March/April 2002
Phil Gates: Life can be wonderful--
but first learn the language
By Margaret Leonard
Phil Gates shudders when she hears anyone say "do it for her and I" or "I'm going to lay down on the bed."
Otherwise, she's not a snob. Having lived a spectacular life herself, she thinks many more Americans can live as well, if they master the English language, learn to speak and write correctly - and go for it.
She's raising money to give
that advantage to Florida State graduates. So far, she's raised
more than $100,000 for a center for "speaking and writing
the English language," and she's planning to raise a lot
more.
She dreams of thousands of Florida State graduates who will have access to the most educated, successful, powerful - and, not incidentally, fun - people in the world.
She knows most of them, and has had a wonderful time with her social life, her marriage, motherhood, travel, book writing, volunteer work and successful career as a New York lawyer. On the side, she has raised money for her alma mater, Florida State College for Women, now FSU.
Now, at the age of 84, she wants everybody who comes out of FSU to live as well as she has. And one of the most important advantages, she is sure, is to know how to communicate - causing no shudders, just welcoming responses.
She's not sure why the mastery of the language is so endangered, but she believes there's a chance to bring it back.
Born in Daytona as Philomene Asher, she grew up in Orlando - reading, writing, swimming, playing the piano, going to parties. In the high school yearbook, she was "most popular" and "best dancer," although she was also a hard-working top student.
While Phil was in high school, the depression reached her family, and she switched to public school and later chose FSCW because it was the best one she could afford.
The four years in college, she wrote in "A Soft Rebel Yell," her autobiography published last year, would be "cherished forever in my memory."
As she had in high school, Phil made sure she had time to make good friends and enjoy life with them.
She and many of the others at her women-only college gave the weekends to visiting Gainesville or anywhere else with well organized, well chaperoned intense social life. She joined the Cotillion Club and Pi Beta Phi sorority. She calls it her "prom-trotting years."
But she also worked hard, studying accounting and planning to go to law school.
"I was well aware that Mother and Daddy would be extremely cool if anything but an A appeared on my quarterly college reports," she wrote.
She also remembers three brilliant professors from FSCW: Sadie Young, who taught money, banking and economics; William Rogers, who taught the romantic poets; and William Dodd, who taught Chaucer and Shakespeare.
After college, she started a lifetime of travel with her first trip abroad, where she showed a great deal of interest in everything - politics, the economy, food, peoples' lives, freedom, beauty, art, music. She is still interested in all of that.
"She's got the brightest mind you ever saw," said Mart Hill, who made friends with Gates when both were on the board of the FSU Foundation. "She's interested in everything."
Phil Aster came back from Europe, went to George Washington School of Law and continued to know everybody interesting. It is clear from reading her autobiography: While most of the alert population is keeping up with important people through the newspapers, magazines and television, Phil Gates is having them over to dinner.
She became a Gates not long after meeting Sam, the "dashing, ambitious young legal transplant to the later New Deal," who had degrees from the University of Paris, the University of Southern California and Harvard.
"He seemed at once to be everything I wanted in a husband," she wrote years later. "I would have agreed to anything, I had fallen so much in love with him."
It lasted 40 years, until he died in 1979. They had three daughters. She reared them, got them into fine schools she couldn't have afforded for herself, saw the world, ran a rich social life, practiced law in New York and became a civic leader, serving on dozens of boards and raising money for whatever she believed in - and she believed in a lot.
But when Sam died, she didn't know what to do.
So she wrote a book, "Suddenly Alone," to help other women make it through the emotional, legal and practical hard times of losing a partner, by death or divorce.
And Gates stuck with what she believed in, including Florida State. Since she graduated in 1938, she has made the most of what she has: brains, charm, beauty, an education with a few brilliant professors and, from the start, a thorough knowledge of the English language. (She also speaks French and Spanish, but that's extra, for fun, and she hasn't neglected fun.)
Though her ease with the language came from a literate family in a literate age-when talking and writing, reading and listening, were dominant-Phil Gates believes it can be acquired now by generations raised on television and technology.
It can even be acquired late, in college, she says, but it will require effort, standards, homework, lab cubicles, grades, practice and professors with passion for correct, grammatical language.
And that takes money. So she's raising it. The outcome, she hopes, will be FSU graduates who'll have access to the kind of spectacular life Phil Gates has been having.
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