2007 Outstanding Alumna Award winners
2006 Outstanding Alumna Award winner
List of Past Outstanding Alumna Award Winners
2007 Outstanding Alumna
Jean Drennan Dortch, SCA '51
Julie Dortch Cragon, SCA '78
Julie Dortch Cragon, SCA ’78, turned her journals into a nationally treasured book, Bless My Child. Jean Drennan Dortch, SCA ’51 – with a lot of help from her daughter and family – turned Nashville’s St. Mary’s Bookstore into a comfortable place to enhance one’s faith. Together, Jean and Julie have turned the St. Cecilia Academy Alumnae Association into a family affair.
Both women were honored this summer as alumnae of the year at the annual June alumnae luncheon. They were honored for all they have done to further St. Cecilia Academy. Julie, however, will tell you that it is St. Cecilia Academy that has done so much for her family.
“Alumnae have helped us to build this business,” Julie said of St. Mary’s Bookstore, which the Most Rev. James D. Niedergeses, the retired Bishop of Nashville, asked Jean to take over in 1978 and which Jean bought from the Diocese the next year.
“When mom went to buy the business from the diocese, it was an alumna who helped her finance the business and an alumna’s husband who helped us get this building on West End and an alumna who helped us get the parking lot,” Julie said. “St. Cecilia alumnae come back into the store – two are working here now: Ginger Luster Sullivan runs our ordering and Kay Petri Galligher is our office manager and my sister, Donna Dortch Turner, does all book keeping and runs the store when I’m out of town.
“When you get someone who has been at St. Cecilia, you know what you’re getting. To me, once a St. Cecilia girl always a St. Cecilia girl.”
That is certainly true for Jean and Julie. Upon graduation from St. Cecilia Academy, Jean received an art scholarship to St. Mary’s Dominican College in New Orleans. Since then her life has been devoted to her family, the church and her art.
“I only know that I love St. Cecilia, and I credit God and the sisters for most of the wonderful things that have happened in my life,” Jean said. “My education, the fostering of my art, my values and my prayer life, without which I can do nothing,” were all developed at St. Cecilia Academy.
“My grandmother Rose Dalton Dortch went to St. Cecilia when it was a boarding school and then my mother went there, also at the Motherhouse, then my sisters and sister-in-law, nieces and daughters. We’ve all gone to SCA,” said Julie. “To me there is no better place for a Catholic girl especially, but also young women in general. It’s an opportunity for every young Christian woman because, like the bookstore, it gives you a comfortable stage to share your faith with women your age, the sisters and teachers.”
After graduating from St. Cecilia Academy in 1978, Julie received her bachelor’s degree in education and math from Vanderbilt University. She taught at St. Cecilia in the PE department and coached for a few years in the mid 1980s. Then she began working at St. Mary’s Bookstore.
“When my mom bought the store from the Diocese, she started taking the store to parishes and schools outside the Nashville area,” Julie said. “I followed her lead. We set up book and gift tables at schools and churches and gave book talks to groups such as garden clubs, young mothers, adult ed or whoever invited us.”
Julie is on the board of the Catholic Booksellers Association and is a member of the National Church Goods Association. She gives book suggestions and critiques upcoming books for several different Catholic publishing companies. Julie also was on the most recent Strategic Planning Committee for SCA.
“My first grade teacher was Sr. Christine and my principal for all four years at St. Cecilia was Sr. Ann Marie, both of whom became Mother Superior. I guess the Congregation figured if they could survive me, they should be sent straight to the top,” Julie said.
Julie and her husband Allen Cragon have six children: Beth, 18 SCA ’07, now attending Spring Hill College; Sarah, 16, a current SCA student; Will, 11; Margaret, 9; Nicholas, 7; all of whom attend St. Henry. Julia, 5, attends the Jewish Community Center Preschool.
Jean is a founding member of the Chestnut Group, Plein Air Painters for the Land in Nashville, a member of the Von Leibig Art Museum of Painters in Naples, Fla., and in 2006 was entered into The National Museum of Women in Art in Washington.
Jean and Bill have eight children, 24 grandchildren and one great-grandchild. All three of Jean’s daughters are St. Cecilia graduates, three of her granddaughters are graduates and one granddaughter will be a senior next year.
2006 Outstanding Alumna
Agnes Eckhardt Nixon
Class of 1940
Agnes Eckhardt Nixon is known as a great storyteller. No wonder then that her personal story is so remarkable.
Born in Chicago, Agnes grew up in Nashville. She was a day student at St. Cecilia Academy and excelled academically. Following in the footsteps of her mother, grandmother and aunts, who are all St. Cecilia alumnae, Agnes graduated from St. Cecilia Academy in 1940. “I loved the Dominican Sisters and looked forward to going to the Academy,” Agnes said. “The things I’ve learned from the Sisters I’ve kept with me throughout my life … the Sisters taught more than reading, writing and arithmetic.”
