News Scrapbook 1985

San Diego, CA (San Diego Co.) Evening Tribune (Cir. D. 127,454)

San Diego, Monday, May 27, 1985

San Diego, CA (San Diego Co.) Evening Tribune (Cir. D. 127,454)

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AY 2 7 1985 , 4/1,.,.', Pc a 1, •xax

MAY 2 7 198

7 Dr. Anita Figueredo ,r 1 t:s story inspires women at USD

._Altrrr '• r 8xx USD awards B.A. degree osthumously / Her name might have been over- looked in the program listing the 1,283 s~ude~ts receiving degrees at the Uruversit¥, oI San Diego's com- mencement. But Anne Catherine Swanke 22 whose tragic death last fall sadd~ned the USO campus and shocked the San Diego community, was remembered by her fellow students and about 5,000 spectators gathered at the graduation yesterday in Campus Sta- dium. W~en Sister Sally Furay, USD vice president, stopped the ceremony briefly to present Swanke's degree posthumously to her father, Dr. John Swanke, the graduates and their families suddenly rose en masse and applauded as a show of affection for the former USO student. The memory was still painfully fresh about bow she was kidnapped raped and slain last Nov. 20 after he~ car ran out of gas and she went to a nearby service station for help. Her Please see USD, B-4 P. c. B 1 , By Joseph Thesken... Tribune Education Writer

work outside the home. I got my first job 21 years ago, and people won- dered what as wrong in the Finn hou hold. But Anita told me to go for it." According to Finn, Figueredo has never stopped going for it. •· he still serves on hve committees. I asked h r to be on one more committee the other day and she aid yes. She never stop." For years, he donated one day a week to a chnic in Tijuana and free med1c1nes to two centers there for the poor. She provided free medical care for nine convents in San Dieg . She was on the board of the San Diego College for omen when it began rn 1952. She wa on the first board in the merged colleges for men and women that became USO in 1972. For 10 year . he served as USO' Plea U EDO,D

Tribune photo by &b Redding ANNE SWANKE REME!\1BERED IN TOUCHING MOMENT AT USO COMMENCEMENT USO President Author Hughes, right, presents degree to slain woman's father, Dr. John Swanke

Continued From B-1 body wa found four days later in a remote area of Spring Valley. "We are presenting the bachelor of arts degree, magna cum laude, to Dr. Swanke for his daughter, Anne," Furay said. Dr. Swanke, who is a professor at USD, accepted the degree without comment and quickly moved away. As he and his wife, Kathleen, walked away from the stadium and toward their car, Swanke was asked about lns feelings after receiving his daughter's degree. "I am grateful to the university for presenting our daughter's degree to

us," he said. "We are disappointed that our daughter wasn there to accept it." He declined further comment. Earlier, Peter M, McGuine, speak- ing for the senior class, had lauded Anne Swanke for her "genuine con- cern for others" and her keen inter- est in music and drama. McGuine, who won the university's Franklin Award as the top male gra- duating student, compared Swanke's life to that of Mother Teresa of India, a Roman Catholic missionary whose work among the poor earned her a Nobel Peace Prize. "Both can serve as models for our lives," he said. Dr. Author Hughes, USD president, in an address to the gr duates, de- plored the "increas1 gly fragile rela- tionship" between the United States and Mexico. "The (present) immigration policy of the U.S. IS blatantly outmoded and needs revision," he said. "The relationship between the two countries has been strained." He told of the economic plight of the Mexicans, adding, "And the issue isn't really a Mexican issue. It's also an issue for the United States." Hughes exhorted the graduates to use their leadership abilities to help resolve the difficulties that beset Mexico. "My honest and sincere hope is that your education has prepared you well to become leaders," he said. Dr. Anita V. Figueredo, a La Jolla

physician and longtime USO board of trustees member, was presented an honorary doctor of humane letters degree from Hughes. Speaking oi her medical career and her lJm1ly life - she is the mother of mne children - Figueredo said, "I've had a rich life. After near- ly 70 years, I wouldn't want to change any of it." She said her Roman Catholic edu- cation and faith were responsible for the contentment she enjoys. "You must get involved (with oth- ers)," she told the graduates. "You must learn to say 'yes' when you're asked for help. Involvement brings happiness." In a morning ceremony yesterday, 376 students were awarded degrees by the USO School of Law. Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr., a Yale Law School professor, gave the prin- cipal address, titled "A Lawyer's -' Personal Judgment." 1,

Tribune pbcto by Scott LinDett

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DR. ANITA FIGUEREDO 'Soft- poken strength' I

