Bonnie Ethel Cone - Early Career

Early Career

At Coker Bonnie majored in math and earned a scholarship by grading math papers. She was president of the Math Club and the YWCA. She played the piano and was a member of the basketball, field hockey, and swimming teams. She also rowed on the crew team. Graduating magna cum laude in 1928, she got a job teaching math, science and French at a high school in Lake View, South Carolina. French was not her best subject, and she struggled to teach it during one anxiety-filled year in a classroom beside the principal's office where everything she taught could be heard next door. She abandoned French but continued to teach math and science at Lake View four more years, then moved to McColl, South Carolina, and later to Gaffney, South Carolina, where in 1940 her reputation for excellence in teaching brought her to the attention of Dr. Elmer H. Garinger, principal of the 1,400-student Central High School in Charlotte, North Carolina.

When Dr. Garinger invited her to join the faculty at Central High, Bonnie Cone accepted on condition that she be allowed to teach more than one subject. She didn't like the idea of teaching the same course over and over all day. At age 33, she joined the Central High faculty as a roving math instructor, moving from classroom to classroom to teach basic math, algebra, plane geometry, trigonometry, solid geometry and college algebra. She also ran the school's testing program. Central High students of that period remember seeing her walk the crowded hallways between classes, her short, dark hair pulled tight behind her head, her blue eyes sparkling and her body leaning forward as if she were determined to get where she was going. She usually carried a sheaf of student papers under one arm and a collection of math teaching tools a wooden compass and a protractor under the other.

During summers she attended Duke University and worked toward a masters degree in mathematics, which she earned in 1941. In 1943, when World War II had made math instructors difficult to find, the mathematics chairman at Duke invited her to teach in the Navy V-12 program underway there. She accepted and was the only woman teaching on Duke's all-male West Campus. Among the students she taught from 1943 to 1945 was author William Styron, who resisted Miss Cone's instruction, complaining that he wasn't interested in math, that he intended to become a writer. She told him that his first priority was to survive the war, and to do that he would need to learn mathematics. The writing could come later. After the war he sent her a thank you note and an autographed copy of his first published novel, Lie Down in Darkness.