President's Award Recipient: Isabella Dodds
Member Emerita
University Board of Governors
Love – of books, of education, and of one smart and entertaining man who kept her engaged and laughing – has been the engine of Isabella Dodds experience. A witty irreverence has helped too.
She will tell you that her life is a series of accidents that included the day she encountered some friends who were about to take the Boston Library exam, and impulsively joined them in their test-taking. (She passed, and was hired at the library.) Then one day she received a letter from Yale University requesting she become its documents librarian, so she took the job and moved to New Haven. And then there was the evening she agreed to accompany a young workplace colleague and his family to the theater, where she met his accomplished uncle, Robert Dodds, a successful businessman and a hard-working engineer. He had lost his wife to illness, caring for her while she was ill, and Isabella saw how that changed a person.
The two married, and Isabella found life with Robert Dodds more interesting than she ever could have imagined. “I had lived my life in varying shades of black and gray,” she says, “and I opened the door to him and life became technicolor.”
They spent more than 24 years together, raising their daughter Katharine, becoming involved in civic causes and promoting education. When her husband died, Isabella kept up her causes and took up his, including her support of numerous programs – the library and student scholarships among them - at the University of New Haven.
“I’m very interested in helping people at the time in life when they really need it,” she says, “and when it will make a difference for the rest of their lives.”