Dolores Mann Burdick, age 96, passed away on January 15, 2024, at Aurora Hospital, in Kenosha. Dolores was born on November 23, 1927, to Henry and Sara (Tepper) Mann, in Milwaukee, WI. She graduated as salutatorian of her class at Custer High School in February 1945. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin –Madison with a B.A. degree in 1948 and an M.A. degree in French a year later.
Dolores was awarded a Fulbright Travel Grant to France in 1949, the first year Fulbright scholarships were made available, and spent a year in Paris teaching English at a French lycée, while studying French literature at the Sorbonne. She took one course in film studies and spent many hours weekly haunting the various ciné-clubs that were bursting open all over Paris. She was intrigued by the interest the French were taking in films, a field that, until then, had never appeared in academic circles.
In 1950 she began working for a Ph.D. degree at the University of California in Berkeley, CA. While teaching at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts from 1954 to 1962, she met and married Harvey Burdick and gave birth to three sons: Anthony, John, and Albert. She won her Ph.D. in 1958, after she defended her thesis entitled “Sophoclean Themes in Modern French Drama: The Moral Quest.”
In 1962, Dolores and her family moved to Michigan, where she and her husband had been hired to teach at Oakland University, newly founded as an offshoot of Michigan State University. It was, in many ways, an experimental institution, aiming for the heights in higher education. As a state-funded school rather than a private institution, it was described in TIME magazine as striving to become “the Harvard of the Midwest.” The faculty had been drawn from prestigious schools all over the country, and their average age was about 30. This meant that a youthful faculty was given the responsibility of establishing a school they could be proud of, and building it from scratch. Oakland University went on to become one of the great centers of higher education in Michigan. It now boasts a medical school, a business college, and a reputation for scholarship and alumni loyalty to match the Ivy League.
During the 1970’s, Dolores began teaching courses in the history, theory, and appreciation of film. During the last ten years of her teaching career, her work turned more and more to cinema studies, which by then had begun to enter higher education as a refreshing newcomer to the humanities. In the summer of 1978, Dolores won entry to a seminar at Rutgers University, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, where twelve professors from all over the U.S., representing departments such as philosophy, music, literature, and history, gathered to study how to think about the movies as a subject for classroom analysis. In other words, they were thinking about how to teach film. As Dolores reported to one of her friends: “We were creating a new academic discipline, and there were no sign-posts to guide us. This was a brand-new academic activity, and the freedom we experienced was mind-blowing.”
Dolores retired from Oakland University in 1988. Her parents had recently moved to Kenosha, where her father, Henry Mann, was teaching English at Parkside. Dolores moved to Kenosha in 2003 to be closer to her Milwaukee relatives. She chose to live in Kenosha where she had made many friends through her parents’ association with the area. Here she has lived quietly, reading and writing and looking at movies. She drew some of her friends into watching movies together at her home. She enjoyed nothing so much as the discussions that arose after those shared moments before the screen. She will be remembered by her friends as a lover of movies. She remembered seeing technicolor when it first came out, and she recalled seeing Citizen Kane when it emerged in 1941. She actually remembered biting her nails as a twelve-year old, sitting in the Shorewood Theater and wondering “what is Rosebud?” And when she saw the sled burning in the very last shot, she nearly fainted!
One of Dolores’s sons said of her, “Mom was so accomplished, but she always stayed humble and connected with people so easily. She was beloved by many.”
She is survived by her sons, Tony and Albert; two daughters-in-law, Kate and Judith; three grandchildren, Ben (Kara) and Molly, children of John and Judith, and Nick (Mahlet), son of Tony and Kate; and two great-grandchildren, Juniper, daughter of Ben and Kara, and Forest, daughter of Nick and Mahlet. Dolores was preceded in death by her parents; her ex-husband Harvey Burdick; her son John; and her great-granddaughter Elowyn, daughter of Ben and Kara.
Services for Dolores will be held at a later date.
