Tribute to Jean (nee Whittaker) Rohde Mahn

A Tribute to Jean (nee Whittaker) Rohde Mahn

September 10, 2009

In his book, Telling Secrets, Frederick Buechner writes of the importance of personal history:

Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually (p. 30).

In the fall of 2004 I began to work on keeping track of such stories through a Master’s thesis, collecting oral histories of a handful of women from the early days of Briercrest College & Seminary. Jean Rohde Mahn was one of the five women I interviewed. She invited me to stay overnight in her lovely Athens, Ohio home, which I did in June 2005—an elegant and gracious home, full of antiques and memories. We had nearly 24 hours together. I met her darling dog Muffy, two of her caregivers and one good friend. We went to the gym where she rode a recumbent bike, and she proudly toured me around Athens, especially the university. Meeting Jean was one of the great serendipities of my graduate studies.

Jean’s early life involved many sacrifices in and for Briercrest, while her later life led to unimagined opportunities. She had a career in higher education, followed by two special marriages, first to Tom Rohde, a Wall Street lawyer, and later to Bob Mahn, a faculty member at Ohio University. Keenly interested in matters of historical record, Jean was eager to meet with me. She remained connected with Briercrest throughout her life, as a supporter, an encourager, and sometimes challenger. During one life season, Jean and Bob lived in Moose Jaw and ate frequently at the former Pilgrim Restaurant.

Jean Mahn’s life is a story of reversed fortunes. As a girl in the 1930s involved in a fledgling college, she felt that she suffered and sacrificed many things by someone else’s choosing, yet these things were returned to her and multiplied later in life. She told me her father could have been a millionaire, but that he gave it all away to the school; later in life she would associate with millionaires, naming one as a best friend and, with her second husband, would give a $1 million gift to support Ohio University Libraries. Denied a bicycle in her teens, she flew on the Concorde jet in her seventies. She went from cleaning up Briercrest’s Yale Hotel in the 1930s and working into her 50s to support herself and supplement her parents’ pension, to marrying—for the first time at 53—a husband who, she said, “did not want me to work.” From giving up her bed for countless guests in her teens, to being “able to stay at [New York's] Waldorf Astoria any time, any weekend” because of her first husband’s job. Both husbands took care of her and helped to provide for her parents. Jean Mahn’s life is a great reversal: closed and “governed” at first, but ever expanding.

In spite of marrying so late in life, Jean’s husbands occupy a prominent place in her narrative. During her single years, Jean did some things she had always dreamed of, like learning to dance, but it was after she married that she really felt she began to have “an exciting life.” Near the end of her interview, Jean told me, “I have a lot to be thankful for, that I had such good friends and I don’t suppose anyone’s had the privileges that I’ve had in my later life.” Indeed, few people experience such dramatic shifts in a lifetime.

Jean met her first husband through a chance encounter, meeting Tom Rohde at Le Moal Restaurant in New York City through a stranger who very kindly invited her to share his taxi when she was stranded due to a snowstorm at La Guardia Airport.

She met her second husband through similar happenstance. Jean had always tried to follow her father’s advice: “Anytime you go to a strange city, be sure to take a bus trip if you can.” This is how she met her second husband, Bob Mahn, whom she married twenty years later. She was able to convalesce in her final home in Athens, Ohio thanks to Bob, who had arranged 24-hour live-in care for her after he died.

Jean basked in the companionship and privileges that came with both of her marriages, yet she remained quite independent. For example, refusing to cancel a lunch date when Bob Mahn came from the States to visit her in Moose Jaw, then putting off marriage to him until after a pre-planned trip on the Queen Mary to the British Isles.

Very interested in historical records, Jean referred often to her late husband Bob’s archival work at Ohio University. In fact, because of their separate academic careers they often consulted with each other in the 20 years between meeting and marrying. As you know, together they founded the Robert E. and Jean R. Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections at the Ohio University Libraries. Jean used our visit very intentionally to provide me with as much material as possible to support my research: letters, newspaper clippings, other writings, and pictures.

I emerged from my research with a sense of wonder at being entrusted with precious memories, living connections to history that enrich the particular story of Briercrest and the wider stories of women in Saskatchewan and North America. Perhaps in Jean Rohde Mahn’s story someone will, as Frederich Buechner hopes, “recognize that in many ways it is also” theirs. Certainly, in Jean’s life we can see the active hand of God. To have known Jean, even for 24 hours, and to have been entrusted with her story has enriched my life.