Something about Mary

Second Fulbrighter Mary Bunyan Uren ’59 cultivated cultural capital in Paris

By Sherri Kimmel

Mary as a Dickinson coed.

It’s a Monday-morning message no worker wants to hear, particularly if your work is writing. The lady you’ve been trying to land an interview with for days has politely but definitively declined.

It’s bang your-head-on-the-desk time. You listen again. In well-modulated tones she tells you the college for which you work has a long and distinguished history with many graduates who’ve attained much higher honors than the one about which you intend to quiz her. Mary Bunyan Uren ’59 thinks she doesn’t belong in the magazine, plain and simple. But if you really want to talk about it, you can call her at 6 a.m. San Francisco time. She’ll be up, waiting for her financial adviser to phone her from a Greek isle.

Of course you must try. She’s too good a catch. Not only was she the second Dickinsonian to win a Fulbright. But she was a math major selected to study in France. In 1959. And since then—here’s the kicker—she’s become a worm farmer.

Place the call. There’s the lovely articulate voice, and after you say she truly is distinguished, for she’s the second, she’s telling you, yes. Yes!

First, let’s dispense with the worms. We all want to know how Uren assumed the title she proudly proclaims at the outset of our talk: verminculturalist. We can relate it to the Fulbright with a few twists and turns.

During her year in Paris she developed a passion for cooking and went to cooking school. Nearly a decade after the Fulbright grant, she got even more serious, returning to Paris for courses at Le Cordon Bleu. Since then she’s been cooking up a storm—mainly for herself in the exclusive Pacific Heights district where former Flood mansions, like the condo in which she resides, overlook the bay. From her bedroom window she can see Sausalito and Alcatraz, the prison’s beacon blinking every few seconds.

She spent six years thinking about starting a worm farm. “Because I cook so much I had so much refuse,” Uren explains. “I live in a condo with no yard, so I can’t have a compost pile. I hate throwing things away.

“ I heard about a compact black-plastic thingie that had tiers for your worms. I bought it from a lady in Sonoma. I call her my worm mentor.”

Only problem is, her condo by-laws say just one pet is allowed. She has 15,000. “But they don’t bark, meow or smell, so they [the condo authorities] don’t know about it.”

At first the worms resided in a closet in the middle of her unit. But now they burrow in their plastic home in a corner of her 300-square-foot, glass-ceilinged, glass-walled atrium where Uren also raises herbs and tomatoes. It’s where she likes to sit in the morning.

“ You eat breakfast with the worms?”

“ Yes, breakfast with the worms.”

But before the worms there was Paris. And the Fulbright. And Dickinson College. She came here in 1955, the daughter of two mathematicians, her father a Rutgers University professor, her mother having earned a master’s in math in the 1920s, quite a rarity for a woman. Uren had her pick of Oberlin, Swarthmore, Wilson or Dickinson.

“Dickinson was just perfect. I could be a big fish in a littler pond. I could take drama. If I had gone to Berkeley then [instead of later, when she earned graduate degrees there] I would have had to be a drama major to act in a play. There’s an advantage to a liberal-arts school. You could try anything.”

One thing she wanted to try, but couldn’t, was winning a Rhodes Scholarship. “It was men only,” she recalls being told. She applied for a Marshall Fellowship to England. Didn’t get it. “I applied for a Fulbright to France, and I didn’t get that.”

But she did win a Fulbright travel grant and then, as a garnish, a grant from the French government. A French minor, Uren was fluent enough to make the grade.

“ Once you start doing equations it doesn’t matter if you speak French or English. I didn’t have to be as fluent as if I were a history major. I snuck in under the radar.”

Because of the government grant Uren didn’t stay with Americans in Paris as the regular Fulbrights did but in housing with French students. “Living in the Cité universitaire gave me exposure to people from all over the world—exposure to other cultures.”

Her Tunisian roommate was the best friend of the best friend of the future bride of the Shah of Iran. “Farah Diba was a student when she was plucked away to be the wife of this wealthy shah. This happened when I was there. That was pretty exciting for us kids.”

While studying math at the Sorbonne, Uren also cultivated her social life. “Having the grant from the French government gave me entrée to parties and receptions.” She also had access to an array of fascinating men. Hearing her speak, one envisions Mary, in Audrey Hepburnesque fashion, with pixie haircut, spritzing around Paris with Gregory Peck-handsome suitors.

“ I dated three men in Paris—French, Russian, Moroccan. Moroccans and other Africans were sent to the Sorbonne, handpicked to be the next prime ministers. This man I knew had a mission for his country. I was just little Mary, there for myself. It was kind of sobering.”

But this was the Cold War, so “mother was upset that I dated a Russian. He made me realize, ‘How could I ever fight and shoot someone like this?’ That made me pretty antiwar. The French man took me on a trip through Provence. I didn’t date Americans until I was in my 30s.” (Uren’s only marriage, to a Brit, lasted seven years.)

Her Fulbright year over, Uren headed back to the states. She earned an M.A. at the University of California at Berkeley, then began her career as a mathematician. “The job evolved from scientific programming to financial modeling to the care and feeding of financial modeling of big-ticket leasing.

“ It was very intellectually stimulating, although I felt it’s not like being a nurse. It’s not like helping humanity. You’re helping rich people to move money to other rich people.” When Uren retired eight years ago she was a vice president for GATX Capital.

She reflects on how the Fulbright experience 44 years ago played out in her life.

“ The Fulbright was really seminal. It was my way to get that French travel grant, which was a seminal thing. It was my introduction to another lifestyle. I saw that American ways aren’t necessarily the way to be. My interest in wine and food started there.”

Now, at age 67, she concentrates on her cooking, mainly Asian fusion, and wine collecting. Uren has 3,000 bottles in her cellar. She enjoys the ballet and opera, visiting the farmers’ market, watching the Giants on TV, growing “millions of yeasties” for her sourdough bread starter—and, of course, those thousands of worms.

“ It’s nice to get older,” she offers, “because you can be eccentric.”