Serendipitous Sisterhood A Low-Heywood Bond

Aspark of recognition drew Ellen Dyer Thornton LH’62 and Camilla Brownson Kenny LH’65 together. Their parallel interests were impossible to miss. Books consume them. Nature confounds them. Service is a central purpose of their lives. They both volunteer at St. Paul’s by the Sea Episcopal Church in Jacksonville, Florida, their hometown. These commonalities fueled casual banter for more than a year. Then one day, their small talk turned to Connecticut. They began with Shelton, where they both had family. The discussion traveled south along the Gold Coast, their stories intersecting along the way.

Their voices rose with each discovery. By the time they reached Stamford, the pitch was pretty high. Then came the pièce de résistance: They both went to Low-Heywood School. Their jaws dropped in a dramatic pause before their conversation crescendoed.

Thornton said she graduated in 1962, and Kenny in 1965, meaning they had overlapped for one year. They erupted in delight that echoed throughout their beloved church.

“We were so happy,” Kenny said. “It was early in the morning, and we were quite loud, screaming and dancing.” different backgrounds and cultures. I learned how different we can all be and how wonderful it is that there is such a varied world that we can all appreciate and that we can all learn from one another. Low-Heywood shaped those kinds of attitudes, and they benefited me. They have made me a happier, more open person.”

“It was just so stunning,” Thornton added. “We traded stories about our time there, remembering different teachers, especially Mrs. Cesare,” she said, referring to Sue Cesare LH’48, who taught ethics and physical education at the time before becoming Head of School.

The women have forged a deep connection through their shared past.

Their conversations have solidified just how formative Low-Heywood was in their lives. Their mutual teachers and the lessons they learned had a profound effect on both of them, evidenced by the decisions they made.

During her junior year, Thornton participated in American Field Service, an international youth exchange organization, and was selected to go to Japan for the summer. She stayed with a family on Shikoku, an island south of Honshu, Japan’s largest island. Her host owned a newspaper and, though Thornton did not speak Japanese, newspapers and Asian culture later became central to her life.

The trip, coupled with world religion classes taught by Cesare, kindled Thornton’s interest in Daoism, Shintoism, and Hinduism. With encouragement from teacher and Low-Heywood Headmistress Ann Ayers Herrick, Thornton studied art and immersed herself in Asian culture at Mills College, now a California campus of Northeastern University.

“When I look back, it was Low-Heywood that made all the difference in my life,” she said. “My trip to Japan influenced my appreciation for people from

After secretarial jobs at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Newsweek magazine, Thornton was hired as a reporter for a newspaper south of Boston. She loved the news business and went on to earn a Gannett journalism fellowship at the University of Hawaii, where she studied Japanese and traveled to China. She also met her husband, Brian Thornton, a journalist and surfer, in Hawaii.

Thornton’s career spanned the globe. She was an on-air reporter for a television station in Hong Kong but found print to be her passion. She worked as a reporter at The Wichita Eagle in Kansas; The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Massachusetts; and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on Maui in Hawaii.

The Thorntons moved to Jacksonville in 2007, and she started writing fiction. She has published two award-winning novels, “Touch the Dead” and “The Girl Who Swam to Atlantis,” the latter of which Kenny is reading with friends in The Beaches Book Club.

Like Thornton, Kenny traces her career back to Stamford. Though it seemed insignificant at the time, one summer in the early 1960s, King School was relocating. Kenny, whose brother attended King, helped Jean Steel, a volunteer mother, organize the library at the new site. It took some time, but Kenny eventually found her calling in libraries.

First she earned a degree in psychology with minors in French and biology from Hood College in Maryland, then she took a job at a Baltimore library. Inspired by Low-Heywood librarian Beatrice Brinker, Kenny entered the same library science program Brinker had completed at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. After graduating, she was a children’s librarian at Cuyahoga County Public Library until her husband, Peter Kenny, was transferred to New Jersey.

In 1981, the family moved to Jacksonville. Kenny began working as a school librarian, fueled by her passion for helping children learn and grow, and by the belief that libraries are essential to a well-rounded education.