Ada Belle Winthrop-King
(1900-1997)
Ada Belle "Pat" Winthrop-King was a scholar, a bilingual foreign language
teacher, a stock market wizard and a woman devoted to her family and Florida
State University. She was committed to helping students enrich themselves
and meet their goals.
Born in 1900 in the small town of Lyons, Georgia, Winthrop-King came
to Tallahassee in 1928 to teach Spanish and French at Florida State College
for Women. She taught at two different times until 1938. After earning
a master's degree at Vanderbilt University, she went to Paris on a scholarship
and studied at the Sorbonne. She went back every year after that, falling
in love with the city during one of its most exciting periods of art and
literature.
Along with her love of FSU, her devotion to the romantic city is the
reason she established the Ada Belle Winthrop-King Endowed Memorial Fund
to be used in FSU's Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in the
College of Arts and Sciences. She gave the university $8 million for the
endowment before her death and a state match brings the total to $16 million.
Most of the endowment is used for student scholarships
so others may experience France much as Winthrop-King did almost 70 years
ago. Her gift also included a $1 million endowment for the Appleton Museum
of Art in the School of Visual Arts and Dance in Ocala.
In July 1991, she received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from
FSU. In 1989, the French government bestowed on her the rank of Chevalier
des Arts et des Lettres, one of the most prestigious honors given by the
French government to a foreign citizen.
|
