Marcelline Krafchick ’54 was Arcadia’s first recipient of a Fulbright scholarship, which took her to Bristol University in the United Kingdom, where she met Bristol’s Chancellor, Sir Winston Churchill, and began travels that would take her to 63 countries. Her adventures abroad constitute her third of four books, The Romance of Elsewhere: A Half-Century of Connecting By Sea, By Air, By Rail, published by Regent Press (2007).

Her romantic tales includes falling into an aardvark pit, paddling a reed boat across the San Francisco Bay, dodging a predator at the Metropolitan Opera, and facing the ugliness of racial segregation. Her writing recounts “awakened responses that routine would have left dormant.” This past fall, Krafchick went to Nepal with a group that tries to help young girls.

Regent Press announced Feb. 24 the release of her fourth book, How Belief Stories Matter: An Approach to Myth. The forthcoming mythology book is based on more than 30 years of teaching the subject at California State University, East Bay. It is available on Amazon, Kindle, Barnes and Noble, and from Regent Press in Berkeley, Calif. The book deals with “a vast range of worldwide belief stories—Ashanti to Hindu, Christian to Navajo. It shows how three interconnected components of belief systems—doctrine, story (myth) and ritual—reinforce one another to carry forward values that identify and cohere a society….” Read more at www.marcellinekrafchick.com.

An English major, Krafchick was the first woman professor at Santa Clara University and taught at San Francisco State University before becoming a professor at Cal-State University, East Bay. She was a board member of the resocializing program for ex-felons, the Seventh Step Foundation, and a radio and television actor and taught modeling on Park Avenue. She was the first woman member and chair of the Hayward (Calif.) Zoning Board and Planning Commission and a member of three County and State Commissions. She also authored World Without Heroes: The Brooklyn Novels of Daniel Fuchs (Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press) and part of O’Neill in China (Greenwood Press), and co-edited Speaking of Rhetoric (Houghton-Mifflin).