For 27 years Betty Sheerer served as head of the Department of Child and Family Development—a position she never coveted. “But someone had to take it,” she recalls, “if we were going to accomplish what we wanted to accomplish.”
Despite her initial reluctance, Sheerer embraced the position in 1954 working with her faculty to set 5-, 10-, and 15-year goals and then proceeding to achieve them. The result is a department that was considered one of the nation’s best when Sheerer retired in 1981 and continues to enjoy that reputation today.
Sheerer’s first contact with the University of Georgia was in 1945, when she visited the university with a friend, Eulala Amos, who was teaching in the art department for the summer. “The weekend I was here the art faculty was going to the mountains to draw and paint, and we joined them,” she recalls. “I felt so at home.”
Amos accepted a position in 1949 with the art department, then led by its future namesake Lamar Dodd. He soon began telling Sheerer, who was on the Iowa State University faculty, that she too should join UGA. “He liked me and wanted me to come to home economics,” she says. “First he talked to Dean Pauline Knapp and then he worked on Maude Pye Hood, who had become acting dean, and she came up with a job for me.”
Sheerer arrived on campus in 1952 and was placed in charge of the McPhaul Child Development Lab, helping undergraduates understand the development of the babies cared for in the lab.
Just two years after her arrival, then-CFD department head Bill Sperry was promoted to the associate dean position.
“Bill and I were the only two PhDs in the department, so either I was going to be the department head or we would have to hire someone from outside,” Sheerer recalls. “Things were so informal then; he just came and talked with me about whether I wanted the position.”
Tenacity Pays
Among Sheerer’s earliest goals was to expand the professional opportunities for young women graduating with degrees in child and family development. “There weren’t many interesting opportunities for them at that time,” she explains.
She worked with the College of Education’s elementary education division to develop teacher-certification programs for CFD graduates, some of whom had general CFD degrees and others who had focused on working with children with developmental disabilities. The effort also included establishing a PhD in child and family development. First Sheerer and CFD faculty members Dick Endsley and Dan Hobbs worked together to write the proposal for the doctorate; and then they spent the summer lobbying for the support of psychology and sociology faculty who weren’t initially confident that a CFD doctoral program would differ significantly from those in their own fields.
“We were three tired ducks by the end of the summer,” she says.
Sheerer applied the same tenacity throughout her career, identifying potential faculty members she believed would help the department and persuading them to join. “I worked for 15 years to get Jim Walters to come here, and three years to get Dick Endsley,” she says. Other prominent CFD faculty members who joined during Sheerer’s tenure were Chuck Halverson, Sharon Price, Zo Stoneman, Keith Osborne, Gene Brody, Ray Yang, Joanne Aldous, and Karen Wampler.
When Sheerer began her UGA career, enrollment was only about 4,000 and faculty meetings were held in the Chapel. Not only were there no computers or air conditioning, she didn’t even have a phone.
“My office was on the second floor. If there was a call for me, someone would buzz me on the intercom and I’d run down to the main office on the first floor,” she says, chuckling at the memory. “One day, one of our graduate students became incensed that a department head didn’t have a phone. She put on her hat and her gloves and marched over to the university’s business office. It wasn’t long after that that I had a phone.”
Family Ties
Sheerer continues to live in the house in Winterville that she moved into in 1952 and shared with Amos, who died in 2001, and for many years with Amos’ parents as well. Although she never married, she is very close to her nieces and nephews and speaks proudly of the “daughter” and “grandchildren” she gained through her support of the Christian Children’s Fund.
In 1948, Sheerer began supporting Soledad Acuzar, a 14-year-old Filipina orphan. Although the fund’s official rules required that all letters go through their office, the head of the orphanage gave the girl Sheerer’s address and the two began to correspond directly.
She contributed funds that allowed Soledad to attend school, and they became so close that Soledad would address Sheerer as “Mother” in all of her letters. After Soledad married and had children, Sheerer sent money that allowed Soledad’s five children to attend school. Her generosity has allowed her “grandchildren” to graduate from high school and pursue further education in fields ranging from computer training to dentistry. In recent years, one of the children, Mervi, and his wife Jelly have moved to Lilburn; Mervi works as a virologist in AIDS research at Emory University. He and Jelly were among the many who attended Sheerer’s induction into the Honor Hall of Recognition during the annual awards luncheon this past February.
Although Sheerer only knew Soledad through her letters and has met just two of her children, Mervi and his brother Nole, she responds very simply when asked about their relationship.
“They’re family,” she says.
Dreamworks
While Sheerer spent much of her career as an administrator, she never gave up her early training as a counselor—training she had received as a graduate student of Carl Rogers, considered by many to be a founding father of psychotherapy research and the originator of the person-centered approach.
“When I first came, there was no way to have time for counseling, but eventually I was given time for academic advising, which allowed me to do counseling,” she says. “Most of my clients were from the university. An awful lot were my students, but there were other UGA people too.”
Sheerer continues to work as a counselor, although she now follows a somewhat different format.
“Years ago, there was a graduate student who started a little dream group,” she says, “and I remember thinking that was so trivial.” But Sheerer began to learn more about dream therapy and in 1979 became a facilitator, a role she has maintained for 30 years. She works both with groups and individuals but particularly enjoys the groups, where participants help each other interpret their dreams.
“Dreamers can get insights that are so profound,” she says. “I remember one lady who had had the same dream since she was 5 years old. With her group’s help, she finally figured out its meaning when she was 38, and she had such peace once she knew what it meant.
“My belief is that dreams are messages from God and that the messages are always helpful, even when the dream is a scary nightmare,” she says. “These groups aren’t about anyone telling someone what their dream means. Instead, we raise possible meanings. It’s the dreamer who knows when we’ve reached the right interpretation.”
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