Agnes Fay Morgan, Home Economics: Berkeley

“There were giants in the earth in those days,” and time will endorse the verdict that Agnes Fay Morgan is high on the list of “men (and women) of renown” who have served the University of California long and well.

Born in Peoria, Illinois, May 4, 1884, Agnes Fay was the red-haired younger daughter in a family of Irish lineage. She attended Vassar briefly and then transferred to the University of Chicago where she received a bachelor degree in chemistry in 1904 and a masters in 1905. She taught chemistry at Hardin-Simmons College in 1905-1906, at the University of Montana in 1907-1908, and at the University of Washington in 1910-1912. She then returned to Chicago where she received her Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1914. She came to California in January, 1915.

The Hardin-Simmons Yearbook for 1905 refers to her as “wildly unconventional.” Her marriage in 1908, to Arthur I. Morgan, a senior in her class at the University of Montana, a veteran of the Spanish American War, and a star of the football squad, was probably considered even less orthodox. Fifty years after her arrival at California, at a symposium in her honor, her reminiscences were both colorful and unexpected. CONTINUE

photo credit: Unsplash Taisiia Shestopol