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Wednesday, January 22, 2003

By Jan Ackerman, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Whatever Helen Mason Moore was doing in life, poetry was spilling from her soul, especially the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

"Her interest in poetry was like her oxygen," said Sam Hazo, president of the International Poetry Forum.

Mrs. Moore read poetry, memorized it and taught it to young girls at The Ellis School, where she was a teacher and headmistress from 1958 to 1971. As an octogenarian, she held informal poetry classes at Calvary Episcopal Church in Shadyside, teaching fellow church members about George Herbert, Robert Frost and Dickinson.

Even special weekends that she and her late husband, Charles, planned for a few close friends at their weekend home in Butler were centered around poetry.

"Every Valentine's Day, she would have four or five couples spend the night and we would take turns reading poetry," said Elizabeth Schoyer of Squirrel Hill.

"She thought poetry ought to be part of everyone's life."

The verses she memorized remained with her until the end, said her friend, Marilyn Donnelly of Shadyside, who would bring a Dickinson poetry book to visit Mrs. Moore at Longwood at Oakmont, where she spent her final years.

"I would open with 'Hope is the thing with feathers' and she would answer, 'That perches in the soul. And sings the tune without the words,' " Donnelly said.

Mrs. Moore died of heart failure Friday at the health center of Longwood at Oakmont. She was 95 and had spent much of her long life in a charming old home in Shadyside, a few hundred yards from The Ellis School.

"She had an enormous presence," said Judy Callomon of Shadyside, a retired teacher and former headmistress at The Ellis School. "She made you stretch intellectually, even with your vocabulary."

When the International Poetry Forum brought Princess Grace to Pittsburgh in 1978, Mrs. Moore chaired the committee that handled the dinner at the Carnegie. She was chosen to introduce the great poet W.H. Auden when he visited the poetry forum.

Mrs. Moore, a tall, genteel woman with a firm but caring demeanor, used poetry, biblical stories and classics to teach the girls at The Ellis School about ethics and morals, Callomon said. She was a teacher from 1958 to 1963 and headmistress from 1963 to 1971.

According to a 1963 Pittsburgh Press story, she would quietly correct anyone who described Ellis as a finishing school for daughters of social gentry. She described the school as academically difficult and socially diverse.

She led the school at a difficult time, when campus unrest over the Vietnam War was affecting her young teenage charges.

"She tried to get the girls to weigh points of view. She respected what they believed but insisted that they look at the other side of the issues," Callomon said.

Mrs. Moore was born in Pittsburgh, graduated in 1929 from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, and married Charles Harbaugh Moore of Sewickley in 1933.

Mrs. Moore never dwelt on the great tragedy that she and her husband experienced. Their three children, Michael, Melissa and Emily, died young of Wilson's disease, a rare genetic defect that causes excessive copper accumulation in the liver or brain.

"I think she had what Quakers call 'peace at the center' that allowed her and Charlie to carry on," Donnelly said.

Mrs. Moore was quite taken with the classics. In the 1960s, she was a founder of a weekly book club that still survives, whose members read Homer's "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" aloud.

Throughout her life, Mrs. Moore wrote poetry and plays. At The Ellis School, she wrote a faculty show that integrated Greek literature with Beatles music.

"She had all of us running about in short togas. We walked down the aisle to "All You Need is Love," Callomon said.

In 1983, Mrs. Moore became producer and host of a series, "Voices from Afar," on Sunday mornings on WQED-FM. It was 10-minute segments in which local actors read personal letters from people like Abigail Adams, Giuseppe Verdi, Dickinson and others.

In 1979, Gov. Dick Thornburgh named her a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania. In 1987, she received Metropolitan Pittsburgh Public Broadcasting's rarely given "Q Award for Excellence" for her radio series.

She is survived by one sister, Emily Rose of Massachusetts, and nieces and nephews. A memorial service will be held at 1:30 p.m. tomorrow in Calvary Episcopal Church in Shadyside.