By: Dr. Andrew Yox, Honors Director
As a member of NTCC’s first Presidential-Scholar cohort in 2007, Ann Finch persevered with a topic on the Paleolithic Indians of Texas. The evidence was thin, and she had to surmise scenarios at every turn. And yet her effort culminated into an exercise on thesis maintenance that has been employed as an exercise in honors Texas history every year since. Fourteen years later, after marrying NTCC’s former Director of Computer Services, Kenny Goodson, Ann returned to the honors scene at NTCC as a makeup artist, costume designer, and actress in two recent film efforts undertaken by Honors Northeast, on Carroll H. Shelby, and the Texas suffragette, Minnie Fisher Cunningham.
In addition to remarkable efforts securing food for various scenes, suggesting script edits, re-sewing costumes, and helping the film set capture the best visual backdrop, a notable work of Goodson in this year’s film was her work creating suffragette sashes. Texas suffragettes campaigned publicly in the years 1915-1920, often performing public services to win the support of male voters on which their cause depended. An identifying element in their crusade was the tricolor sash, of gold, purple and white, with the leaders of the cause wearing thicker sashes, and novices, thinner ones. For this year’s film, Goodson created the sashes that identified and classified the members of the movement.
Honors Director, Dr. Andrew Yox, notes: Ann has some amazing skills. As an autodidact, and a patron of good historic films, I thought her sensibility of how Texan women in the early twentieth century would have expressed themselves was the best of any of us. She donated a good part of her summer, drove a pickup truck with a coat rack to Fredericksburg, and helped us in innumerable ways. I am so thankful for her impressive contributions, and for this model of public service, coming from someone who experienced our program, even in its untried inaugural year.”
