Gwendolyn Raper

1931 - 2012  (81 years)

• Name	Gwendolyn Raper
  Nickname	Gwen
  Birth	8 Feb 1931	Englewood, McMinn, Tennessee
  Gender	Female
  Death	9 Sep 2012
  Person ID	I58033	Scudder
  Last Modified	22 Nov 2015

  
  

  Family	Benjamin Franklin Stillwell,   b. 17 Oct 1922, Jackson county, Minnesota d. 13 Jun 1990 (Age 67 years)
  Marriage	11 Aug 1956
  Children	1. Brett Stillwell   2. Martha Stillwell
  Family ID	F20741	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	3 Mar 2024

  
  

• Notes

  In 1949, Gwen graduated from Englewood High School where she lettered in women's basketball and co-edited the school's first yearbook. She then enrolled at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, a college that provides full tuition scholarships to sudents from Appalachia. During her Berea years, she worked in the college's weaving industry and majored in history. She also worked two summers at a beach boardwalk cafe in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Upon graduating from Berea in 1953, Gwen became a fellow of an innovative teaching program at George Peabody College for Teachers and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. (Peabody later became part of Vanderbilt.) The program was one of 39 funded by the Ford Foundation Fund for Advancement of Education during the years between the end of World War II and the beginning of the space race. Gwen learned methods for teaching secondary school at Peabody and studied political science at Vanderbilt. She completed her student teaching in Nashville public schools before earning a joint master's degree in 1954. She taught at Waterford Township High School in Pontiac, Michigan, in 1954-1955. At the urging of Berea classmate, Lil McCoy, she applied for a job to teach seventh-grade social studies at Prineville Junior High School (PJHS), in Prineville, Oregon. She arrived in Prineville in August 1955.