THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 25, 1995 TAG: 9510250060
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KRYS STEFANSKY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 145 lines
HER TOTE BAG is still on her arm when Dot Hinman bustles into her office, grabs the phone and starts answering questions.
``We always have to tell her to put her stuff down,'' says Marjorie Wheeler, Hinman's assistant at Virginia Wesleyan College.
Hinman is director of the Adult Studies Program, a place where she has a reputation for working long hours and mothering returning students who are afraid they're too old for college.
Students have problems, they see Dot Hinman. Evening faculty has questions, they see Dot Hinman. Area volunteer groups need help. . . ah, you get the picture.
Friends say excess energy waggles her thumbs while she drives, listening to educational tapes and books during her commute. She once stayed awake until 3 a.m. in a cornfield to get a wide open view of Halley's comet.
``She's a person with an adolescent's energy in an adult suit,'' said Bill Ruehlmann, associate professor of journalism and communications.
Heading Wesleyan's adult program is just part of Hinman's one-woman assault on life. She mentors children, works as a docent, organizes her own volunteer groups when she sees a cause without a solution.
She says, at 64, she's lucky to have no family demands and the time to indulge her own interests.
She lives in a sparsely furnished trailer south of Pungo that reveals a naturalist's love of the outdoors. Outside, a plain board swing hangs by its ropes from a tree at the edge of the woods. Inside, its peace and idyll are strewn with meaningful bits - her grandfather's snowshoes, odd chunks of rock, seashells, a shed snakeskin she once found in her closet - it intrigued, rather than horrified her. She jokes that she has a catch-and-release program for mice.
Hinman came to Virginia Wesleyan 11 years ago after coordinating and directing adult and continuing education programs at colleges in Iowa. She was looking for a place close enough to mountains to indulge her passion for camping and hiking, close enough to water to float her canoe without too much trouble. Mountains were especially important. That's where she goes to unwind, packing a one-person tent and just enough food to make it back to town.
The respites are necessary. Since she joined this campus, the adult student population at Virginia Wesleyan has swelled from 79 students to 378, creating 12- to 14-hour work days for her.
Hinman knows what it's like to pick up the pieces of an unfinished education and start again.
There were no Dot Hinmans when Dot Hinman went to school in 1966 at Cornell College in tiny Mt. Vernon, Iowa.
Professors were uneasy about a 35-year-old mother of two sitting in their classrooms. Adults talked too much, asked too many questions and were not welcome.
``I had one professor tell me no, I could not take his course,'' said Hinman. Seventeen years before, she had enrolled in the college fresh out of high school from southside Chicago, where she'd grown up. She fell in love with a fellow student, married and dropped out to put her husband through grad school. She worked, waited until her two sons were both in elementary school and then returned.
Hinman stepped around the stodgy naysayers and graduated summa cum laude with a degree in biology.
But prejudices against older, non-traditional students ran deep.
``They never asked me to join the biology honor society even though I won the biology original research prize,'' she recalled.
The experience defined her life's work.
``I'm kind of in the realizing potential business with the Adult Studies Program,'' she said. ``We're facilitating people's growth.''
Divorced, she moved here in 1984 after earning a master's in higher education.
She carved herself a niche. At home in the trailer park, she organized the children to clean up the neighborhood. Together, they police a stretch of country road around the corner. It's marked by an Adopt-a-Street sign labeled ``Dot and the Kids.''
``We won a grabber,'' she said, reaching beside her front porch and hauling out a pole with a claw at the end. The kids love to use it: ``We divide up the road by telephone poles so everybody gets a turn.''
Knee-high in roadside weeds or sitting side-by-side eating hamburgers and talking about homework with 14-year-old Beshala ``Shala'' Whaley at Bayside Middle School, Hinman feels as if she's doing something important.
So many children could do so much if somebody believed in them, Hinman says. Willie L. Braye counts himself lucky that Hinman feels that way. Braye is director of guidance and counseling at the middle school where Hinman is a mentor.
``I tell you she's fantastic,'' said Braye. ``I've known her three years and it seems like I've known her 10. If I tell her I need a favor, she says `What is it.' She always says yes.''
Especially at Virginia Wesleyan where she's done everything for students from supplying cough syrup to buying their books to lending them money.
``She seeks no credit or adulation,'' said Lambuth M. Clarke, former president of the college. She just wins it.''
Like this: When the college reintroduced a foreign language requirement, something adult students particularly dreaded, Hinman took two years of Spanish just to prove that it could be done.
A few years ago, Hinman took Helen Friszolowski under her wing. She could tell Friszolowski was nervous about returning to college as an adult even before she enrolled.
``She used to call me and tell me I could do it,'' Friszolowski recalled.
``I just started calling her Mom,'' Friszolowski said, adding that Hinman invited Friszolowski to live with her for a few months when she needed a place to stay. ``She helped me get a leave of absence from school and came to see me while I was sick. She was the first one I hugged when I graduated. I hugged my husband second.'' Now Friszolowski is getting a nursing degree. Hinman goes along during exams for moral support.
That's not unusual. Fred Weiss teaches accounting and business courses. He remembers when one of his students failed her first exam and marched straight to Hinman's office announcing she'd quit.
``Dot talked with her, she came back, did extremely well and is very successful now in the business world,'' he said.
Her generosity of spirit is what Hinman's friends mention most often.
Years ago, she taught Margaret Zimmerman, associate professor of psychology at the college, how to backpack.
``We've both reached the age of elegance,'' Zimmerman said, ``and she can run me into the ground.'' Hinman sets a tough pace on uphill climbs in the Blue Ridge but always stops to point out interesting geological formations, ferns or fascinating lichen.
At work, Hinman has made the faculty take the adult program seriously and woos them any way she can, especially with chocolate.
To get daytime profs to check their mailboxes, where she leaves messages for their students, Hinman stuffs them with candy bars. ``Snickers bait,'' she calls it. She stocks a kitchenette beside her office with hot chocolate, teas and snacks and runs it on the honor system.
``She takes a soaking,'' said Zimmerman, ``But she gets a lot. Not with a whip, with chocolate.''
The faculty had better eat up.
``It's time for somebody else to have fun here,'' Hinman said. ``The program needs new blood. I don't think anybody should run anything for more than 10 years.''
So next summer she's moving to Chicago to work with her sister-in-law, who manages small associations.
``I'm going to be the gopher,'' Hinman said. ``I'm just going to plug in where there's a hole. The fun part is going to be learning a new job and seeing how you can make things better.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color staff photo by Christopher Reddick \ The Virginian-Pilot
Dot Hinman is full of adolescent energy that keeps her bouncing from
her job at Virginia Wesleyan to projects in her Beach neighborhood.
Color staff photo by L. Todd Spencer
Dot Hinman, director of adult studies at Virginia Wesleyan, revels
in her love of the outdoors. Left, she mentors Beshala Whaley at
Bayside Middle School.
by CNB