Myra Imogene Mead

Myra Imogene, the third of Paul Martin and Ariet Palmer Mead’s eight children, was born on May 13, 1895, in the home her grandparents, Dr. Martin Luther and Myra Jenkins Mead (built in 1883, this house was destroyed by fire in the 1960s and was located where Founder’s Park in Mead now is). Alternately known as Myra, Imogene, and finally just Gene, she was named for her two grandmothers, Myra Jenkins Mead and Imogene Hamlin Palmer.

Myra’s parents were deeply religious, and started everyday with family prayers and scripture study. Almost from the time she learned to talk, she was memorizing large sections or chapters of the Bible. In her memorial at her mother’s funeral, she comments, “To this day (1961) I have at my tongue’s tip probably more scripture than many a minister can boast, and am eternally thankful for it.”

A recurring theme in Myra’s writings, is about how much she loved her girlhood years in Highlandlake. Her vivid, descriptive recollections give us some of the only known first-hand accounts of what it was like to grow up around the lake during Highlandlake’s heyday.

Myra especially loved Christmas, and writes that each Christmas Eve, the whole family piled into the surrey and drove to the Highlandlake church to speak their pieces and receive “a red mesh bag of candy from a glorious tree hung with festoons of popcorn and cranberries and lighted with real candles.” She also remembered the unusual seats in the church as she and Ralph Holmes were once publicly reprimanded for playing during a sermon. “We weren’t playing,” she explains, “we were just amusing ourselves by putting our fingers into the perforations in the seat of an empty chair between us.”

Myra’s earliest schooling came at her mother’s (a former school teacher) knee. By the time she started school, she already knew how to read and write. Among some of her memories of those times, she recalls, “I remember our rough and tumble games on the school playground. One day Mona Quaile and I collided and my nose was broken. In the winter, at recess time, we’d rush with our skates across the road to skate on the lake, as soon as Uncle Lorin (L.C. Mead), the Deacon, would declare the ice safe.”

After graduating 8th grade from the two-room Highlandlake school in 1909, Myra’s father talked to teachers at the Longmont High school, purchased all the books needed and proceeded to home-school her for the next two years. Later, the family moved to Longmont so all the children could attend the upper level schools there. Myra graduated from Longmont High school in 1912.

For college, Myra moved to Chicago and lived with her Uncle and Aunt, George Hiram and Helen Castle Mead, while she attended the University of Chicago. She graduated in 1916, with a bachelor of science degree.

After graduation, Myra taught science for a few years at The Mary C. Wheeler International School for Girls, in Providence, Rhode Island (still in existence), but soon decided that she wanted to continue her education. Back to Chicago she headed, receiving her medical degree from Rush Medical College in 1923.

Myra met her future husband, Henry Erwin Cope, M.D. in her Gross Anatomy class. He was a half year ahead of her in medical school and the assistant to the Laboratory Professor. Henry immediately took a fancy to the attractive red head, but can you imagine a more difficult joint project of trying to impress a new acquaintance of the opposite sex while at the same time laboring over all the parts of a preserved human body?

Ever resourceful, he managed to find a way to do both. Henry and Myra married in 1923. Two children soon followed, Maurice Erwin, in 1926, and Elinor Ariet in 1928.
Somehow, in early years of her marriage and motherhood, she managed to squeeze in her internship in Pediatrics at the Presbyterian and Durand Contagious Hospitals in Chicago, and her residency in Obstetrics and Surgery at the Womans’ Hospital in Detroit.

With her schooling behind her, she set up a private practice in Detroit, specializing in Pediatrics and Obstetrics. However, while pregnant with her first child, she was diagnosed with a type of inherited, and progressive hearing loss called Otosclerosis.

By age 33, Myra was becoming increasingly deaf. Because of her hearing impairment, she gave up her private practice and accepted a job with The Detroit Department of Health. In this capacity, she worked for almost 15 years at various Well-Baby and Pre-Natal Clinics in the Detroit area.

In the late 1930s, her husband was hired by the State of Michigan as the State Pathologist. In 1939, in order to be closer to his work, the family moved to Lansing, By then her hearing was so far gone that it effectively ended her ability to continue to practice medicine.

Not one to sit around and moan about her condition, she soon became involved in garden clubs, flower arranging, horticultural therapy for people living in medical institutions, and other hospital auxiliary work. She also found time to write about her Mead family’s genealogy and history, much of which is the source for the information in this article.

After Henry’s death in 1977, Myra moved to Manlius, New York, to be near her daughter, Elinor. For several years she lived in an apartment and then, for the last few years of her life, moved into an assisted living facility. Myra died in Manlius, on January 13, 1983. She is buried in the Deepdale Cemetery in Lansing Michigan, next to her beloved Henry.

Sources: Letter, dated 1971, from Dr. Myra I. Mead Cope to Mary Jensen to be read at the 50th Anniversary of the Highlandlake Reunion. Unpublished Mead family history and genealogy by Dr. Myra Mead Cope. Special thanks to Elinor Cope Burton for providing the photos in this article, some of Myra’s writings and for sharing her personal memories of her mother.