For now over 75 years, The Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. This November 1985 Classic about Dr. Cornelia Marschall Smith — former biology department chair, longtime Strecker Museum director, and Baylor “national treasure” — was written on the occasion of her 90th birthday, capturing a life defined by boundless intellectual curiosity and a marriage built on mutual devotion to learning. We’re resurfacing it from the Baylor Line archives as a reminder of the remarkable people who’ve shaped this University’s story.
It is difficult to be a part of the Baylor family for very long and not know about “Dr. Cornelia” —Dr. Cornelia Marschall Smith. Those who attended Baylor prior to 1967 remember her as the chairman of the biology department. Those who attended Baylor in the early forties might have had her for both biology and English, since she taught for several years in the English department before a position opened for her in the biology department. She also served for nearly a quarter of a century as the director of the Strecker Museum.
Her current status as professor emeritus, far from diminishing her campus activities, seems to have quickened their pace. She attends a high percentage of official Baylor functions (and quite a few unofficial ones) and has the notable distinction of having witnessed every All- University Sing act since the tradition began in 1953. She faithfully attends First Baptist Church and rarely misses the major functions of Kappa Kappa Gamma, the sorority she and her husband sponsored in the days when it was known as the Athenean Club.
She maintains an office on the third floor of the Armstrong Browning Library where she is currently working on two manuscripts — Browning’s Proverb Lore and Big Thicket to Gaspse via Appalachia.
She has received a large number of Baylor honors and is listed in an impressive list of publications, among them Who’s Who in America, since 1952; American Men of Science, since 1938; Who Knows and What : Texas Women of Distinction; World Who’s Who of Women, 1973; International Who’s Who of Intellectuals, and 1983; and The International Who’s Who of Contemporary Achievement, 1984-85. The list goes on.
This fall, on October 15, Dr. Cornelia celebrated her ninetieth birthday in the company of many Baylor colleagues and friends.
How has she managed to maintain her physical vitality and intellectual activity twenty years beyond “retirement” from an already distinguished academic career? The answer, she says, lies in one of her favorite Browning quotations: “Knowledge is power.” The quest for knowledge has empowered her just as surely as gasoline supplies the energy to move a car down the road. Talk with Dr. Cornelia for very long and you will notice her conversation has a theme. The word “interest” occurs often because the world is infinitely interesting to Dr. Cornelia.
Nothing is beyond Dr. Cornelia’s enthusiastic interest. In the course of an afternoon’s visit, she discussed with great animation a trip she had made with her bacteriology class at the University of Chicago all the way across the city on the “elevated” (train) to see the activated sludge process associated with a critical sewage problem in the Mississippi River.
Then, to illustrate her point that the field of biology “has so much in it,” she mentioned an acquaintance who had recently found the garlic in his garden was sporting a strange growth. “He had tried to get it analyzed as to just what its nature was,” she said, “and even went to the biology department to get assistance relative to it because, well, here it was and he wanted to know.”
And she recalled that on a recent breakfast outing with relatives, she noticed that as the grownups were conversing after the meal, her little grandniece was creating a major work of art on the back of her paper placement. “Really,” she told me, “what she drew was so extraordinary that I took it with me because I thought it was of such interest.”
Dr. Cornelia says that the personal achievement which she finds most satisfying is not really what most of us would consider an achievement. It is the process of “intellectual pursuits” that has brought her, and continues to bring her, the most satisfaction. One is not surprised, therefore, to find in her appreciation of the human mind a distinctive brand of enthusiastic reverence. “To me, there is nothing comparable to the human mind,” she said. “In other words, if I worship anything physical, it is the human mind and its capabilities. Well, just look at what can be done and what remains to be done! If you read that last National Geographic article on the origin of the earth, about this planet and the shifting of the continents, it’s just unbelievable how man has used his brain to ferret out the answers to these questions.”
The successes she has enjoyed, Dr. Cornelia is very quick to point out, would not have been possible without the support of several special people. The one to whom she gives the most credit is her late husband, Dr. Charles G. Smith, one of Baylor’s most revered professors of English. She uses a unique term in speaking of the kind of support he lent: he underwrote everything she attempted, she says. When they were both working on Ph.D.’s at Johns Hopkins, “he would come and take the pieces of equipment that I needed for my experiments . . . and he would go and place them where I could use them,” she remembers. At one point during their stay at Johns Hopkins, their finances became so reduced that he encouraged her to finish her degree while he suspended his work to teach at nearby Goucher College.
“Not only did he promote my every intellectual endeavor,” she said, “but the spiritual and artistic, as well.” She recalled the delightful “opera weekends” he would organize for the two of them. When operatic productions would come to Dallas, San Antonio, or Houston, he would purchase a recording of the opera; they would drive to the city and spend the first night in a hotel, listening to and discussing the recording of the opera. The next night they would see it live, their pleasure greatly enhanced by the previous evening’s study, she said.
