Cynthia has been a member of Nauset Neighbors since launch. She was born two years before television was invented, and Nauset Neighbors recently helped her to replace her router that distributes wireless Internet service and email to her computer.
Cynthia has a long history of volunteering in Wellfleet. She was a member of the Natural Resources Advisory Board, which during her tenure was responsible for the first harbor management plan, accepted by the town in 1995. She was also on the Open Space Committee and the Local Housing Partnership. She resigned from these committees only last fall. She also volunteered at the Boston Museum of Science for eleven years for two weekends per month, and while in Boston she often went to the ballet, plays and concerts. She is an ongoing member of the second book club established through Nauset Newcomers twenty one years ago, and is a member of the Environmental Book Club in Wellfleet.
Cynthia was born in Lakewood, OH, a suburb of Cleveland, and when Lindbergh was crossing the Atlantic, she, her sister, her cousin and her parents were driving for three days from Ohio to Hyannis, where Cynthia spent summer childhood vacations since she was three. Long before the National Seashore, Hyannis was a village then in fact as well as name, and Cynthia remembers fondly those “charmed” days sailing on Lewis Bay in August, their “teeny weeny” rented cottage, and the stack of books they always got at the local library the first day they arrived, encouraged by her mother, who was a children’s librarian. Once each summer, they made a trip to Provincetown. Cynthia still often drives to her favorite beach on Dunbar’s Point in Hyannis, undaunted by the summer traffic, where she loves to swim. And for about fifteen years after she retired to Wellfleet, she could be seen out on Cape Cod Bay in her 17-foot day sailer.
During the war years, while she was still in high school, Cynthia remembers the arguments between her conservative attorney father and her more liberal sister, a student at Sarah Lawrence College, over Roosevelt. She was nevertheless allowed to follow her sister to Sarah Lawrence. Although there were no required courses, she followed a pre med curriculum.
Immediately after the war, Cynthia married and had three children, all daughters. She also parlayed her education into a career as a research chemist in industry, working on a range of projects from vacuum tubes to developing methods of analysis for quality control of incoming ingredients for Lipton soups. One interesting assignment involved herbal teas. A major ingredient was orange peels. Unlike California oranges, the juice of Florida oranges is sweet before the peel is fully orange, and the suppliers would roll their peels in red dye. Red dye, it turned out, was a suspected carcinogen. Cynthia developed an analytical method to detect the dye and thereby reject the Florida oranges.
Cynthia noted that not many women worked in science in those days, and she encountered discrimination and sexual harassment. She thus became one more pioneer in the fight for women’s rights. She is sad that to this day, women do not receive equal pay for equal work. She loved her career, because it gave her the opportunity to work with her hands and with her head.
Cynthia has traveled widely to Japan, Europe, Central and South America, and throughout the U.S. and Canada.
She says, “I think the way to be happy is to make the best of your circumstances, and not to focus on what isn’t or might have been. A lot of what happens in life is luck.”