Background on Alice H. Garside
Alice Blake Hawes was born on July 13, 1909, in the family homestead on Acushnet Avenue in New Bedford, Mass., the second child of Frederic Blake Hawes and Carrie Gifford Hawes. Her older brother by three years was Richard Gifford Hawes. Her grandfather, Jonathan Capen Hawes, had been master of the whaling ship Milo, aboard which her father had spent his early years, along with his family, for a five-year voyage that took them to the Sandwich Islands and the Arctic. Just before starting high school, young Alice took her first long trip in 1922 with her father, traveling out west to visit relatives and historic sites. Aafter graduating from New Bedford High School, as valedictorian, in 1926. She went to Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and majored in economics, graduating in 1930.
In August 1930, Alice married Kenneth Greenwood Garside. The two had met in New Bedford--his aunts lived next door to her family home--and became reacquainted while she was at Vassar and he, a graduate of Harvard and MIT, was working in Poughkeepsie. Their daughter Anne was born in 1932, with Elizabeth, called Jo, following in 1934, when the family was living in Kingston, N.Y. They returned to Massachusetts in 1937, settling in Duxbury, to manage the Duxbury Cranberry Company--a business acquired from Alice's family as a result of a mortgage default held by her father. Their third daughter, Caroline, was born in 1939.
Alice Garside was busy with her family, helped manage the company, and became active in her community. She was involved in the Republican Town Committee, the Duxbury Board of Health, the congregational church (where she spent a number of years as Sunday school superintendent), the PTA, the American Red Cross, and 4H. The couple built a house in the 1940s. In 1944, Alice attended the Vassar Summer Institute, bringing her two younger daughters with her. She stayed involved with the program for many years, and through it found close friendships and deepened self-confidence. Another formative experience was training in the Orton-Gillingham approach under Dr. Edwin Cole at the Massachusetts General Hospital Language Clinic and, in 1952, becoming certified as a reading teacher. She tutored students at the Cambridge School of Weston from 1952 to 1957.
Alice and Kenneth Garside divorced in 1956, after 26 years of marriage. Alice retained ownership of the lands of the Duxbury Cranbarry Company and continued to live in the family house for several years, until it was sold. After a brief period of substitute teaching, she enrolled in Boston University's education program and earned her master's degree in 1958. That year she took a trip around the world, traveling by sea, air, and land. On her return home, she moved to Boston and worked at Mass General's language clinic training tutors, becoming the clinic's supervisor in 1959. She also traveled across New England training teachers in the Orton-Gillingham method of teaching reading. She continued to travel, sometimes with friends, sometimes with family. In 1976, she retired as director of Mass General's language clinic.
Although nominally retired, Alice Garside continued to be active in reading education. As a reading consultant for the The Reading Clinic, founded in 1968 in Bermuda, she made regular trips to the island to train teachers and tutors in teaching reading and working with people with dyslexia. She helped develop the Summer Training Program at the Carroll School, a school in Lincoln, Mass., for youth with reading disabilities, where she had offered training several years earlier. She served on the school's board of trustees from 1977 until 1996. In 1990, the Garside Institute for Teacher Training was established at the school. Named in her honor, it continues the work of providing comprehensive Orton-Gillingham training and certification. She was honored as the first recipient of the Alice H. Garside Award from the Massachusetts Branch of the International Dyslexia Association in 1985 and the IDA’s highest honor, the Samuel T. Orton Award, in 1987.
At 80 years old, Alice Garside moved to a retirement community in Westwood, Mass., where some of her neighbors were former classmates from Vassar. She continued her work at the Carroll School and consulted for Lexia, a company that made phonices software for reading skill instruction for children. She adapted Aesop's fables for a small series of books for beginning readers that she published as The Garside Readers.
In the spring of 1994, Alice made an appointment with Mass General's Gerontology Research Unit for an evaluation related to memory problems. She ended up joining a memory and aging research study and was evaluated annually until her death. The study revealed her to have memory decline and, ultimately, dementia. She lived in a memory care unit in her final years and passed away on August 26, 2007, at the age of 98. A portrait of Alice Hawes Garside hangs at the Carroll School.