Agnes attended St. Mary’s Notre Dame for two years and one summer at Catholic University after St. Cecilia Academy. She graduated from the Northwestern School of Speech, where she was a classmate of Charlton Heston, Cloris Leachman and Patricia Neal. After graduating from Northwestern, she headed to New York where she wrote for several television dramatic series such as Robert Montgomery Presents and Hallmark Hall of Fame. Agnes married Robert Nixon and they had four children – Cathy, Mary, Robert and Emily. She is now the grandmother of 11 grandchildren as well. She lives in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, in a home that was a pre-Revolutionary inn. She also has an apartment in New York City and can often be found attending the daily 12:30 Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
When the nighttime programs moved to the west coast, Agnes and Bob chose to keep their family on the east coast, where they had settled, and she began writing for daytime programs. She served as head writer for Guiding Light and Another World; she created One Life to Live and All My Children. Agnes’ productivity is rare accomplishment in the world of entertainment. She has had a serial on the air five days a week, 52 weeks a year for more than 40 years, entertaining and educating some 60 million viewers.
Yet she is especially known, and honored, for introducing social issues to daytime viewers. She said, “I’ve always believed people can be entertained by learning.” Over the years her goal of educating while entertaining involved topics such as early detection of uterine cancer, alcoholism, drug abuse, teen-age prostitution, anorexia and bulimia, AIDS, racism, diabetic retinopathy, global warning, the dreadful plague of child abuse and domestic violence, and the growing problem of autism.
Agnes is a member of the International Radio and Television Society, a board member of the Museum of Television and Radio, a trustee of the National Arthritis Foundation, on the Advisory Council of the Wilmer Ophthalmologic Institute and a member of the Harvard Foundation.
She is the recipient of several prestigious awards including the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ Trustee Award. Barbara Walters, in presenting Nixon the award in 1981, noted that Agnes is both the first woman and the first television writer to be so honored by the Academy. In May 1982, she received the Junior Diabetes Association’s Super Achiever Award. In October of 1983, the Ladies Home Journal voted her one of America’s 100 most important women. In December 1984, she received the Communicator Award for American Women in Radio and Television. She has also received the following recognitions: Wilmer Eye Institute Award, 1984; American Academy of Achievement Gold Plate Award, 1993; and in 1995, she was installed into the TV Hall of Fame. And she has won eight Emmys.
Although she is far from home, Agnes’ heart has never been far from St. Cecilia Academy and the Dominican Sisters. For years she periodically sent her second-grade teacher, Sister Jane Dominic, a box filled with candy and treats. Sister would tuck the box away and share the goodies with any postulants at the Motherhouse who were homesick in their first year. Many sisters still have fond memories of “the special box.”
“I still remember my classes with Sister Mary Agnes and Sister Jane Dominic,” Agnes said. “It’s just a very precious part of my life that I still carry with me all these years later.”
Agnes has been one of our school’s greatest supporters throughout the years in every way possible. Whether sending care packages to the sisters or contributing to the endowment and building projects so that St. Cecilia would continue to flourish and grow, Agnes has always been a faithful friend.
Agnes couldn’t be in Nashville for this summer’s 101st alumnae luncheon but she sent a note to be read as she was honored as the outstanding alumna of the year.
“I am deeply honored by the accolade you have bestowed on me today and genuinely regret that I cannot be at the luncheon in person. Those of you who also belong to the grandmother category know that to be absent from a grandchild’s high school graduation is excused only by the aforementioned progenitor’s totally unexpected and most inconvenient death...”
“As I’m sure it is for all of you, my memories of St. Cecilia are among the most cherished. Cherished because all the good results that followed are indebted to the superior education I received at that convent academy on that north Nashville hill so long ago. I could go on for pages about all I learned there and how it helped me throughout my life. But, above all, the most important lesson the sisters of St. Cecilia taught me is the meaning and magnitude of love.”
Previous recipients of the Outstanding Alumna Award include:
| Mary Catherine Bradley Hannon |
'48 |
2005 |
| Sister Mary Justin Haltom, O.P. |
'74 |
2004 |
| Alice Byrne Burns |
'53 |
2003 |
| Sister Mary George Barrett O.P. |
'47 |
2002 |
| Joanne Collins Walker |
'52 |
2002 |
| Sister Janet Marie Geist, O.P.; |
'56 |
2001 |
| Katie Haltom |
'70 |
2000 |
| Sister Andrea Vaughn D.C. |
'39 |
1999 |
| Frances Petrucelli Varallo |
'31 |
1998 |
| Sister Dominica Gobel, O.P. |
'27 |
1997 |
| Sue Ann Mannion Simpson |
'46 |
1996 |
| Sister Assumpta Long, O.P. |
'50 |
1995 |
| Rose Dalton Dortch |
'14 |
1994 |
For more information, please contact the Alumnae Relations Office at (615) 383-3230 or alumnae@stcecilia.edu.
