I honor the memory of my mother, Mary Louise Hoover Koslovsky, with this brick at the Catharine S. Eberly Center for Women.
Education was everything to my mother. It was her way out of the poverty of a small, rural Arkansas town where many students did not finish high school. At that time a young woman’s career choices were limited: teaching, nursing, secretarial work or marriage. She was fortunate to receive a scholarship to study nursing at St. Luke’s Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. She later worked in Chicago as a plant nurse for Owens-Illinois where she met my father. They married and raised a family.
She instilled in my brothers and me a love of learning as well as the fact that education is the key to a better and fuller life. During all those years of raising her children my mother never forgot her dream of obtaining a B.A. degree.
She realized that dream in 1980 by graduating cum laude at University of Toledo. I hope that her story will inspire women not to give up and to keep striving to reach their goals whatever they might be.
Mary C. Koslovsky
