition payments and summer income. Course records consist of essays written for introductory English and French class in 1961-1962; these papers include comments by instructors. Memorabilia includes annotated copies of College publications and Kalma's Mount Holyoke diploma. Newspaper articles that concern primarily Kalma's graduation from high school and college make up her biographical information. Also included in this category is Kalma's obituary. Photographs and slides include images of Everett House (used for student housing) and of students and the Richard Glenn Gettell Amphitheater at Commencement in 1965. Two other photographs show Kalma in the jungles of Sao Tome and Principe, where she was a Peace Corps Medical Officer in 1996.
This collection is organized into eight series:
Unrestricted.
Please use the following format when citing materials from this collection:
Susan Hitchcock Kalma Papers, Mount Holyoke College, Archives and Special Collections, South Hadley, MA.