Scholarship winners dine with Ladies Literary Club

Hannah Gottman and Megan Buford are the 2017 recipients of the Ladies Literary Club $1000 scholarships

By Carolyn Marnon – The Ladies Literary Club, established in 1896, is the oldest continuously meeting club in Wayne. Established by women for women in Wayne who didn’t have a chance to be educated back in the late 1800s, the goal was to learn about subjects such as geography and science. Today, the club is about having fun, meeting new friends and still, to learn.  Learning takes place through reading, attending lectures, seeing plays, and other activities where learning and enjoyment can take place.  It is also the goal of the club to give away two $1000 scholarships to young women each year, one from Wayne Memorial High School and one from John Glenn High School.
Each year, the club invites the scholarship winners to their annual dinner in May, dubbed the Scholarship Dinner.
The girls are chosen by the club’s scholarship committee which meets in April to read over the applications that are submitted through the high school counselors. Some years the committee is able to select one girl who rises among the rest. Other years, the committee has such a hard time deciding who to give the scholarships to that they pick their top 3 and let the high school counselors choose which girl gets the scholarship. The 2017 winners are Hannah Gottman from WMHS and Megan Buford from JGHS.
Hannah Gottman was featured in a story in The Wayne Dispatch last December when she wrote a novel for November’s National Novel Writing Month. She will be attending Michigan State to study English and Journalism.  She would one day like to share her passion for the English language and journalism by teaching. She shared in her essay, “I’ve learned that writing, in all its forms, is what I love to do. It began when I joined yearbook and took off from there. In the beginning, I didn’t care for it much. I didn’t like the stress, the deadlines, and I didn’t like writing about topics that didn’t interest me. But towards the end of my first yearbook production, I found myself enjoying it. I was no longer the inexperienced writer and I was taking on extra work by editing my peers’ pages and writing the pages that were unfinished. I was starting to have fun with the work…I fell in love with rearranging words, syntax, and offering advice to my peers about their writing.”
Megan Buford plans on studying biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. When she said “biomedical engineering” at the dinner, a rush of ohs and ahs went up around the room, impressing the women.