Bonnie Ethel Cone - Early Life

Early Life

Bonnie Ethel Cone was born in Lodge, South Carolina, June 22, 1907, into what was to become a family of teachers. She was the youngest of four children (two sons, two daughters) born to Addie Harter and Charles Jefferson Cone. Three of the four children entered the teaching profession, as did three of the grandchildren.

Her father was a farmer and businessman who also served as the mayor of Lodge, a community of about 200 people near Walterboro in Colleton County, South Carolina, just off present-day Interstate 95 in what is known in South Carolina as the Low Country. Her father also ran a dealership and garage for Hudson automobiles and was a distributor of Singer sewing machines. Bonnie Cone's mother, Addie, was a talented seamstress and needleworker who made most of her children's clothes. She also was a gracious and resourceful homemaker with precise ideas about keeping house. Whether the task was doing laundry, setting a table, or arranging flowers, she taught her children to do it properly. Bonnie Cone inherited her grace, her precision and her resourcefulness.

From her earliest days Bonnie Cone planned to be a teacher. She once recalled that while feeding chickens in the backyard of her parents home, she pretended the chicks were her pupils. I taught every little animal around in those fantastic years, she said. A neighbor who owned a piano taught her to play and made music an important part of Bonnie Cone's upbringing. Until age 12, when she got a piano of her own, Bonnie practiced on an imaginary keyboard in the windowsill of her bedroom, she said. She was such a good student that when the town music teacher married and moved away, parents of other piano students prevailed on Bonnie, then a teenager, to take over the teaching chores, which she did. She also learned to play an organ. Baptized by total immersion in the Little Salkahatchie River, she became a member of Carters Ford Baptist Church and played the church's pump organ at worship services.

She attended public schools and was a good student, but in the eyes of her parents was too young and shy to graduate at the end of her last year. In those days in the Lodge community, high school ended at the 9th grade. When her father sent her back for an extra year of schooling, she was assigned to the school's new teacher, Edwin Rentz, who helped her see the logic in mathematics and converted her into a lifelong mathematician. She had hoped to attend Winthrop College, the state's teacher training institution for women in Rock Hill, South Carolina, but her parents feared that Winthrop was too far and too large (1,200 students). Instead they enrolled her at Coker College, a women's school in Hartsville, South Carolina, where she was one of 275 students, including her older sister, Louise, with whom Bonnie roomed her first year.