Hilton Head ‘point of light’ Frances Ferrene dies, still dreaming of the circus

Frances Welborn Ferrene, the Hilton Head Island woman who came up with the concept of the Rotary Reader program that was replicated worldwide and earned her an invitation to the White House, died April 30.

She had fought cancer for five years, said her husband, attorney Otto Ferrene Jr. She was 80.

With her spunk and Southern drawl, Frances Ferrene touched countless lives as a physical education teacher, elementary school counselor, private counselor and volunteer since moving to rural Hilton Head in 1973.

The Rotary Reader program was born not long after she became a counselor at Hilton Head Primary School. https://hhie.beaufortschools.net

It places adult volunteers in elementary schools to read to students, and they become long-term mentors, advisers and confidants.

“I was pretty overwhelmed with children who needed a counselor,” Ferrene told a Rotary Club in Aiken in one of many presentations she and her husband made to spread the idea.

“But I soon found that they did not really need a counselor. They needed a friend, and I needed help.”

She told her husband that his Rotarian colleagues “make great mentors,” and the Hilton Head VanLandingham Rotary Club ran with the plan in 1989. https://www.vanlandinghamrotary.org

She would write a 67-page manual for the new support system for children who tended to have three things in common: They had great potential, they could not read, and they had been in trouble.

But she said they also “can sit and listen; they want a Rotary reader; and they have the ability to learn and are receptive to different experiences.”

President George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush welcomed the Ferrenes to the White House as his 740th “Point of Light” honorees in January 1993.

Bush recognized an American “Point of Light” six days a week, spotlighting individuals and organizations that “successfully address pressing social problems through direct and consequential acts of community service.”

Otto Ferrene went along as a representative of the VanLandingham Rotary Club.

They took the president a golf shirt from Hilton Head Primary School, emblazoned with the likeness of Seamore the Pelican, the mascot for the school and the Rotary Reader program.

That honor at the White House was a lifetime achievement, but not the one Frances wanted most.

THE CIRCUS

Frances Ferrene — known to us as a Presbyterian elder and deacon — always wanted to run away with the circus.

She planned to study physical education at Florida State University because of its link to the circus world, but her parents wouldn’t hear of it.

Her father, an attorney, state representative and University of South Carolina trustee from the Upstate city of Anderson, and her mother, who did tax work for the law firm and later demonstrated foods at a variety of grocery stores, thought Frances should become a scientist.

She ended up studying physical education at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, then a women’s college that produced thousands of teachers.

Otto was a student at Presbyterian College in Clinton, then mostly a men’s college, when he gave a friend at Winthrop a detailed description of his idea of a dream date. That led to a blind date with Frances at a Winthrop Valentine’s ball, and they married in 1962.

“She was a mail-order bride,” Otto likes to say.

She put him through the University of South Carolina School of Law following his six-year stint with the U.S. Army.

She taught physical education at the then-segregated C.A. Johnson High School for Black students in Columbia, starting a gymnastics program that in three years became the best in the state.

She saw physical education as something much broader than team sports, saying basketball is fine for the ones who like it but a dreadful bore to most in the class.

In 13 years of teaching physical education at Sea Pines Academy (today’s Hilton Head Preparatory School https://www.hhprep.org), she included a wide range of movement skills in her classes, including juggling and walking on stilts.

“People tell me I’m too interested in trick skills,” she said. “But I like to go beyond the required everyday physical education program and teach things you might use all your life — wonderful skills that make it fun.”

Televised Olympics Games were not part of her world growing up, so circus performers became her idols.

“They’re tremendous athletes,” she said. “They have incredible discipline. Circus women in their 50s and 60s still have great bodies because they exercise every day. It’s part of their daily lives.”

She organized more than 150 students into an annual circus at Sea Pines Academy, complete with costumes and other trappings of a real circus.

“Children love it,” she said. “They love the physical challenge. And when you put an umbrella in their hands, add the lights and music, they become stars. Without all that, without the fantasy, there’s no magic. It’s what makes the circus.”

CUB SCOUTS

Ferrene’s dream came true in the spring of 1985.

She got to ride an elephant in the opening parade of a Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus show in Savannah.

“I put my foot on his knee and swung on up,” she said.

At last she got to talk to her idols when a young girl in one of the 10 tightly knit families that made up the circus did her makeup and fit her into a dazzling costume.

“It’s really and truly like going into a different world,” she told our newspaper at the time. “For me it was more than just a ride on an elephant, wonderful and exciting as that was.”

Ferrene expanded the world of young islanders when she organized the island’s first Cub Scout pack.

Both her sons would become Eagle Scouts, and both would end up in Hollywood. Otto III is supervising picture editor at Nickelodeon Animation Studios, and Welborn is a film editor, producer and actor specializing in trailers for potential reality TV shows.

She expanded her own world by getting a doctorate at age 59. After more than 40 years in schools, she opened a private counseling business.

For a quarter-century, she was the disaster mental health lead for the Palmetto Chapter of the American Red Cross.

But she never lost hope that when Otto retired (he hasn’t), they both would join the circus.

“I think it’s important to kick your heels together,” she said.

David Lauderdale may be reached at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com.