Meet Don and Merry: A Legacy of Peace and Activism

Don and Merry Lathrop have been an essential part of BCC since its beginning. Don was hired as one of the first three full-time faculty members at a community college in Massachusetts in 1961. Merry came to BCC as a student in '78 and eventually graduated as the student of the year in '85. Merry grew up in Worcester and graduated from a commercial high school. She went to school for physical therapy and worked in the field until she got married: "I graduated from high school in 1954, and the next week I went to the college-age group at our church. In the door walked Don with a big smile on his face, and I said, 'That's for me.' We started dating the next week or two, and two years later we got married. That was in 1956." Growing up in Yonkers, Don developed an interest in engineering and physics, which led him to Worcester Polytechnic Institute, majoring in Mechanical engineering. Don and Merry got married one week after Don's graduation. He started working as an engineer for three months before he had to go into service: "There must have been a lot of people like me across the country that were trained to be officers, and there was no war anymore. The Korean War ended by the time I graduated. So, I was sent to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, for six months. That was all, and then I had to teach, teach electricity and teach this and that, and I thought, wow, this is more fun than sitting at a desk. I never went back to engineering except a couple of summers at GE."

After his service, Don went looking for a job when the opportunity came up to teach at Pittsfield High School, starting in '75: ": It was very exciting because after the first two years, Sputnik went up and they started an honors program. There were around 1,500 kids and I got to teach the best 15 with two classes a day. We did two years of college physics in one year of high school, because we met twice a day." While Don was teaching at PHS, Merry volunteered at one of the local churches: "I took a student to apply to BCC, and I went home and said to Don, 'There's something happening there at that old building on the common,' and I wasn't sure what it was going to turn out to be, but it was the beginning of BCC.", and the beginning of the Lathrop's long history with the college. In his over forty-year career at the college, Don taught twenty-three different courses. One of them turned into the World and Peace Order Studies Concentration. Merry recalls when she took his class Peace, World Order, and War: "I took the first class. After we were through, we said, 'We can't just walk out of here and forget this, like any other class you can do.'" This led to their founding of GIRO, the Global Issues Resource Organization. "We were a great, very small group, but we did amazing things. When I think back on it, we raised thousands and thousands of dollars for good causes. We put on conferences, and we had tables around for people to sign petitions.", Merry remembers.

Don and Merry's legacy is impossible to fit into one short spotlight: In 1963, they initiated, along with a friend and the cooperation from the local branch of the NAACP, plus Berkshire Community College, a free tutoring program for under resourced high school and junior high students held at BCC; they organized and supported vigils downtown in Pittsfield and at BCC on various peace and social justice issues; organized a bus trip to New York City for the First Special Session on Disarmament at the United Nations; co-organized a bus trip to Washington, DC, to ask for an end to the Vietnam war; were involved in organizing the FORUM credit program at BCC; joined two buses from Pittsfield to the March on Washington in 1963; started the Never Again Campaign, where they brought volunteers from Japan to educate students around the United States about the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and so much more. When Don shows us a group photo from a past Thanksgiving at their house, Merry remembers the many students that had living with them: "Way back when we first started at the other campus, we bicycled around Europe in 1965 in the summer, and we met a young man there. We invited him to come over here. He lived with us for two years and went to school here. We had students from Germany, Japan, Ghana, Burma, and Russia live with us. Most of them went to BCC." Don recalls one of their guests, Yulia Chentsova: "As I recall, Yulia was living somewhere in Lenox and felt insecure there, so we offered her a room. We already had Anna from the Moscow area living with us and the two got along famously. When Yulia showed interest in Williams College, I encouraged her. She graduated from Williams, and later we went up to the hilltop behind the Clark Art Museum to attend her wedding to a fellow Williams student."

Merry concludes: "It's amazing how in your life one thing leads to another, to another, to another, to another."

BCC would not be what it is today without Don and Merry and the love and passion they brought into their daily work here on Campus, with our students, throughout our Berkshire Community and around the world.