The lost graduation: Pain, but hope from afar for Beaufort senior class in coronavirus
Her lost graduation was 81 years ago, and she’s not over it yet.
Carroll Christensen Sommerville Eve of Beaufort wrote a letter to editor about it just last week.
“A picture of Samantha Foster on the front page of The Beaufort Gazette on April 6th brought back memories of another Beaufort High School canceled graduation that many people never hear of — that of 1939, because of a polio epidemic before there was any cure for that disease,” she wrote.
At 96, Carroll Eve was touched by high school seniors in the class of 2020, now locked down in their homes, with schools closed through April 30 due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
Samantha Foster, a senior at May River High School in Bluffton, told our staff writer Rachel Jones, “All seniors, we just miss being able to come together and talk. ‘We’re like, well why can’t we go back? This isn’t fair to us.’ And I can’t lie, that’s how I feel, too. But it is selfish.”
For teen-aged Carroll Christensen, the blow of the lost graduation was a quick as it was deep.
“We were notified one Monday morning that school would be closing two weeks early and we would have exams a week early,” she wrote.
The 30-or-so Beaufort High seniors of 1939 had heard of polio all their lives. Its source was unknown, and there was no cure. They might have joined students across America in the new March of Dimes to search for that cure. Maybe they read in the news that 1939 brought a polio surge of epidemic proportions in Charleston County.
But none of that helped.
“Our caps and gowns (which we had to order from afar) would not have had time to reach us in time for our newly assigned graduation date,” Eve wrote.
“Also, we were not allowed to have ANY guests (at the graduation ceremony) other than our parents.
“We had all selected and purchased our special dresses for what we thought would be a grand celebration followed by a party. Instead, we were relegated to having a very simple ceremony with our parents and NO PARTY.
“I feel Samantha’s pain even after all these years.”
Diphtheria orphan
Young Carroll Christensen had every reason to celebrate a diploma. She is fourth-generation Beaufort, and each one prized education.
Her grandmother arrived in Beaufort as a child of parents who had come from the North during the Civil War to teach freed children.
That grandmother, Abbie Holmes Christensen, grew up to be a folklorist, educator and suffragist. She started a Montessori school in Beaufort for her grandchildren, one of the first in the South. She founded the Port Royal Agricultural School in Burton to improve education for African Americans.
Her husband, Niels Christensen, designed the Beaufort National Cemetery and started several businesses in Beaufort, including the first real estate agency. They had five children.
One of them was young Carroll’s father, Arthur Christensen. He left Beaufort for Harvard but quit after an argument with his math professor and finished at MIT.
Her mother also was well-educated. And, oddly enough, she was orphaned as a child when both parents died in a diphtheria epidemic. She was adopted by the dean of education at Columbia University in New York City, and studied piano and violin in Germany.
“She was teaching at the Horace Mann School when Arthur Christensen convinced her to marry him and leave New York City for the swamps of South Carolina, with no air conditioning,” said Carroll’s daughter, Kathryn Sommerville Mixon of Beaufort.
Perhaps to help pull it off, he built her a stunning home on Pigeon Point Road, where Carroll grew up with an appreciation for art, books — and graduation parties.
Harvard, MIT and rattlesnakes
Stories still swirl around Beaufort about Carroll’s father.
Arthur Christensen was a surveyor, and a character.
By the time Kathryn Mixon’s generation grew up, the family ritual was to go to St. Helena’s Parish church dressed in a crinoline, dress, hat, gloves and patent leather shoes. Kathryn says that after dinner, they would lose the hat and gloves and stand in the front yard to watch their grandfather milk his rattlesnakes, taking the venom to the hospital to be a life-saving anti-venom.
“I was an adult before I knew that wasn’t normal,” Kathryn said.
Arthur took up water skiing at age 77 and won a $100 bet for slalom skiing from Beaufort to Savannah when he was 82.
Carroll Christensen Sommerville Eve emerged from it an independent woman.
After her lost high school graduation, she went to college. She got a degree in textile art from Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina, married an engineer, had five children and came home to Beaufort with them after a divorce in 1960.
She was a draftsman in a family business, but, while raising her children, went back to school to get a degree in library science. She was a librarian at Beaufort Elementary, Port Royal Elementary and Beaufort High School before marrying a character like her father, the late Pinckney Eve, in 1985.
“Affectionately, Pinckney became widely known in Beaufort as ‘the flashlight man’ giving out keychain flashlights with his name on them to all he met saying, ‘My last name is Eve,’ reminding them we are all descendants of Adam and Eve, therefore we were all related and should find love, peace, and kinship in that knowledge,” his 2017 obituary read.
“He attributed his long life to this belief.”
Carroll Eve has long shown her education in Beaufort’s Clover Club, a literary society founded in 1881. Each of its 30 members present a well-researched paper once a year.
Her textile art played under the lights at the Beaufort Little Theater. For 25 years, she designed and made the costumes, and did some acting.
Today, Carroll Christensen Sommerville Eve lives independently in an apartment next to her parent’s old home in Pigeon Point, where her son Paul Sommerville, a member of Beaufort County Council, lives.
Her message to the seniors in the silent spring of 2020 might well be that life will go on, full of intrigue and characters, challenges and joys.
But be prepared.
“I feel Samantha’s pain even after all these years.”
This story was originally published April 16, 2020 at 4:45 AM.
