Session #2 - Estate of Penny and William (Bill) Allderdice - September 24th - October 7th

Dr. Penelope Witte Allderdice had an accomplished life as a cytogeneticist at Memorial University in St. John’s NL, before retiring and obtaining an M.Div degree at Meadville-Lombard  in Chicago. She lived with fierce resolve right to the end.

Penny grew up in a former Shaker Village in Harvard, Mass, where her family owned the “Square House,” previous home of Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the Shaker Movement. The Witte family grew their own food, cooked, knit and sewed, and strove for self-sufficiency. Penny treasured raising animals, riding her bike, and exploring. As an adult she would often credit her childhood in the Shaker Village for fostering her independence, curiosity, self-reliance, self-confidence, and love of nature. She also shared the Shaker belief in equality of the sexes.

Penny earned an A.B. from University of Chicago and landed in a Master’s program in plant genetics at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. There she met her future husband, William, a former cowboy. They married and bought a Montana cattle ranch. They taught in a one-room school, lived on venison Bill hunted, and raised what Penny always called her “finest crop:” their three children, Edward, Jacob and Frances. They eventually made the hard choice to sell their below-subsistence-level ranch and returned to grad school in Bozeman, ending up at Columbia University, NYC. They were both hired at Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1973.

Penny became a well-known professor at Memorial and the Janeway Children’s Hospital, teaching cytogenetics to medical students, interns, and residents. Her research was widely published and she received many competitive research grants. She served on the National Research Council of Canada and other national bodies. She was best known for finding the cause of severe disabilities among residents of Sandy Point, NL (a “periocentric inversion on chromosome 3,” AKA “Allderdice Syndrome”). Penny retired as Professor Emeritus in 1997.

Penny’s passion for learning and lifelong interest in the sacred (her maternal grandfather was a minister in Oak Park, Illinois) led her back to the Chicago after retiring from MUN. As a Unitarian-Universalist chaplain she worked in Buffalo, Hamilton,Toronto, and in St John’s.

But Penny’s great passion was always her garden. In St. John’s, she was known for her ducks, turkeys, and hens, her tulips, daffodils and scilla, and a forest of special trees: among them beeches, lindens, acer griseum (and even a gingko, grown from a nut harvested in Toronto).

Dr. William (Bill) Allderdice was raised on a Montana homestead as a cowpoke. He studied geography at Utah State and Montana State, was a dryland rancher. Three children were the best harvest.

Earned a PhD from Columbia University (NYC) and became an Economic Geographer at Memorial University. Students called him "Uncle Bill". He too transitioned from rural school. Bill retired in 1996 and painted Montana childhood story memories. 

In 2016, Bill had a solo exhibit at The Rooms called A Glimpse of Eden He was active in MUN faculty union, a Humanist working for gender equality.