{"id":168080,"date":"2025-03-25T15:58:31","date_gmt":"2025-03-25T19:58:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=168080"},"modified":"2025-04-14T14:27:47","modified_gmt":"2025-04-14T18:27:47","slug":"remembering-sylvia-hawks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2025\/03\/25\/remembering-sylvia-hawks\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Sylvia Hawks, 1948\u20132025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sylvia Hawks\u2019 work resume has no gaps: Fifty-one years, all spent supporting Bates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hawks joined the college on March 4, 1967, working in what was then known as “the secretarial pool.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was 18 years old, and wherever you look, 1967 was a different world. The day she was hired, for example, the Lewiston Sun Journal<\/em> reported that the Lyndon Johnson administration was avoiding the word \u201cescalation\u201d to describe the ominous, stepped-up military action in Vietnam. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And at Bates, coed dining had just begun \u2014 as had something called \u201cShort Term.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Sylvia Hawks, 1948\u20132025<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This tribute to Sylvia Hawks appeared in the fall 2018 issue of Bates Magazine<\/em> at the time of her retirement from Bates the longest-serving employees in the college’s history. Hawks died on March 14, 2025, at age 76<\/a>. 
<\/p>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n

I visited with Hawks in June 2018, three days before her retirement as an academic administrative assistant in Pettengill Hall. After we talked, I asked permission to write a story, since she\u2019s reticent about such things. She paused. \u201cThat\u2019s fine.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her first Bates job, handling mimeographing, no longer exists. She recalls an early technological innovation: an IBM typewriter with a \u201cmag card\u201d that stored a page of text so corrections could be made without retyping an entire page!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"
A 51-year member of the Bates staff, Sylvia Hawks pauses in her Pettengill Hall office for a photograph on her last day at Bates, June 29, 2018. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I asked her to complete this sentence: \u201cThe more Bates changes\u2026.\u201d \u201cThe more changes there are,\u201d she said, laughing. Yet change never perturbed Hawks. \u201cYou have to keep up,\u201d she says. \u201cIf you
don\u2019t change, then everything becomes stagnant.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And are students different today, too? \u201cNo. They\u2019re still leaving Mom and Dad for a new world. So their friends become that much more important to them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hawks grew up in Lewiston, and after graduating from Lewiston High School in 1966, she learned her office and typing skills through a 20-hour course, part of a federal program that had been signed into law by President Kennedy a few years earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back then, a young person would graduate from Lewiston high, choose a local business \u2014 often a mill \u2014 and work there for decades. \u201cAnd that\u2019s what I did,\u201d she says. \u201cMy mother said, \u2018You don\u2019t go jumping from job to job. That\u2019s just not right.\u2019 So I grew up with that mindset.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Hawks\u2019 case, the choice was Bates College, not Bates Manufacturing. She made the choice intentionally after a summer job in a mill. \u201cI was very young,\u201d she said. \u201cYou had all these bosses, and they would, if you want to say it now, harass the younger ones. It was that kind of a mentality, and I hated it. I wanted out of that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in the day, one of her secretarial pool colleagues, briefly, was a just-graduated Elizabeth Strout \u201977, now a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning novelist. \u201cLiz was a character,\u201d says Hawks, for whom \u201ccharacters\u201d are interesting people. \u201cNot boisterous, but she always had something to say, just off, about different things.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Strout has equally vivid and fond memories of Hawks, whom she\u2019s visited when back on campus. Steadfast and honest is how Strout describes Hawks \u2014 good words that sound good together.
Since the dissolution of the Lane Hall secretarial pool years ago, Hawks has worked in Pettengill Hall, supporting the faculty in anthropology, history, politics, and digital and computational studies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\""This
In 2014, Sylvia Hawks holds a canister of candies that she refills weekly for the faculty members in Pettengill Hall. “It’s a stress reliever,” she said. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

There, she was indeed steadfast in supporting her faculty. \u201cYou build a relationship with a professor, and that becomes a bond. There\u2019s trust.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, what does \u201csupport\u201d mean to Hawks? \u201cIt\u2019s when you work with somebody, or there\u2019s somebody you just care about or think about, then you\u2019re going to be loyal to them. It\u2019s just being there for them. \u201cThat\u2019s what I\u2019ve done at Bates. And it\u2019s been so worth it.\u201d
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