Catherine the Great Is Final Answer to a Niemanite's Prayers

There's probably only one Radcliffe mother in the United States who can dance the Charleston, discuss world affairs intelligently, manage a busy office, and stand up from a sitting position on the floor without using her hands.

Not simultaneously, of course. But only a deluded innocent would make Catherine (Totty) Lyons a substantial wager she couldn't.

Totty Lyons is, happily, secretary to the curator of the Nieman Fellowships, Louis Lyons. Happily because Louis Lyons is her husband, as of July 31, 1950, which makes office and home affairs mesh smoothly, and perhaps just as happily from the standpoint of the dozen Nieman Fellows who hit Harvard every fall.

Totty is the answer to a Nieman Fellow's prayer. She knows where to find an apartment, how to corral baby-sitters, locations of good restaurants, and answers to the other 11,999 questions she gets the first day. And she has a small fee with the 12,000th answer--to coerce an outgoing newsman into putting a nickel into her parking meter.

Totty manages to interrupt her office work for any Nieman problem. She even anticipates them. Most Niemans don't know, for example, that Totty personally checked all the apartments the foundation had arranged in advance for them.

Brown-eyed and an Ohioan, Mrs. Lyons went to Wittenberg College in Springfield, also Ohio, and then to Simmons in Boston. That was just the beginning of her collegiate tour.

Next she spent a year as a secretary to the president of the University of Illinois, and in 1940 she became office manager of American Defense--Harvard Group. After the war she worked with the Harvard Speakers' Bureau and as secretary to philosophy professor Ralph Barton Perry. She held that position part-time when she moved into the Nieman office Jan. 1, 1947, but dropped it when she assumed the full-time job of being Mrs. Lyons last July.

Her acquaintance with still a fifth college, Radcliffe, comes through her daughter, Sheila, who's a freshman there.

Totty displayed her look-no-hands technique of arising from the floor at a Nieman-and-wife gathering one evening when there weren't enough chairs to go around. Only the Nieman wives were surprised; the fellows take it for granted Totty can accomplish anything.