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Anna (above) and Gladys Medzorian on the BU campus. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
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As teachers in the Arlington Public Schools for more than thirty-five years, Anna (SED’66) and Gladys Medzorian know education well. They will pass on their commitment to education, learned from their parents and practiced through their own years of service, with the new Anna and Gladys Najarian Medzorian Scholarship Fund. The decision to endow a scholarship, Anna says, “goes back to our parents, who regarded education as very important. They came over from the old country, from Armenia, and they thought that the U.S. was the best place to continue to advance oneself.”
Their family’s concern for education helped lead Anna and Gladys to teaching. Both earned bachelor’s degrees from Boston State College, where Gladys got a master’s in education. Anna earned her master’s from BU’s School of Education. “I had always wanted to be a teacher,” Gladys says. “It’s an awesome task to try to teach—you’re helping to mold the future.” At BU, Anna became a reading specialist. “I felt that really helped when I taught first grade, when students start reading,” says Anna. “It was very satisfying to see the kids happy that they were able to read.”
In honor of their family, they have included their mother’s maiden name, Najarian, as well as their family name in the scholarship, which will fund the education of Armenian-American students in SED. If a qualified SED candidate is not found, the scholarship will be used for a School of Management student.
Anna and Gladys were raised in an immigrant household with hardworking, bilingual parents and a grandmother who spoke only Armenian. Their mother, Serpouhe, emigrated from Armenia when she was twenty-one, learned English, and worked in her brother’s textile mill before marrying. After marriage, Serpouhe continued as a homemaker who excelled at all forms of sewing and handiwork, including making lace doilies and linens through a weaving-like process called tatting.
Anna and Gladys’ father, Arthur H. Medzorian, came to America when he was five, along with his father and five brothers. Eventually, Arthur graduated from Arlington High School. “He would have loved to go to college,” says Anna. “He had a very good business mind,” adds Gladys. To support his family, Arthur opened a business with three of his brothers. The O.K. Tire Company offered tire patching and re-treading from a shop on Columbus Avenue in Boston. “They worked night and day,” Gladys says of her father and uncles. “It was hard, tedious work.” But Arthur was able to put his daughters through school while continuing his own informal education. “He was self-taught through all the reading he did,” Gladys adds. “He loved reading,” Anna chips in.
While they lived in Arlington, the Medzorian family was active in the Armenian community, attending functions in Watertown and Cambridge. Helping others, both within and outside the Armenian community, was also an important part of the ethics with which they were raised. “If you’re good to people,” Anna says, “they’ll be good to you.”
—Nathaniel Beyer |
