According to family lore, the Dorman family connection to Lebanon came about in the late 1890s at Union Congregational Church in Montclair, NJ, when Harry Gaylord Dorman, an aspiring physician at Columbia University, asked of his neighbor who the young lady was near the front pews.
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Harry Gaylord Dorman Sr.
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“She’s the minister’s niece,” came the answer, whereupon Harry simply grunted, “Humph.” The minister was Howard Sweetser Bliss, who in a few years was to be appointed president of the Syrian Protestant college (in 1902, succeeding his father, Daniel Bliss), and the young lady was Mary Bliss Dale, visiting her uncle on break from her classes at Vassar College.
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| May Dale (later, Mary Dale Dorman). Freshman at Vassar College, 1898 |
Ma with her mother, Mary Bliss Dale (on left) and grandmother, Abby Wood Bliss (on left) at Marquand House. January 14, 1903.
Daniel Bliss and Abby Wood Bliss on Ma and Pa's wedding day, January 14, 1903. Daniel was 80 years old; Abby was 73 years old. Marquand House
Apparently Harry had a change of heart when, on graduation from Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1900, he married Mary and they traveled together to Beirut, where the bride’s widowed mother (who also called herself Mary Bliss Dale!) was living, and where Harry took a position as a pediatrician at the college hospital.
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| Mary Bliss Dale 1895 in her widow's black, which Mary wore for the rest of her life - because it helped ensure respect for her as a single, professional woman, as she later told her grandchildren. She became Superintendent of AUB Hospital and was a very busy, professional woman - and always a very devoted mother to May. |
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| Mary Dale (later, Dorman), age 15, and her mother, Mary Bliss Dale, in Bedouin clothing, Jerusalem, 1895. |
Beginning in 1903, the couple eventually had six children: Gerald, Harry Jr. (“Bud”), Belle, John, Daniel (Dan), and David, all born in Beirut except for John, who was born in Shemlan.
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| Dorman Family after David's birth 1919 |
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| 1922 Beirut harbor and Mount Lebanon |
The Dormans occupied a large traditional house with a red-tiled roof on the corner of Rue Abdul Aziz and what was to become Rue Bliss (named after Howard following his untimely death in 1920) across the street from the college campus.
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| Dorman Beirut House on Rue Bliss marked with an X 1922 |
Harry Sr. set up his clinic on the ground floor of the building, while the upper floors were occupied by the family.
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Harry Dorman Sr. 1922 in the Beirut House
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The house was the home of Daniel and Abby Bliss as well as Mary Dale, after they moved out of the president’s residence at Marquand House to make room for his son and successor. As the children grew older, they attended classes at the American Community School, which was established in 1905 for children of the faculty of the college. Mary Dale Dorman was one of the organizers, and classes were initially held at the Dorman home, and later in larger quarters on Sidani Street just off Rue Jeanne d’Arc. To escape the heat and humidity of Beirut summers, Harry purchased a large villa and grounds in Shemlan from the Marquis de Freij around 1910 that overlooked the small village and, far below, Beirut and the coastline south of the city
Dorman Shemlan House 1923
View of Beirut from Shemlan
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| Shemlan 4th of July with fireworks: Belle Dorman is the girl with bows in her hair |
Mary Dale had cofounded the Nursing School at the college in 1905 together with Elizabeth Van Zandt (the first nursing school in the Middle East), and Harry was appointed founding dean of the Medical School in 1915 (until 1924). Those first decades were eventful, as the family endured the hardships of the First World War within the colonial territory of the Ottoman Empire, allied with Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. Their closest friends from that period were their Bliss cousins living at Marquand House with Aunt Amy (Blatchford): Margaret, Alice, and Mary.
The war years were a time of extreme deprivation. As Superintendent of Nursing at the AUB Hospital, Mary Bliss Dale witnessed the terrible starvation and suffering of the occupied population and was actively involved in distributing food and other aid to the local Arabs, though under Ottoman military rule it was strictly forbidden for her to do so. One hot summer day, the military police showed up at her office and told her that she was to come with them immediately to the police station: essentially, an arrest. She led the policemen out of the building and past their carriage, announcing that she would rather walk. At her usual brisk pace, her flummoxed escort had no choice but to follow her and arrived at the police station dripping heavily with sweat. When the captain began to lecture her on the law against aiding the Arabs, she soon interrupted him, saying, "You asked me to come to the station, and here I am. But I can't stay here long, because I'm very busy at the hospital. Goodbye." She turned and stalked out, knowing that, as Muslims, the police could not touch her or physically restrain her. She walked straight back to her office and was never bothered again.
