Ethel Rhodes

Ethel Truscott Rhodes, widow of former Davidson College Professor Daniel Durham Rhodes, died among family at the Pines in Davidson on July 9, 2009, at 10 a.m. She was 86 years old.

She was born Ethel Irene Truscott on Jan. 23, 1923, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, into a family of Methodist missionaries.

Services will be Monday at Davidson College Presbyterian Church, where she was a longtime member. Details below.
Her grandfather, Thomas A. Truscott, originally from Devon in England, and his wife, Caroline Johnston of Sydney, Australia, immigrated to Argentina from Sydney at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century with three small children. Basil Reginald St. Leger Truscott, the father of Ethel, was the oldest of the three and, after attending prep school and university in the United States, followed in his father’s footsteps as a Methodist missionary in Argentina. When he returned to Argentina he was accompanied by his wife, Annie Fryar of County Cork, Ireland, whom he met in Chicago when he was a student at Northwestern University, and with three young sons.

Ethel was the fourth of six children, the first of three girls and the first of the children to be born in Buenos Aires. Like her father, she was from the beginning a scholar, completing Barker College (a British primary and secondary school in Buenos Aires) and passing her Cambridge University entrance exams at the age of thirteen. Unwilling for her to leave home for university so young, her father enrolled her in the American High School and Junior College in Buenos Aires (from which she graduated as valedictorian) and then, when she was eighteen, took her up to the States to attend Coker College in Hartsville, S.C. She graduated in two years, in 1943, and was accepted into the PhD program in English literature at Duke University, where she studied until 1946. She also did extensive graduate work in religion there. According to Ethel, those years at Duke were the most exciting of her young life, both intellectually and socially: she was challenged in class by her professors and fellow students, and for the first time in her life she was the belle of the ball. Among her suitors was a tall, dark PhD student in religion, Daniel Durham Rhodes, whom she married on September 8, 1945.

Dan and Ethel worked as a pair for almost 60 years, as romantic collaborators to the very end, as parents, and as academic partners. She critiqued and edited and typed and helped inspire Dan’s PhD dissertation, and did the same for his subsequent professional publications. She was also the constant editor and muse for her children, whose careers have all entailed extensive writing of various kinds. Throughout his teaching career at Davis and Elkins College in West Virginia, at Southwestern at Memphis, and for the last twenty-five years at Davidson College every student paper submitted to him was read by Dan for content and reasoning and by Ethel for grammar and syntax and organization. All his students knew this, and Ethel became the mysterious and sometimes intimidating force behind Professor Rhodes, and an integral aspect of the education of his students. Ethel was also his constant consultant for new lectures and sermons he wrote, and she often accompanied him on weekend teaching and preaching engagements. Most recently, she accompanied him every Sunday morning for years as he taught the Dan Rhodes/Frontis Johnston Sunday School Class at Myers Park Presbyterian Church.

In addition to her nearly lifelong collaboration with Dan, Ethel was an educator in her own right, teaching for many years at North Mecklenburg High School in Huntersville. The variety of courses she taught reflected the richness of her knowledge, training, and interests: English literature, American literature, Greek mythology, religion, science fiction, Black American literature, French, and Spanish. Dan did not help grade her papers. She was also the coach of the Hi-Q team at North, the high school version of the knowledge-based College Bowl Quiz Show.

Ethel was a devoted and active member of whatever church she attended, as a choir member and as a circle leader and teacher for more than 50 years. It was only a few months ago, shortly after her 86th birthday, that she retired from teaching her latest Circle. To her teaching Ethel brought not only a devotion to the church, but also a lifetime of study and contemplation that began with her father in Buenos Aires and continued through graduate school, her long collaboration with Dan, and through the agency of her own discipline and intellectual curiosity. Ethel was a deacon and an elder in the Davidson College Presbyterian Church and was honored with a lifetime membership there.

Ethel was literary. She was native in English and Spanish and fluent in French. She read broadly and avidly for her whole life—books, periodicals, scholarly publications, those of popular culture—and was a font of knowledge and information about many, many things, from history and literature to biographies and the history of science, to the latest reports on education and childhood development and medical practice and US politics. Few forget having heard her read in lilting tones one of her book reviews or one of her stories or letters, or even having heard her read a children’s book aloud to her grandchildren or a passage from a book she was reviewing, or recite one of the multitudinous passages from Shakespeare she first began committing to memory as an elementary school student; or render one of her many roles on stage in Davidson College productions or with the Davidson Community players: Amanda in the “Glass Menagerie” (her favorite and most gratifying role), Major Barbara in “Major Barbara,” Juno in “Juno and the Paycock,” Grandmother in “The American Dream” (playing opposite her son, as the American Dream), to mention a few.

Yet perhaps her greatest gift was her ability to touch the lives of her children and grandchildren in ways that have made them better, more compassionate, more productive people.

Ethel had many talents—in writing, in theater, in music, as a wife and mother and grandmother—and she was a true intellectual and critical thinker. She was deeply self-confident in an era before that was the norm among women, even highly educated ones, yet she was never arrogant. As a birthday poem written for her thirty years ago stated, she was genuinely modest and kind:

Within her this knowledge took root and it grew
not into pride to be one of the few
but into a drive to repay with her love
the riches at birth she received from above.

Ethel Truscott Rhodes was preceded in death by her husband, Daniel Durham Rhodes, their first son, Daniel Truscott Rhodes, her brothers Gordon, Lionel, and Wesley and her sister Lorraine. She is survived by her children, M. Elaine Rhodes, Noëlle Rhodes Scott, Edward Chisolm Scott, Robin Francis Rhodes, Jean Ann Dibble, and Theresa Woody-Rhodes; her sister and brother-in-law, Arlene and Roger Miller; and her grandchildren, Lessie Ann Scott, Richard Chisolm Scott, Houston Daniel Truscott Rhodes, and Annie Cecilia Marie Rhodes.

A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. Monday at Davidson College Presbyterian Church. Visitation will be the following morning at 10 at the Pines in Davidson. Memorials may be given to the Truscott Rhodes Memorial Fund, c/o Davidson College.