Sara Haardt-Mencken at Goucher

The years that changed the course of her life

Sara Haardt-Mencken had always been an exemplary student. From a young age she would often be found with her nose stuck in a book, and it took little time for her family to realize she was ‘the smart one.’ She was a gifted child whose reading capacity, comprehension, and retention was extraordinary. As such, no one was surprised when she went on to excel at the Margaret Booth School. The school championed discipline, a skill that would come to help Haardt many times in her life. Margaret Booth herself encouraged Haardt, her star pupil, to apply to Northern colleges, something that Haardt was all too happy to do. She did not want to go to the standard colleges in the South – such as Sewanee – because many of them taught women how to be ‘proper women.’ Haardt had bigger dreams. She put her sights on Goucher College, which she stumbled across after finding an old copy of The Donnybrook Fair, the school’s yearbook.

In 1916, Haardt boarded a train and headed for Baltimore, Maryland, the home of Goucher College. At the time, the ‘quiet’ school of Goucher was a women’s school known to stress a liberal arts education. At Goucher, Haardt would go on to major in history, though she also concentrated in English, philosophy, and psychology. She was also editor in chief of the three Goucher publications: the yearbook (The Donnybrook Fair), the newspaper (The Weekly), and the literary magazine (the Kalends). 

By the time she graduated from Goucher College in 1920, no one was surprised to hear that she had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest Greek Letter fraternity in America and considered to be one of the most prestigious academic honor society in higher education. Most if not all of her classmates only saw her serious side. They would never have imagined her dancing the night away back home, or even entering any sort of romantic relationship. It was, perhaps, the fault of her pride that she became a ‘loner,’ for her anxieties were heavy: her health was failing, possibly due to the Spartan wartime diet that the college enacted’ her finances were beginning to dwindle, enough so that she had to take a job as the college’s postmistress to make extra money; she had a full workload as well. Still, she shouldered all of this without complaint, demanding no sympathy or understanding.

Looking back, Haardt would describe her time at Goucher, saying that “They were exciting, brimming days.” Under her picture in The Donnybrook Fair, she was described as having a “Soulful Highbrow.” The poem under her picture, used by the yearbook at the time as a way to describe the graduating seniors, was:

“The quietude of genius and strength

Of high endeavor mingle in her eyes;

Not of the spirit only is her life – 

Her cool, sane judgments, wholesome humor too,

And power of execution will be known

While Donnybrook and Kalends shall remain,

And while we sing, as we are wont to do,

Many a college song we’ve learned to love.”

Haardt was also a teacher for one year at Goucher. At twenty-four years, she was the youngest faculty member at the time. Though cold and aloof, her students claim that she did them the greatest courtesy any professor ever could – she took them seriously. She never belittled or laughed at them, and because of that she quickly became one of the campus’ favorite professors. A fellow Goucher student Lella Warren once wrote: 

“She was to us underclassmen remote and mysterious, with tawny skin and slumberous brown velvet eyes that set us dreaming of temple bells calling to prayers, of the clink of silver anklets and shattered shafts of moonlight…. That was Sara Haardt as I knew her at Goucher College in the self-important days of having to wear cap and gown to Friday chapel…. But it’s really not quite fair, for her to be a born writer and look a born heroine.”

It was there at Goucher College that Haardt would come to meet Mencken in May of 1923 during one of his annual lectured to Goucher’s English class. There was not an immediate romance between them. Their first correspondences and meetings were that of apprentice and master – after all, Haardt was eighteen years Mencken’s junior. But in the course of over seven hundred letters, true friendship and then romance would grow, based on mutual respect and understanding.

Haardt would end her tenure at Goucher after only a year due to sickness. She would not, though, give up her writing.