From an Interview with Belle Dorman Rugh at age 100 in 2008.
Once the war had ended, Harry Sr. informed his children that they were going on a treasure hunt in the bac
k garden of the old house, and of course they dutifully followed along, although with a bit of skepticism. To their astonishment, a metal box was soon dug out of the earth, filled with bags of solid gold coins—which their father had hidden several years before in case of dire war emergency or sudden evacuation, fortunately never needed.
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| 1926 Harry Dorman Sr., Harry Dorman Jr., John, Dan |
Among many visitors to the Dorman home around 1923 was an Egyptologist, James H. Breasted, who had founded Chicago’s Oriental Institute and whom Howard Carter had invited to record the stamped impressions on the sealed doorway of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Belle would later recall that, as a girl of fifteen, Breasted had kindly taken her aside to tell her about the excitement of the discovery and what it was like to enter a largely intact pharaonic tomb.
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| 1929 New Car; Pa, Harry, John, and David |
As the Dorman children grew older, the boys were sent off in succession to boarding school at Andover (Belle continued her secondary education at ACS) and then on to Harvard and graduate school to begin various careers: Gerald as a doctor (internal medicine?), Harry as an ordained minister, John to the foreign service, Dan as an obstetrician, and David as a librarian.
Belle Dorman and brothers in Shemlan 1923
While their Lebanese roots were indelible in all this generation, Belle and Harry Jr. were the only two who returned to work in Lebanon itself. Belle attended college at Vassar and earned a master's degree at Columbia University before returning to Beirut to teach: first at the Ahliyah School for girls and later at Beirut College for Women (now Lebanese American University). She met a young staffite at the American University of Beirut, Douglas Rugh, who had been born and raised in China as the son of missionaries.
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Douglas Rugh & Belle Dorman newly engaged in Shemlan 1933
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Belle Dorman and Douglas Rugh Wedding photo Shemlan 1934
The pair were married in Shemlan in 1934 and first moved to China, where Doug taught as an instructor at Yenching University in Beijing, which had been founded along American lines much like AUB, and then to Seattle in 1937, where Doug earned his PhD in developmental education at the University of Washington. The Rughs, with their three daughters (Betsy, Molly, and June) later settled in Wethersfield, CT, where Doug taught in the education and psychology departments at the University of Connecticut.
After graduating from Harvard, Harry Jr. served initially as a staffite at International College in the late 1920s and briefly contemplated a career in archaeology, spending a 1931 season in Iraq with Bob Braidwood (later a major eminence in prehistoric Near Eastern archaeology at Chicago’s Oriental Institute). He then completed a bachelor of divinity degree at Union Theological Seminary, returning to the North Syria Boy’s School in Aleppo, where Douglas and Becky Decherd were residing, becoming fast friends.
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| 1929 Belle in the Citadel overlooking Aleppo |
By 1938 Harry was serving as dean of students at the Boy’s School on a newly built campus. As an instructor to youth during these years, Harry was able to develop his innate entertainment skills as a storyteller (Jeha tales and fleabone stories), singer (“The Bear Went Over the Mountain,” Alouette,” Three Wood Pigeons,” etc.) , and occasional performer in the odd (sometimes quite odd) Gilbert and Sullivan production.
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| Dorman Siblings on Shemlan Balcony in1929 - Harry Dorman Jr. with tray of fruit on his head |
In 1939 Harry decided to begin a joint doctor of divinity degree at Harvard and Union Seminary, where he met Virginia Whitney (Ginny), who was working toward a master’s degree in sacred music; they were married in 1940 in Worcester, MA, by Ginny’s uncle, Harry Emerson Fosdick.
Their honeymoon essentially took them around the world to reach Harry’s posting at Aleppo, since the Mediterranean had already been closed to shipping. The couple passed through Seattle, where the Rughs met the new bride, then on through the Pacific and through the Philippines, across the Indian Ocean and via Baghdad up to Aleppo.
