Dr. Rose Sophie Eisman Boyarsky '44 was the first in her family to go to college.
Born in Jersey City in March of 1924, Rose spent a comfortable childhood alongside her parents and one younger sister.
By the time she was born, Rose's father had sailed the world on the Great White Fleet, she shares with pride. A lithograph of the ship presides over her living room.
Her mother, fluent in German, began her work at this time as a postal censor screening the correspondence of Nazi POWs.
When it came time for college, Dr. Boyarsky felt the weight of being Jewish under the global rise of antisemitism. Most schools had a 10% quota on admitted Jewish students.
As she watched her friends get whisked away by other universities, Rose felt her college dreams slip away.
But UVM came through.
“UVM took me in when no one else would,” she tells us. "Oh, I couldn't be happier."
Dr. Boyarsky recounts in vivid detail how her aunt and mother saw her off at Camp Abnaki as she began her UVM journey. It would lead to a rich and colorful career as a clinical psychologist -- including work with the renowned sex research pioneers Drs. Williams H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson (of televised 'Masters of Sex' fame) -- and eventually her own private practice.
At 100, she now lives independently at a retirement community in Durham, North Carolina, where she reflects on her remarkable life, shaped by the tumult of the 20th century.
VERMONT SAVED!
During Rose's tenure, the University was embroiled in a financial crisis (for more, read “Building UVM”). To keep its doors open, alumni, students, and the community raised $150,000 through a hard-fought campaign, which supplemented a two-year state loan.
Rose recalls someone taking her hand and marching together downhill when the news broke. Other accounts tell of students clamoring victorious and holding “Vermont Saved!” banners (University of Vermont: The First Two Hundred Years, p. 250).
"I was a very serious student," she shares, "and really studied hard... I left home in 1941, but my mother said that if I went off to school away from home, she had enough money for two years, and I never gave a thought of what I was going to do after two years, but then the war started."
UVM’s campus was occupied by the US Army from 1943 to 1945 during World War II.
To meet the educational needs of the Air Cadets, fresh-faced science majors, like Rose, were tasked with their teaching.
"I was 18, and the people I was teaching were in their 20s, and I didn't know whether they'd listened to me, whether they would learn anything from me."
She recalls, with a girlish laugh, wearing makeup and a coiffed ponytail to exude more authority.
“It was a job,” she tells me. “It was giving me enough money to finish my course. We were five of us who were called physics instructors, and we had a wonderful time together. We even made our own, our own song, 'The physics instructors will win the war…' And the war was pretty scary because I was Jewish, and Hitler was killing all the Jews in Germany. My family was from Germany, and it was, yeah, it was really a scary time.”
FORGING HER FUTURE
Dr. Boyarsky met her husband, Dr. Saul Boyarsky '44 MD'46, during her Catamount days after a friend played matchmaker.
He'd grown in Burlington, and would eventually become a urologist. He passed away in 2019 after 73 happy years walking beside Rose.
During their courtship, she recalls one date in which she and Saul got locked out of his car in the middle of a snowstorm and had to be rescued by her eventual father-in-law.
"Weekends we would go downtown," she recalls. "There was a Chinese place, and we'd have egg foo young, which was very good, and really and truly. I studied. I had friends and we went hiking. We went up to Camel something, a number of times hiking, and one time I remember going out. We got up at the top, and there was a thunderstorm, and we ran the whole way down."
"You'd go hiking during the day and go dancing at night."
Her bachelor’s in chemistry – and passion for science -- led her to a Master’s program at Columbia University. There, she encountered adversity: a woman in a male-dominated field.
“Things were very different back then,” she reflects.
"Women weren't really welcome in the sciences then," she reflects. "And Columbia wasn't any different than the rest."
“There were three women and two men. Until the head of the department, or the head of the new graduate students, stood up and looked at us very sternly and said, and I quote, ‘You women better behave yourselves, the only reason you're here is because there's a war on and we can't find men.’ I will never forget that.”
While Saul completed his MD at UVM, the two planed back and forth during their engagement.
Rose giggles at one memory: Frank Sinatra and his crew nursing her to health during one particularly turbulent plane ride, then helping her telephone her mother at the train station.
THE MIDDLE YEARS
The two married and would welcome three children. Rose set her career aside and devoted herself to her children.
Saul's medical career would take them to Nuremberg, while he served in the US Army Medical Corps (1948-1950). A Urology residency would land them in Duke through the early '50s. There would be moves to New York, back to Durham, and St. Louis.
Years passed. Somewhere in the mix, with the children out of the house and the in-laws moved in, Rose decided on a Ph.D. She graduated in 1969 from Duke in Clinical Psychology.
In St. Louis, with Saul as Urologic Surgeon-in-Chief at Barnes Hospital and Washington University, Rose began her work alongside Drs. Masters and Johnson.
"It was very interesting, and I learned a lot," she tells me, "but after a while it became very boring, because the therapy was step by step. You did this the first day, you did next thing the second day, and so forth. And it was a two-week program, and it got pretty old after about four years. So, I decided to go out for myself."
A FULL LIFE
Dr. Boyarsky has been retired 30 years.
"I like to swim. I do a lot of swimming."
Two of her three children are local. They -- and "a bunch of grandchildren" -- keep her busy. "Family is important," she says.
Dr. Boyarsky’s life stands as a testament to perseverance in the face of adversity. Whether navigating a male-dominated field, balancing familial obligations and back-burner passions, or living through some of the most defining moments of the 20th century, Rose continues to move through it all with grace and eloquence.
From her Jersey roots to her UVM days, the centenarian has experienced more life than most people will. Its throughline flows strong: her curiosity, passion, and humor -- all still palpable today.
Read About More Alumni Lives
UVM Alumni are living rich lives, doing astounding and impactful work in many fields, in communities around Vermont, across the US, and around the world. Here are just a few of the stories we've gotten to share recently:
Dr. Rose Boyarsky '44, Centenarian, on Her UVM Days
Lisa Wartenberg Vélez
Dec 13, 2024