Spring 2005
All in the Freeman Family
Photo by Leo Kim
As maroon and gold families go, there’s little about the Freemans that would draw attention or strike anyone as particularly unusual. It’s a modest family, fiercely loyal to the U, not given to bragging or fanfare.
Talk about a U connection. Doug Freeman’s father was in the class of 1912. Doug’s two brothers, two of his three children, and Doug himself all earned degrees from the U. As for Emma Carter Freeman, Doug’s wife of 49 years, she was a CLA student twice, and a much-revered CLA staff member.
Scratch the surface of this close and quietly accomplished family and you’ll find its power source. And that would be Emma— who, by all accounts, was something of a miracle worker until her death in 2004. “At the U, she took a ‘dead’ program and turned it into a winner,” says her husband. And she turned many students into winners as well.
In August 2004, the family honored Emma with a pledge of $25,000 to establish the Emma Carter Freeman Scholarship Fund for academically promising first-year CLA students.
The scholarship gift is a fitting tribute to a woman who devoted her considerable energies to smoothing academic paths for students of the university she loved. “Some of her most rewarding experiences,” says Doug Freeman, “were helping young people. She really connected with them.”
East to Minnesota
“Penny” Carter, as she was known, came east to study at the U from her childhood home in Billings, Montana. She earned a B.A. in English literature in 1955, but not before she met an aspiring advertising man named Doug Freeman. Their first date: a Gophers hockey game.
Doug doesn’t recall whether the team won or lost, so distracted was he by his date. For the Freemans, that day was the start of a life together that eventually produced three children, seven grandchildren, and two great-grandkids.
Emma stayed home to raise her family in the early years. When her children entered college, she reconnected with the U. Inspired by the pathbreaking work of the late Edith Muecke (then director of Continuing Education for Women), she enrolled in graduate school and completed her M.A. in English in 1990. Meanwhile, she joined the U’s workforce.
As a student adviser then director of the Office for Special Learning Opportunities (OSLO), Emma facilitated mentoring relationships between faculty and students and developed academic exchange programs and internship opportunities. Carl Brandt, director of CLA’s Career and Community Learning Center (formerly OSLO), says of his former colleague, “Emma was one of the early voices talking about things that now everyone talks about. She was a trailblazer for experiential education.”
Honored for her work in OSLO, Emma received the Gordon L. Starr Faculty-Staff Outstanding Contribution Award and an award from the CLA Student Intermediary Board. “She was very proud of those honors,” her husband remembers, “because they were awarded by students.”
The scholarship fund is not the Freemans’ first act of generosity toward the U. In 1986, Doug and Emma Freeman set up the Carter Prize in Oil Painting to be awarded annually by the Department of Art to an exceptionally talented undergraduate. The prize was named for Emma’s mother, who was, according to her son-in-law, “ a very good amateur artist.” Doug, retired from a career in advertising, notes wryly that artistic talent in the Carter- Freeman family skipped a generation, only to reappear in their daughter Ann.
Touching lives
Ann, who earned a B.F.A. from the U and now works in University Relations, says her mother “would have been a doctor or professor had she been around at a different time. She did what was asked of women of her age—she was a wife and mother. In going back to school and working full time, she was a pioneer.”
Ann likes to reminisce about the kick of running into her mother on campus back when both were in graduate school. But it wasn’t until her mother’s death that she fully understood how profoundly her mother touched students’ lives.
“After her death, there were notes from people I’d never heard of, saying, ‘Emma changed my life,’” says Ann. “They remembered my mother as a gentle and caring presence and tireless advocate. She retired back in 1989, so it’s a powerful testimonial that they remember her so vividly and with such affection and respect after all these years.”
Ann’s father, a reserved and private man, speaks of his late wife with wistful and understated admiration. She was a “truly remarkable person with many interests,” he says of the woman Ann says was “the great joy of his life.” As for his generous gift, in characteristic fashion he wastes no words, letting the scholarship speak for itself. But there ’s a lesson in the gift that he ’s happy to talk about.
“Everybody who is able to be generous ought to be,” he says. “Education is one of the more worthy recipients of people’s generosity. People need to support causes like education that will result in improvements for the state and the community.”
“The students who receive this scholarship will never have the honor of meeting my mother,” says Ann, “but they should know that she’s with them every step of the way.”