IJ~ vice-chairman. And she has t>ecome a close international collaborator with Mother Theresa's Missionaries of Charity, the kind of friend that Mother Theresa could call and say, "Help me build a center in Amman." (Anita did.) In an interview last week at the Doyle home, a colonial Spanish structure on the beach in La Jolla, Figueredo asks, "Why should I stop working now? I'm 68, but I love my practice." She says she is more excit- ed than ever about her field, oncolo- gy. the branch of medicine that deals with tumors. "Cancer?" she says. "It isn't depressing. I have numerous patients I operated on 30 years ago. And now we can do so many things we couldn't do 30 years ago." She is sure she can help others better now than she ever could before. "I've spent my life," she says, "preparing for this." In fact, Anita told her mother she wanted to be a doctor when she was a child of 5 in Costa Rica. Most re- markably, her mother listened to her and took her off despite family pro- tests, to New York City. "Who listens

to a child of five?" asks Anita. "Well, my mother did." And so, Sarita Villegas, already di- vorced from Roberto Figueredo, pulled up stakes in Costa Rica and moved to this country with little Anita in tow. She had $24 in her pock- et, she couldn't speak English, and all she knew was embroidery. The year was 1921. But she found a room with a Costa Rican family in Spanish Harlem and, to start with, she got a job sewing on a big ma- chine, leather aprons for cobblers. Eventually, she became a seamstress in a New York sweatshop, and a union organizer. She did piece work on the side (she would later tell her grandchildren that she was selected to make Eleanor Roosevelt's inaugu- ral gown) and ran a boarding house, too. Sometimes Anita would wake in the morning to find that her mother hadn't gone to bed. "She had worked the whole night through, ironing sheets." She worked bard because she wanted to prepare Anita for her pre- cocious dream, making sure her daughter got an excellent education - at first with nuns in New York

City, then at a boarding school in Vir- ginia called Southern Seminary and finally at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart. Anita herself wangled a partial scholarship out of Mother Grace Damman at Manhattanville, and smiles now at her boldness then. "I told her, Tm not going to take all this Catholic stuff without proof.' She listened to all this guff and let me in She didn't really have a scholarship available. It was just charity. She just took what my mother could af- ford. I think she might have been im- pressed that I was so determined to be a doctor. There weren't many women who wanted to be doctors in those days." Anita entered the Long Island Col- lege of Medicine in 1936, one of four women in a class of 98. There she met Bill Doyle, her future husband, and married him in 1942, at the end of her internship, just before he joined the U.S. Navy. While he was a medical officer aboard a destroyer in the Pacific, she became the first woman surgeon in the history of New York Memorial Cancer Hospital (which most New Yorkers now know

as Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.) On Dec. 1, 1942, Look magazine celebrated that first with a four-page photographic essay on this little package of dynamite. (She was, and is, a mere 5 feet tall, and it is hard to tell what color her eyes are, because they seem to transmit, rather than reflect, light.) When the war ended in 1945, Bill wrote Anita and told her about a par- adise called La Jolla. Sight unseen, she opted for it. When Bill finished his residency in pediatrics, they came west with three little tots and Anita pregnant with Tommy, and each of them set up their own shops. Their family grew. In 1963, their ninth child, Bobby, died at age 2 in the garden pool of their home on the beach. At Bobby's requiem mass, Anita was strong. "God," she said simply, "needed him more than we did." Almost two decades later, they would lose Tommy, but the way they would do so would be an inspiration to their wide circle of friends in San Diego. Tom was "the most dynamic of all the kids,'' a natural en-

trepreneur who started his own fish business at 22, and then, a place that became one of La Jolla's most popu- lar seafood restaurants. (It is now Hartley's at Bird Rock.) In 1978, he developed a very malignant brain tumor. "After his surgery," recalls Anita, "Tommy was sort of dead. I went to bed that night and then, all of a sud- den, I was suffused with light and I felt the words of the twenty-third Psalm, you know, 'The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want'? And then came so many words of scripture. Scripture I never knew I knew before filled my being. All the words added up to one thing: Everything's going to be all right. I got out of bed and knelt down. I was suffused with the Holy Spirit." It took Tom five years to die. "His passing," Anita recalls, "brought ev- eryone together in the most remark- able unity. We learned to accept." Anita says she has never known anyone of such soft-spoken strength like that of Mother Theresa, whom she first met in San Diego in 1960. "I had sent her $10 once and a note. She

wrote back and said she prayed we would meet someday. Then I heard she was speaking in San Diego, so I went to see her." With the merest of cues, Mother Theresa flashed Fi- gueredo a smile and opened her arms and cried, "Anita!" "We chatted together for the rest of the evening," Anita recalls. The two of them became very close. Four times Anita has gone to India 'to seE Mother Theresa, and one other timE they met by chance in Jerusalem. What has it been like to touch a saint? Anita blinks. "Mother Theresa didn't teach me about the poor. My own mother did that. Mother Theresa taught me to be more caring about the people closest to me. Sometimes, 'the poor' are the people closest to us, the people we take most for grant- ed." By that criterion, Figueredo has never been poor. Nobody takes her for granted, not her husband, nor her seven surviving children, all success- ful professionals now i(I their own right. And now, it is clear, neither does USD.

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