Investing in Education
Perfect First-Grade Teacher
by Lory Hough
Doris Condon
Jane Condon, Ed.M.'74, and Ken Bartels seem different in many ways -- she's a comedian who focused on children's television while a student at the Ed School, he's a former Wall Street executive who graduated from the Business School -- but when it comes to Condon's mother, they agree completely.
"She was the ideal first-grade teacher," Bartels said of Doris Condon, who died in 1990 after more than 30 years teaching in public schools in southeastern Massachusetts.
"Exactly the kind of person you'd want to teach first grade," Condon echoed, ticking off a list of attributes that included warm and loving. "Everyone said this, not just her daughter and son-in-law."
This is why the couple, who live in Greenwich, Connecticut, with their two sons, Todd, who graduated from Harvard College in 2006, and Mac, currently a Harvard sophomore, decided to start a scholarship fund in memory of Doris Condon.
"She was a remarkable woman. She was raised by her mother and two aunts and went to Framingham State Teachers College," Condon said. "She'd drive by Wellesley College and dream of one of us kids going there. Her dream came true when I went. She was so proud, and was even more proud when I went to the Ed School. She joked and said I was a 'diamond in the rough.'"
Doris Condon's daughter was also a comedian in the making. After writing for Fortune and Life magazines and living in Japan for a few years when Ken worked for Morgan Stanley, she wrote a book about Japanese women. While on the book tour, she found that the audience often thought her readings were funny. She decided to give stand-up a try.
"My mother was my first audience," she said. "She was dying when I went into comedy, but she said to me: Do what you want."
Today, Condon does just that, performing on a regular basis at top comedy spots in New York City, including the Gotham Comedy Club and the Improv. She's appeared on The View and Lifetime television
and was dubbed the "the upper-crust Roseanne" by the Associated Press. For years she performed at the Clintons' posh annual Renaissance Weekend -- the latter something she joked about when the New York Times profiled her in 1995.
"I'm like Cinderella when I'm there," she said. "One weekend, Renaissance. The next, Porky's in New Jersey."
Condon said her life in comedy doesn't mean she's not serious, especially when it comes to supporting education in the United States. In fact, the two are a perfect mix.
"I do believe in combining education and entertainment," she said. "Really good comedy makes people laugh and think."
In addition to funding the scholarship in her mother's name, she and Bartels, who met during Ken's freshman year at Harvard, when she dated his roommate, try to support many schools in their lives: their own colleges and graduate schools, their children's schools, and local schools doing good work.
"I follow education like the Red Sox," Condon said, slipping again into her funny mode.
"We're consumers of the education system in the United States," Bartels said. "We're no different than many other families around the country. We were educated, and then we became parents. There is no greater resource for a country than its education system. It's really important that this resource be nurtured, developed, improved, and made productive for the next generation."
About the Article
A version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2007 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
photograph courtesy of Jane Condon