Before the war years, Dan had trained as an obstetrician, with the intention of eventually joining his father in Beirut and carrying the medical work forward for another generation in Beirut, but World War II intervened. Gerald joined the army as a doctor, while John and Dan joined the Navy. Harry and Ginny passed the war years in Syria/Lebanon until 1946, spending summers in Shemlan. But as German armies approached Cairo along the North African coast in 1941, they were evacuated to Jerusalem along with other American nationals in case the Egyptian capital fell and they would need to be shipped out of the region altogether. In that intervening year Harry and Ginny grew especially close to the Decherd family, also evacuees. It was from Jerusalem that Harry Sr. and Mary Dorman decided to retire from overseas service and returned to the US in 1941, moving to Cambridge, MA.
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| Harry G. Dorman (Sr.), M.D., 1940 - Relaxing outdoors (looks like picnic fixings in the background). |
After Rommel was turned back from El Alamein, the Americans were permitted to resume their activities in Syria, and it was left to Harry Jr. to close the family house in Beirut. Then babies arrived: Harry Gaylord Dorman III (“Gay”) was born in Tripoli four days after his grandfather’s death in 1943. The family relocated to Beirut in 1946, occupying the old family home again, and four other children came along: Eleanor, Peter, David (born in Worcester on a furlough year), and Kathy.
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| Dorman Family in Worcester, MA, on furlough in the summer of 1952; from left to right it’s Ginny, Eleanor, Peter, Harry III (“Gay”), and Harry Jr. (“Bud”) with David on his lap—Kathy not yet born. |
Harry’s job at this point was with Christian Youth groups, and he taught part time at the Near East School of Theology, while Ginny taught music there. Harry became Secretary of the Near East Christian Council in the early1950s and at that time the Dormans moved out of the old house on Bliss Street, which had become structurally unsound, and into an apartment on Rue Makdisi.
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| May Dorman in Old Beirut House 1922 |
The children all attended ACS from kindergarten on at the school’s new campus on the Corniche next to AUB, established with the support and funding from the Presbyterian mission, the US Embassy, and Aramco, many of whose employees desired an American school in the area. As with the previous generation, the kids were sent off to boarding school in the US when they were old enough: Gay and Peter to Vermont Academy and Eleanor to Northfield School for Girls. Various cousins in Beirut during this period included Margaret Bliss Leavitt, whose husband, Leslie, was headmaster of IC; and David Dodge, one of the grandsons of Daniel, whose children Bayard, Nina, and Melissa were close in age to the youngest Dormans.
Beirut winters were tempered by glorious summers in Shemlan and the occasional “Mission Meeting” in Dhour Shweir, when children of various mission families could congregate and, while their parents were in sober session, get into all kinds of mischief.
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Shemlan House 1922
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Cousins and friends also lived in Shemlan: Alice and Byron Smith (Alice was the sister of Meg Leavitt), and the Decherds. Betsy Decherd cemented a family connection in marrying George Lane, a foreign service officer who was the son of Fred Lane (the celebrated Venetian scholar) and Harriet, who was a Whitney and therefore a cousin of Ginny’s.
Betsy Decherd (Lane) with Elizabeth Bliss (Smith) at the Dormans in Shemlan in baskets woven in the Druze village of Baysour, renouned for its basket-weaving.
The usual summer activities in Shemlan were essentially the same as those of the previous (barely post-Victorian!) generation: pressing flowers and labeling them, looking for fossils and geological samples, observing the heavens and memorizing the constellations, sketching the scenery, watching ant nests, filling small glass bottles with layers of different colors of sand, enjoying afternoon teas, visiting ancient and medieval ruins, hikes to Ainab, and regular games of tennis and baseball.
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Tennis in Shemlan
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Swimming at Tom Sawyer's Pool 1931
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n Saturdays the village boys and our American friends from the Ainab colony would gather for baseball on the slanted field next to the house; in fact Shemlan developed its own competitive village team that competed against others in Beirut. |
Baseball in Shemlan in 1931
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| 1931 Baseball roster, including Stanley Kerr, Harold Close, William Stoltzfus was principal of a boys' school in Aleppo, Syria, and later president of the Beirut College for Women for 20 years, Leavitt, (Laurens Hickok) Seelye?, a professor at A.U.B. and father of Talcott Seelye, Ambassador to Syria, whose daughter Kate is V.P. of the Middle East Institute in DC today. |
Doug and Belle Rugh returned to Beirut in 1955-1957, when Doug worked for UNRWA to develop an educational system for Palestinian refugees; and later, in 1963-1966, when Doug worked as professor of psychology (and part-time as bursar) at AUB. During that later stay, the Rughs enjoyed summering in Baysour, a Druze village in the Chouf mountains, and visiting Belle's childhood summer home in Shemlan.
