Keeping Cultural

Veteran teacher Betty Keat ’61 keeps French and classics coursing in Chatham

By Sherri Kimmel

Betty Keat is winding down her long career as a Latin and French teacher.

The high school where Betty Anne Keat ’61 teaches has the sturdy, functional look of early 1960s architecture. Tucked back from tree-lined Lafayette Street in the tidy town of Chatham, N.J., it was a new school when Keat first came there to teach 39 years ago.

On this sunny late-March day, the busy, tile-lined halls resound with chattering softball players in uniform gathering before lunch. Students toting today’s typical 50-pound backpacks breeze in and out of the principal’s office.

Just 25 miles from New York City, Chatham was hard hit by 9/11. Thirteen people died, and their children are just now starting to enter her high school, Betty Keat notes with a look that suggests she’ll be shedding tears if she goes on about it.

In the school’s foreign-languages office you’ll find Keat on her 40-minute break, seated at a steel desk that butts up against a plain white wall. A colorful Mexican tapestry sets her small workspace apart from the rest in this room full of book-cluttered desks. A Romulus and Remus and the wolf figurine given her by a student signifies that a teacher of Latin lives here.

There is no hint in her office decor that this is a woman who, 42 years ago, left behind Dickinson College and this, her hometown of Chatham, to board a boat to Paris. She and her Biddle House roommate, Barbara Thome Bagri ’61 both were Fulbright recipients the third year that Dickinson seniors received prized acceptance letters.

A French and Latin major, Keat says she was the only woman then majoring in Latin when she applied her senior year. Her Latin professor, Thomas Means, who’d been a Rhodes Scholar, encouraged her to apply, as did William Bowden, an English professor and her adviser; and William Kirk, a modern-languages professor whose relationship with students was so close that he often invited them to his house for breakfast. “I never thought I’d get it,” she says with a shake of her head.

But then there was a time she never thought she’d be able to attend Dickinson. Keat had wanted to be a teacher since she was in the sixth grade, but when her father died two years before she was to graduate from Chatham High School, she gave up on the dream of attending college.

Keat’s mother, however, insisted that she apply to Dickinson. “She said, ‘Dad was at Dickinson, and so were your grandparents. You need to go to Dickinson.’ ”

Adds Keat, “Dad [Samuel Keat ’16] was born in Carlisle, and had lots of ties to the college.” Her grandmother, Maud Zeamer, class of 1894, a classics major, had met her grandfather, John Keat, class of 1895, who became a journalist, when the two were students.

Keat’s mother, Elizabeth, supported her desire to go to Paris in 1962, just as she had her journey to Carlisle. Today Keat and her mother reside in the Chatham house that has been their home for 52 years.

Living conditions were a bit different in Paris than in her quiet hometown. Keat sublet a place in a blue-collar area of south central Paris. The Algerian crisis was then raging, with dissenters holding protests and setting off bombs in the subway. The French police would swirl their lead-lined capes at demonstrators to keep the peace, Keat relates with a twirl of her arm.

But Keat, who attended classes in the Sorbonne in a University of Paris/Middlebury College M.A. program, didn’t shy away from potential danger. On Armistice Day she and some friends attended the parade that wound past the Champs Élysées in order to catch a glimpse of Charles DeGaulle. She later discovered that many of the French had stayed away, fearing an assassination attempt on the president. “What we didn’t know …” she says with a smile, not completing the old saying.

What she does know today is that her career choice at the age of 12 was the right one. With retirement a year away she teaches two French IV and three Latin classes as well as some independent studies for students who want to go beyond the school’s two years of Latin.

Students of hers who have gone on to Dickinson, she says, often remark, “They [Dickinson’s professors] teach classes like you do.” That means, Keat explains, with a cultural emphasis that she gained as a result of her Fulbright experience—getting students to act out scenarios typically found in the cultures she’s teaching. She also emphasizes geography in case the students want to travel to the countries someday.

Though she’s done a bit of travel since her Fulbright days—including a study tour of Athens and the Greek islands—she’s hoping to do more once she retires. “I’d like to get back to Europe, and I’d like to do some volunteer work here at the [local] arboretum.” But for now, the school bell has rung, and she gathers up her books for yet another class.