Win Sally Osborn Shankel
1893
- 1978
Win Osborn was born in
Haines, Oregon. Following completion of high school in Portland, she attended
the Oregon Agricultural College, now Oregon State College, and the Oregon State
Normal School. In 1917 she began her career teaching art and elocution (speech)
at Walla Walla College, now University. Two years later she married George
Edgar Shankel, a college student. After his
graduation in 1920, they moved to Canada, where he served as head of the
English department at Canadian Junior College, now Canadian University College,
for five years.
The Shankels
went to Cape Town, South Africa, in 1925, where he taught English and history
and she taught music at Helderberg College. He became
president of the college in 1936, after he had completed a master's degree in
history at the University of Washington during a furlough in 1932-33. They
returned to WWC in 1944, where he taught in the history department for two
years and continued work on a doctorate at the University of Washington.
During this time, their
daughter, Virginia-Gene, a young but very accomplished violinist, began her
teaching career with a position in the WWC music department. In 1946 the family
moved to Atlantic Union College, where Shankel served
as academic dean and professor of history. During his eight-year tenure in
those positions, both Win and Virginia-Gene taught music at the college.
Mother and daughter were
inseparable then, and in subsequent years the family remained close after
Virginia-Gene's marriage to Harvey Rittenhouse, a physician, in 1950. Win would
also teach music when her husband worked at West Indies College in Jamaica.
In the early years of the New
England Youth Ensemble, led by Virginia-Gene, Shankel
became a familiar figure during the group's extensive touring. To her former
students and members of the NEYE from those years, she was affectionately known
as "Mom Shankel." She was living with her
daughter when she died in Stoneham, Massachusetts, at age 84.
ds/2005
Sources:
Obituary, George Edgar Shankel, Review and Herald,
10 March 1977, 23; Obituary, Win O. Shankel, 11 May
1978, 23; African Division Outlook, 5 December 1929, 27 October 1930, 6;
Southern African Division Outlook, 15 July 1935; Atlantic Union Gleaner,
30 August 1946, 5; See Virginia-Gene Rittenhouse biography for additional
information.