Symposium Club meets

Thirteen members of the Symposium Club met recently in the historic home of Barbara Jones. Co-hostess Beverly Hunt served a delicious Hershey Bar cake.
Three Chimes for Charity baskets will be given in memory of late members: Ann Hibbler, Kaye Logan and Pam Nailling.
The Christmas party will be held Dec. 20 at Generations Restaurant. Tommye Faye James, Linda Lu Harding and Elizabeth Kendall will serve as hostesses.
Alice Dunlap, program leader, gave an excellent review of the book “Condoleezza Rice: A Memoir of My Extraordinary, Ordinary Family and Me.”
The book tells how her life began in the placid 1950s in Birmingham, Ala., where black people lived in a separate world, segregated from their white neighbors.
Dr. Rice gives a background of her great-grandparents, grandparents and parents, John and Angelena, and highlights their hard work, ambitions and frustrations. She says the determination her parents had for her to be well-rounded, well educated and have a college degree were things they wanted for her because she would need to be “twice as good” as the people she would compete against in school and in life.
She tells of sacrifices her parents made to give their only child the best chance for success.
In her story she describes bombings in her own Birmingham neighborhood and remembers the 1963 bombing of a Baptist church that took the life of one of her friends.
She says she was a precocious child who was passionate about music, ice skating, history and current affairs.
Dr. Rice also describes racial discriminations that she faced as a child and as an adult.
While attending the University of Denver, she attributes Dr. Josef Korbel, Ph.D., Madeline Albright’s father, for giving her the direction into the studies of Russian history and the Cold War. This helped move her into the positions she has been fortunate to hold, one of those being secretary of state under President George W. Bush in 2005.
Dr. Rice is the first black woman to serve as secretary of state, the first woman to serve as national security advisor and the first woman, first minority and youngest provost at Stanford University.
She is also one of the first of two women to be admitted into the Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Ga., in 2012.
This book describes how her early experiences sowed the seeds of her political beliefs and helped her become a vibrant, successful woman.
The next meeting will be held Jan. 17. Fredricka Schleifer will serve as hostess, with Mrs. James serving as co-hostess. Dianne Riley will be the program leader.

Published in The Messenger 12.11.12

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