A Passage from The Answer

From a daughter, to a college student, to Alpha Phi co-Founder, to a wife and mother, that is how Clara Bradley Wheeler Baker Burdette (Alpha-Syracuse) evolved, ever resolute to be of service. In her book The Answer she pens her life story in response to the question posed to her by fellow Alpha Phi Frances E. Willard. Having outlived her three husbands and her son Roy, Clara became skilled at finding solutions, approaching challenges with logic and bravery and finding satisfaction in supporting others. Inside the book, there are passages of encouragement from her first husband, Professor Wheeler as he lay dying, trying to bolster the determination he knew she had. There are reflections she shares as she recovered from her own illness and considered the role faith played in her life.

Chapter VI: College

One day she (Frances E. Willard, Alpha Phi’s first alumna initiate) laid her hand on my arm and said, “Clara, what are you going to do with your life?”

Too astonished to answer at once, I hesitatingly replied, “I do not know – I hadn’t thought about it.”

“I’m going to send you a little book,” she replied. That is all I can recall she ever said to me, but the incident directed the current of my whole life.

When the book came, a little green-covered volume entitled “Nineteen Beautiful Years,” it was the story of her sister’s life, who died when she was nineteen years old, written by Miss Willard. I cannot recall the story, but I do know the influence it left on my soul. The day I read its last pages, I was sitting on the end of the old couch, with the bright flowered cover. The day was one of those soft balmy days, with just enough breeze blowing to stir the maple leaves, so they made dancing shadows on the carpet. The picture will never fade from my memory, the bright flowered couch, the moving shadows on the carpet, and a black walnut whatnot that stood against the wall.

I sat reasoning out what I should do with circumstances which surrounded my life. I reasoned that I could never be a “great lady.” A great lady, as I had thought of it up to that time, was one who went out to the carriage, with a long train, like the purple silk train of my mother’s friend from Madison, Wisconsin, closed the carriage door with a bang, and said, “Drive on, John.”

But I could be helpful to others and honest in my work, no matter what it was. Again my cheeks flush, and I feel as if I was being lifted up with impulse, followed by a settled determination. From that hour, I would give my life to service. I would do everything that came to me to do to the very best I knew how. I offered a little prayer for help, for this self-dedication.

It has been my purpose to keep the string on which I have strung my beads of opportunity all these years. I had just dusted the room before I sat down to read, but my conscience troubled me about the whatnot, with its little toy dog, china slippers, pine cones, daguerrotypes, and a few books. So I picked up my dustcloth, and with this new impulse, everything on it was taken off and dusted so that if Mother came to look at it, I was sure she would not find any dust anywhere. Bead No. 1.