Mrs. Grove, ca. 1907

A happy reunion with his first American school teacher, Mrs. Hattie Grove, from Ovid, Michigan, after 30 years. The reunion took place in Florida, 1954. Romulo credited his 1942 Pulitzer Prize for Journalism to Mrs. Grove, a pioneer teacher in the Philippines, who “taught me the principles of good Americanism.”

In a 1960 speech, Ambassador Romulo recalled the hundreds of American “Thomasites” who had journeyed to the Philippines in 1901 to open schools, teach, and fulfill “a great and unselfish mission.”

There are thousands of Filipinos like myself who can recall an American teacher who came to their town when they were children. I remember the young woman who was my teacher in Camiling, Tarlac. She came from Ovid, Michigan. I saw her years later, while she was living in retirement in Delray Beach, Florida. But I remember her best, in my mind's eye, as the young woman who opened up for me the whole vision of a great and glorious world, of exciting new ideas, of the meaning of words and thoughts and action. I do not know where she studied to be a teacher. I am sure her methods, by modern standards, were antiquated. But her spirit was as alive and refreshing as that of any of your graduates this June. For she believed -- she believed in freedom, in democracy, in the unlimited possibilities of the human spirit, and she was capable of inculcating that belief in the students who stumbled through the textbooks with her.

Ambassador Carlos Romulo was a guest speaker at a dinner hosted by Brandeis University at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City on June 7, 1960. The dinner, honoring Robert S. Benjamin, highlighted the Wein International Scholarship Program.