Debora Curry
English Dept - Administrative Assistant
Email: debora.curry@gcccd.edu
Office Hours: Monday-Friday 8am to 10am and 2pm to 4pm - email Debora for link for her Zoom Office hours
Source: The Gallery, 1974: A Photographic Directory of the Grossmont College Staff. El Cajon, CA: Grossmont Junior College District, 1974. p102.
Source: The Gallery, 1970: A Photographic Directory of the Grossmont College Staff. El Cajon, CA: Grossmont Junior College District, 1970. p29.
Source: The Lance Yearbook. Erie, PA: Gannon University, 1954. p21. Used with permission, courtesy of Digital Collection of Gannon University and Villa Maria College.
While working attending the Pennsylvania Catholic women's college, Villa Maria College, Marie C. Whaling Sweadner earned some notoriety as a skilled debate champion and was one of only two debate objectors selected to represent the college in an Erie Symposium on the topic of American democracy. Sweadner earned her B.A. in English in 1939, then completed her graduate work at the University of Pittsburgh, receiving her Master’s of Librarianship in 1941.
Shortly thereafter, she and her husband, Walter R. Sweadner, a Carnegie Museum Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Pittsburgh, settled in Point Breeze, Pennsylvania, where Sweadner taught English part-time while raising a family. In 1954, three years after being widowed,1 Sweadner took a teaching position at University of Erie’s Gannon College and remained there as an English instructor until the end of the decade. Then, in 1959, she picked up stakes with her family and moved to San Diego, becoming a technical writer for Convair Astronautics.
In 1964, when Grossmont College officially opened its new campus in El Cajon, Sweadner was invited to return to the teaching profession, this time with a highly sought, new set of skills as a Technical Writing instructor. In fact, Sweadner’s decades as an English teacher, coupled with her training and experience in San Diego’s aerospace industries, made her Technical Writing classes quite popular at Grossmont. In later years, she was also known to have taught Introduction to Literature courses, but she is memorialized by many as a dedicated and masterful instructor of argument and rhetoric, worthy of Sweadner's legacy as a champion debater back in Erie, Pennsylvania.
In 1985, two years after her son made a bid to become San Diego mayor, Marie C. Sweadner retired from teaching to become an amateur naturalist and bird watcher. She passed away in October of 1998 at the age of 81 years.
1 In 1950, Walter R. Sweadner was diagnosed with cancer diagnosis and, in early 1951, after undergoing what was declared a successful surgical procedure, he succumbed to a fatal infection and died.
Debora Curry
English Dept - Administrative Assistant
Email: debora.curry@gcccd.edu
Office Hours: Monday-Friday 8am to 10am and 2pm to 4pm - email Debora for link for her Zoom Office hours
8800 Grossmont College Drive
El Cajon, California 92020
619-644-7000
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