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The new president of the Harvard Alumni Association, Corlis "Ciji" Ware '64, at one point feared she'd be unable to complete her undergraduate degree. In 1962, her father, a successful novelist and screenwriter, suffered from a debilitating case of writer's block and wasn't earning any money. Ware talked the problem over with Radcliffe dean Kathleen Elliott. "I'll never forget what she told me about Harvard and Radcliffe," Ware recalls. "She said, 'Once we've got you, we never let you go.'" With the dean's assistance, Ware found a term-time job and took a loan out to make ends meet. Thus began not only her gratitude and subsequent service to both Radcliffe and Harvard ("You've got to pay that loyalty back," she explains), but also her informal education in what she calls "the struggle to juggle."
Volunteerism has always been part of the endeavor. Ware has served as an interviewer for her local schools and scholarships committee, as an elected director of the HAA from 1993 to 1996, and as the first woman president of the merged Harvard-Radcliffe Club of Southern California. She is also likely the only HAA director to tap-dance at a Harvard scholarship benefit--Puddin' on the Ritz: Hasty Pudding's Greatest Hits, which she co-wrote, produced, and narrated in 1985. She's handled a full personal life: her son, Jamie Ware Billett '95, has just graduated from University of Southern California film school, and she and her husband, Anthony Cook, recently moved from Beverly Hills to San Francisco, where Cook has become managing editor and publisher of the online personal finance website "Quicken.com". All this, while managing her own 25-year career in broadcast journalism, and developing the career as a historical novelist that she knew "in her heart of hearts" was her destiny.
Now a full-time author, Ware has just completed her third novel, Midnight on Julia Street. She has also finished a tour to promote the reissue of her first, Island of the Swans, a biographical novel inspired by her great-grandmother's claim that Jane Maxwell, an eighteenth-century duchess in Scotland, was a family ancestor. The book's plot finds Maxwell torn between the man she loves, taken for dead in the American colonies, and the Duke of Gordon, her husband by the time her true love reappears.
Balancing a successful professional and personal life can be tricky--especially, Ware feels, for women of her generation. "We were the first to have both high career ambitions and a desire for a family," she says. Hindrances, for Ware, ranged in seriousness from the discovery that the department at Los Angeles station KNBC where she worked in the late 1970s had no women's restroom, to her dismissal from the station when she became pregnant with her son.
As the first HAA president to have graduated from both Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges, Ware acknowledges that keeping things in proportion in life isn't just an issue of feminism; educating others about that will be her primary concern during her year as president. "I'm interested in finding out how Harvard teaches students to balance their lives," she says. "What's the point of an education if it doesn't teach you how to enjoy life? The effort has to eventually give you some serenity."
~ Dan Delgado