MARTHA MOSS QUO
T
he day after her four-year stint was up in the Air Force, Martha Moss Quo signed up for a whole new kind of duty tour at Georgia Tech. She spent five years as Tech's first female GI Bill student, earning a bachelor's degree in textiles in 1958 and a master's degree in textiles in 1960. "Since my longtime desire was to major in chemistry rather than engineering, 1 switched to the textile chemistry option in the School of Textiles because the chemistry major was not opened yet to females," Quo says. "1 was then able to take all the chemistry courses I needed as part of the textiles program." Quo went to work as a textile chemist for Bancroft Co., in Wilmington, Del, in September 1959, finishing her master's thesis during the course of the year and returning to Tech for graduation. In 1962, Quo moved to California to work for Douglas Aerospace Engineering Co., where she met her husband, Ed Quo. The couple have three grown daughters and four grandchildren. After taking a decade off from full-time work to raise her daughters, Quo returned to the workforce in 1977 as a lab assistant in the Orange County coroner's office, then worked for the Los Angeles County Toxicology Lab until 1981, when she joined SmithKline Beacham Clinical Laboratory. She retired in 1996. "I will always be grateful for the education I received at Georgia Tech," says Quo. — Maria M. Lameiras
MARY NELL SANTACROCE DramaTech's 'Conch'
M
ary Nell Santacroce is to DramaTech what Bobby Dodd is to the Yellow Jackets," author Terry Kay, a former columnist for the Atlanta Journal, wrote in 1965. "She is the unquestioned leader, the catalyst that turns common drama into a living experience, both for her players and those played to. If you had to say it simply, Mary Nell Santacroce has the touch." Santacroce first took the stage for a DramaTech production as an actress in April 1947. She played the role of the "lovely daughter" in the troupe's second production, "The Drunkard." She directed her first of 47 DramaTech productions in 1949.
Dubbed "Coach" by DramaTech students, Santacroce served as director until 1966, when she returned to fulltime acting, including the title role in an Alliance Theater production of "Driving Miss Daisy." Under her direction, DramaTech was named one of the country's 100 outstanding amateur theatrical groups by the National Theater Arts Council. In 1998, she was presented the Atlanta Arts & Business Council's Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award. Santacroce once said she didn't have a favorite DramaTech production. "Each one is special in its own way and temperamental in its own way. Every play is a little, tiny lifetime that you spend in rehearsal and performance." Mary Nell Santacroce died in February 1999. — Kimberly Link-Wills
ANNE BROWN l QOl
A
nne Brown was the first female student to lead cheers on the sidelines at Georgia Tech football games. Brown enrolled at Tech as an architecture major in 1953. She described her role as "a sort of ornament — like a fancy radiator cap when the squad forms a car or does other precision stunts." She left Tech after a year. Female cheerleaders would not rev up the home crowd at Grant Field again until 1960. Fall 2002 • GEORGIA TECH 4 7