Theirs was a marriage of two extraordinarily well-suited individuals. They shared a great interest in each other’s intellectual pursuits to the degree that his lifelong interest in the proverb lore of Spenser and Shakespeare “infected” Dr. Cornelia. As she was taking English classes under Baylor’s Dr. A. J. Armstrong during the Depression, she wrote a paper on Browning’s proverb lore and eventually had it published by the Modern Language Association. When Dr. Smith died before getting his extensive work on Spenser’s proverb lore off to Harvard for publication, Dr. Cornelia was well-enough acquainted with his work to get it into final form and submit it.
The highest priority in their marriage was to support each other in their intellectual pursuits; and if Dr. Smith sacrificed to support Dr. Cornelia, Dr. Cornelia demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice as well. In 1935, the Smiths were invited to Stetson University in Florida, he to be dean and she to chair the biology department. “So there was my chance to use my whole training, both in comparative anatomy, which I had had with Fred Terry Rogers, and my botany. Here was a whole new area, a whole new world of plants! And animals, likewise. Nobody had made any particular study of the plants of the region around Stetson, so that just intrigued me and I went to work on it; and I had two students almost immediately do master’s theses on plants in the area. Right there!” she said. “So what happened? Well, Dr. Smith didn’t enjoy being dean. That was administrative work, you see, and he wanted intellectual endeavors, so we came back to Baylor.” No one would understand the desire for intellectual endeavors more than Dr. Cornelia.
When Dr. Smith died in 1967, Dr. Cornelia commissioned a sculpture based on a stanza from his book of sonnets, Trajectory. This sculpture serves as the monument of their plot in Oakwood Cemetery, and the stanza is inscribed at the base of it:
Strange cosmic curve!
Integral arc of space!
Unrolling rhythm swinging out
From time into eternity.
The life-affirming words stand their silent watch over the graves in Oakwood. Dr. Cornelia gave me her reading of these lines, in the process resurrecting the man and the great thing they loved together: the unlimited life of the mind: “How does one know just what the final analysis of life is going to be? We just have to take it as it is. ‘Strange cosmic curve,’ can you see that? ‘Integral arc of space.’ All right, here’s a curve. It is a part of all life, all space, all everything. Space is … we know about as much about space as we know about life itself.”
The other individual to whom Dr. Cornelia gives great credit for her development is her mother, “an intellectual if there ever was one,” she says. Mrs. Marschall overcame a series of difficulties during her lifetime to serve for her children as a model of perseverance and mental discipline. And of course, she worked that special miracle for them, instilling in them a love of learning. Dr. Cornelia has made that principle a cornerstone of her own philosophy of teaching. “All that we can do as teachers is to incite students to want to know more and more. That is the big thing. That is why we teach.”
Dr. Cornelia attributes her physical vitality primarily to her many interests which keep her active. But she does have an exercise routine and a diet that she says she is wedded to. “Every morning of the world, I take a certain group of exercises; and then I relax and have another snooze and then come to school,” she said. While still in bed, she clears her lungs, brings her knees to her chest and then extends her legs. She does this twenty times and then repeats the set twice more. She always keeps a choice of three fresh fruits in her refrigerator and has only fruit for breakfast. Her choices for lunch and supper multiply greatly from there, although she does try to avoid too much red meat and heavy, rich food.
Friends, colleagues, and relatives play a special part in Dr. Cornelia’s life because she has so many of them. Although she doesn’t keep routine weekly or monthly meetings with friends, spontaneous gatherings and impromptu invitations pop up often. She related a past week’s social calendar: “This week, well, four nights out of the seven I had something. The LeMasters are leaving soon, so the Collmers had a nice group in for the evening meal on Saturday. Then on Sunday, I had Dr. Dalglish invite me to go out to lunch with him. And I did. Then that evening I had the surprise of my niece’s coming to town. So these things just go on and on. Last night I was with the Tom Parrish party, a huge one, in the Union Building.”
What Baylor has in Dr. Cornelia is a great lady and scholar who is at the same time thoroughly human. To know that she uses a magnifying glass for close reading, that she misplaces things occasionally, and that the classical radio station WFMT is her special companion during the late evening hours that are prone to loneliness endears her all the more. She is a Baylor equivalent to what the Japanese, in their inimitable way, have designated as “national treasures”: revered elders who have for decades practiced, to a degree of unparalleled excellence, the arts that symbolize the Japanese culture.
Dr. Cornelia has for decades been about the business that is at the very heart of Baylor’s raison d’etre: transmitting her personal love of learning to her students.
