CHAPTER EIGHT
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Katherine Coleman was born and raised in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Race relations there were somewhat less tense than in Virginia. Katherine’s father worked at the Greenbrier, where he would one day meet Dorothy’s husband. Katherine also sometimes worked at the resort, as a maid and later as a store clerk. She impressed guests and management with her intelligence and charm. Katherine inherited her father’s unusual gift for mathematics and was academically so talented that she skipped from second grade to fifth. By age fifteen, she was attending West Virginia State College. William Schieffelin Claytor, a brilliant, demanding professor, created advanced classes specially for her and urged her to go to graduate school.
After her 1937 graduation, however, Katherine took a teaching job in Marion, Virginia. There she met Jimmy Goble, a chemistry teacher. They married but kept their marriage quiet, because schools did not generally hire married women. Two years later, Katherine took a better-paying job in Morgantown, West Virginia. The next spring, she was asked to be one of three Black students to integrate West Virginia University by attending its graduate school. She attended the summer session, but she left the program when she became pregnant. She returned to the classroom back in Marion, in 1944, when Jimmy came down with an illness, and his principal offered her the job as Jimmy’s replacement.
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