Hively says she didn’t share this “gracious living mentality” and even bet a friend that she wouldn’t marry before the age of 30.

But after contracting polio during a summer trip to Mexico City between sophomore and junior year, Hively’s plans quickly changed.

She spent what should have been her junior year in the hospital. Her boyfriend—fellow Harvard student Wells Hively ’53—came to visit her every day.

She returned to school the following year and married this Harvard sweetheart, right before he was drafted to fight in the Korean War.

The Ties That Bind

Hively spent the next chapter of her life devoted to her husband and family, but continued to find time for causes that were important to her.

Upon her graduation in 1954, Hively followed her husband to Fort Dixon, where she was employed as a quartermaster—“not what you think of as a good job for a college graduate,” she says—and then followed her husband to Camp Stuart, Ga., where she worked in a pawn shop.

Shortly thereafter, she took a job as a substitute teacher at a local high school, sparking a commitment to education that has lasted throughout her career.

Hively says she was fired from this position because she refused to pass students on the basketball team, “who basically couldn’t write a sentence.”

Once her husband finished serving in the army, the couple returned to Cambridge to take classes at the Graduate School of Education.

Hively says she dropped out two weeks shy of earning her master’s degree because she couldn’t deal with the large class of 35 students to which she had been assigned.

Later, while Hively’s husband earned his Ph.D., she worked to support the couple as assistant art director at Allyn & Bacon, a publishing company, until her first pregnancy in 1960.

“The rule was you could not work past the sixth month, and of course you would never come back once you had a child,” Hively says in a mildly sarcastic tone.

In 1963, her husband’s career again required a relocation, and the family moved to Minnesota, where Hively has spent the bulk of her life ever since.

While her husband taught psychology at the University of Minnesota (UMN), Hively became what she calls “a very active volunteer” with the League of Women Voters and local environmental groups, coordinating efforts to implement pollution control legislation and laying the groundwork for the service-oriented career that would follow.