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Tri-State Defender (12/Jan/1963) - Student Journalist is Named One of 'The Ten Young Women of the Year'

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Student Journalist is Named One of 'The Ten Young Women of the Year'

New York, N. Y. — Sidna Brower, a senior at the University of Mississippi and editor of her college newspaper, The Mississippian, has been selected by Mademoiselle magazine as one of the ten 1962 Merit Award winners.

For the twentieth successive year, silver medallion awards were presented to ten young women all in their twenties. The Merit Award winners were praised by Betsy Talbot Blackwell, Mademoiselle's editor-in-chief, as young women "who have already distinguished themselves in their fields and are expected to achieve even greater honors."

Miss Brower, twenty-one, a native of Memphis, courageously published a widely reprinted editorial pleading for moderation during the riots over the admission of Negro student James Meredith. She also started a drive to establish a $1,000 scholarship in memory of Paul Guilhard, the French reporter killed at Ole Miss. Miss Brower plans to get her master's in journalism and later pursue some aspect of the field.

The achievements of the other "young women of the year", who are featured in the January issue of Mademoiselle, range from headline performance in sports and the arts to signal accomplishment in science, fashion, and social work. They are:

Stephanie Merton Russell, a twenty-three-year-old psychiatric social worker, who is working on her master's degree at the University of Southern California. Her interest in mental illness started in college when she was a leader of a group of Harvard and Radcliffe students who set up and operated Wellmet, a halfway house for schizophrenic patients, a project that has opened new avenues of approach to the treatment of mental illness. After graduating magna cum laude in 1961 from Radcliffe, Mrs. Russell did graduate work in the field of psychiatric social work at Simmons and continued her association with Wellmet before moving to California.

Maggy Reese, twenty-nine, is a young California designer with a sense of humor. Her clothes — in which the spirit of Claire McCardell breathes — are casual, slightly kooky and very young. Personally as fresh and breezy as her clothes, she started her career in department-store window display. Her imaginative designing flare came to the fore when she turned table cloths into wacky dinner dresses. By now, she is very much in business, coast-to-coast, though she claims it is as much fun as hard work ("clothes are spoofs").

Charlayne Hunter, twenty, will graduate from college in June — the first Negro woman to do so at the University of Georgia. Her admission in 1959 stirred up an ugly tempest of resistance among white segregationist students — a lonely frightening experience that Miss Hunter went through with determined courage, crossing a frontier in American history. She has since won general admiration: a scholarship student, she has been on the honor roll, the dean's list, has won a national sorority award, works on the college newspaper, and looks forward to a career in journalism.

Barbara Harris, twenty-five, has spent about a year playing the schoolgirl siren, Rosalie, in Arthur Kopit's off-Broadway production, "Oh Dad, Poor Dad," and at the same time has managed to put in some New York appearances with "The Second City," the improvisational group she got her real start with in Chicago. She has appeared on television on "Playhouse 90" and the "Alfred Hitchcock Show." Besides rave notices, she has won an Obie award as the best actress of 1961-2 and is going into rehearsal in the Rodgers-Lerner musical, "I Picked a Daisy" next fall.

Regina Sarfaty, a twenty-four-year-old mezzo-soprano, made her debut at Town Hall in New York in 1958 after studying on a scholarship at Julliard. Since then she has sung such roles as Cherubino in "The Marriage of Figaro" and Octavian in "Der Rosenkavalier" with many American and European opera companies. The mellow richness and dark color of her voice, as well as the elegance of her acting and the intelligent artistry of her interpretations, have been widely remarked. As one critic boldly put it, "All the attributes for a destiny of greatness."

Joan Brown, twenty-four, a native of San Francisco, studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and received her M.F.A. there. She began painting when she was 16 went briefly nonobjective, and has now returned to imagery in her big, freely handled, sensuously colored paintings. In 1960 she was much the youngest painter represented in the Whitney's Young America exhibition, and has had one-man shows both at home and in New York. Her work is included in a number of collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Allbright Gallery in Buffalo and the Williams College Museum. Besides this precocious success, she teaches art at the San Francisco Art Institute, and is married to a sculptor and has a son.

Margaret Smith, a twenty-year-old Australian girl, whose home is in Melbourne, is generally considered the finest woman tennis player in the world. Though, she has not yet won at Wimbledon, she is a marvelous server and volleyer, and has the best ground strokes of any girl now playing. She holds national titles in Australia, Italy, France, and Switzerland: has won important championships in the U.S., including Forest Hills last fall. Unless she gets married, she expects to go on playing tennis, but "either way, I'll be happy."

Ann Eckels Bailie, twenty-seven, is a graduate of Middlebury College where she majored in mathematics. In 1959, she was co-author of a paper in which deviations she had observed in the orbit of the U.S. satellite, Vanguard I, were used to prove that the earth is not round, but pear-shaped. She was then working in the Theoretical Division of the Institute of Space Studies; she is now at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. She is married and the mother of two children.

Edna O'Brien, twenty-nine, was born in the west of Ireland and at seventeen went to Dublin to study pharmacy. Later, married to a novelist, she had two sons and wrote two novels. The Country Girls (1960) and The Lonely Girl (1962) reflect, with romantic sadness, humor, and sensuous verisimilitude, the texture and content of a life much like her own. She has since written two plays which are being produced in London. The Lonely Girl is to be filmed in Ireland next spring.