Helen Carlotta Rose, an Emerson trustee emerita and 1938 graduate, died at her Palm Beach, Fla. home March 23. Rose, who majored in speech pathology, became a trustee in 1952. Passionate about education for deaf people, she helped open Emerson’s Robbins Speech, Language, and Hearing Center in 1953. “The adult deaf were the forgotten people when I asked my newly-formed women’s committee at Emerson College to help me get a clinic started for speech therapy,” Rose told the Boston Globe in 1970.
For decades after, she continued to work with Emerson: fundraising when the college was in serious financial straits in the 1980s, leading an effort to restore what is now called the Cutler Majestic Theater, and creating Emerson’s first endowed full-tuition scholarship in 1994. “Helen was a wonderful friend of the College,” President M. Lee Pelton told the college website, “contributing in many ways, both meaningful and long-lasting.”