| Marion R. Kramer (CAS'63) was twelve years old when she decided to become a doctor. Though the number of women in medicine was still relatively small, she never considered her gender an impediment.
"My parents brought me up so that I never knew there were boy jobs and girl jobs," Kramer recalls. "It wasn't their idea that I go to medical school, but they never discouraged it-they never once said, 'Oh, don't you mean you want to be a nurse?'"
Kramer worked toward her goal through her undergraduate years at BU, where she studied biology and developed an interest in embryology. Though her coursework kept her busy, she found time to indulge her passion for opera and the theater. Second balcony seats at the theaters downtown were $2.50, affordable even on a student's budget. "I enjoyed my classes, and I loved the theater," Kramer says. "I managed, during my junior and senior years, to see every new show that opened in Boston-without cutting a single class. And when you're a science major, that's not easy."
She studied obstetrics and gynecology at the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania (now the Drexel University College of Medicine). "I never had any real problems as a woman in science," she says, "though that's probably partly because I was somewhat naïve. But I know that women in science face a few more obstacles, and I wanted to do something to help women to accomplish what they want to do." So to celebrate her sixtieth birthday, on December 6, 2001, Kramer established the Marion R. Kramer, M.D., Scholarship Fund, which will provide annual awards to Boston University women studying biology at the College of Arts and Sciences.
"Education is what enabled me to do what I enjoy more than anything else," she says. "I would like other people to be able to pursue their dreams."
The scholarship, which is also the beneficiary of her IRA, is set to be awarded for the first time in the 2005-06 school year. Kramer hopes that by starting the scholarship that soon, she'll meet some of the recipients.
"Other people who've done this have started a correspondence with the students, and so they had the chance to enjoy their giving," she says. "Most people get enjoyment out of their children growing up and seeing them succeed. Since I don't have children of my own, I can help someone else's child succeed."
Kramer established her private practice in the San Francisco Bay area in 1968 and has delivered more than 5,000 babies, by her count. And she still balances work with her zeal for the theater: she chose Hayward, California, as her home for its proximity to the San Francisco Opera, where she's held season tickets for more than thirty years.
Theater, dance, and music have been bountiful in Kramer's life since her early childhood. Her father was a devotee of symphonic music; her mother was raised in New York City and never lost her love for the city's arts, although as a military family, they moved often. Whether they were living in Manhattan, Texas, or Chicago, on Saturday afternoons the family listened to the radio broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera, which fostered in Kramer a lifelong devotion to the art.
Though she remembers her time at BU fondly, she does have one complaint. "I still have not forgiven Boston for tearing down the opera house the year before I started school," she says, laughing.
— Tricia Brick |
