In Memory - 2006

Dorothy Marie was born in Tunnelton, West Virginia, of parents Maude Halbritter and Ernest Walter Watson.

During her college education she discovered that she was destined to become a teacher. After receiving a Bachelor of Science degree from Drexel University (then Drexel Institute of Technology) in 1937, she began a career of public school teaching which terminated at the University Demonstration School of West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Her graduate studies included a Master’s degree in Education, West Virginia University; Master’s degree in English plus twenty-four hours, Peabody College for Teachers; two semesters’ study at Hartford Seminary, Hartford Connecticut; and odds and ends at New York University and University of Kentucky.

During her childhood she had become interested in the missionary programs of The Methodist Church because of her mother’s active involvement, and because of the influence of Miss Julia Benafield, missionary to China and a resident in her hometown. However, it was in Morgantown that she became actively involved in the work of The Methodist Church through the Wesleyan Service Guild at Wesley Methodist Church. As a representative of this organization, she joined a group of women from the Northeastern Jurisdiction on a tour of mission projects in Puerto Rico.

At George O. Robinson School in Santurce, she was asked to come to help organize a business education department. As a result, she joined the US 2 training group and left for Puerto Rico in August of that year.

Her other fields of service included teacher and administrator at Harwood Girls School in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Administrator at Vashti School, Thomasville, Georgia; and instructor in English and Education at Sue Bennett College in London, Kentucky.

She was commissioned a deaconess at the Fifth Assembly of the Woman’s Society of Christian Service in St. Louis, Missouri, May 8, 1958.