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Belle's Rock & Crystal Moutain 1931
 | Belle Dorman Rugh published Crystal Mountain in 1955
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In 1964 the Dormans made a final move back to the US, but Eleanor was the first of her generation to return in 1968 when, after finishing her MA in philosophy she was hired to teach at the Beirut College for Women. She met her future husband Rich Johnson at BCW, beginning a lifelong joint interest in secondary education, first at Loomis School in CT, then at Robert College in Istanbul, then back to the US at Northfield-Mount Hermon with a stint in Zimbabwe; their three children—Betsy, Katie, and Peter—all had the benefit of living overseas in very different countries. With the growing conflicts in the Middle East beginning in 1967 and continuing through the civil war in Lebanon (1975-1990), it became impossible for Americans to travel to Beirut until 1997, at which time Rich was hired as the head of the math department at ACS and Eleanor as a development officer. She soon made a lateral move to the provost’s office at AUB. Their daughter, Betsy, had met her future husband, Jason Crook, at the international Schutz School in Alexandria, and moved to Beirut as well, both teaching for three years at ACS. Their son, Dan Crook, was born in Beirut in 2001, the 6th generation of the family.
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| The lower end of Shemlan - undated |
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Shemlan in 1979
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In the meantime, after receiving his bachelor’s degree in anthropology at Amherst and serving in the US Navy for three years, Peter chose to pursue graduate studies in Egyptology at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute beginning in 1974, and on a visit to Istanbul in 1976 Eleanor and Rich introduced him to Kathy Crecelius, who was teaching at the Üsuküdar School for Girls on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. After a lengthy courtship of five days and an engagement of 11 months, they were married in Orient, NY, and initially moved to New York for Peter’s first job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1978 they moved to Montclair, where Meg and Emily were born, and attended Union Congregational Church—exactly where the Bliss-Dorman connection had first been made. In 1988 Peter was hired at the Oriental Institute to direct the Epigraphic Survey in Luxor, whose first director, Harold Nelson, had served as a professor of history at AUB but who had been lured away by James H. Breasted to found the expedition in Luxor in 1924. Kathy, Meg, and Emily spent several winter months every year home-schooling in Luxor and exploring the ruins of ancient Thebes on their free days. Peter returned to Chicago with his family as a full-time professor of Egyptology in 199, and served for five year as chair of the department of Near Eastern languages and civilizations. Kathy and Peter were able to spend a sabbatical semester in Beirut in the spring of 2006, renting an apartment on Rue Makdisi and enjoying the company of the Johnsons. In 2008 Peter was offered the position of AUB president, and his inauguration served as a chance for a sizable family reunion together with siblings and cousins, in both Beirut and Shemlan.
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| Peter Dorman with Students at AUB 2012 |
Just to add some curious historical coincidences at this point, as happen so often in the Middle East to illustrate the circle of collegial and generational links: Calvin Plimpton, who was a trustee of AUB and stepped in as president of the university from 1984-87 directly following the tragic killing of Malcolm Kerr, had previously served as president of Amherst College and handed Peter his BA diploma during commencement exercises in 1970. During Peter’s tenure at AUB, a number of alumni presented him their grandfathers’ medical diplomas to show Harry Dorman (Sr.)’s signature as dean of medicine from the early 1920s; but next to it was also the signature of Harold Nelson, who was secretary of the university before his move to the Epigraphic Survey in Luxor.
Peter and Kathy lived at Marquand House until he stepped down from the presidency in 2015; he continued as a professor of history and archaeology at the university for two more years until retiring to Vashon Island in WA state. At that point Eleanor and Rich had also retired from Lebanon in 2013 and settled in Easthampton, MA.
Many earlier photos of “Dorman Family Memorabilia,” can be found here.
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