Elizabeth Cleaver Noonan

(c. 1907 – October 6, 1961)

Eureka College alumnus (Class of 1927)

Three sisters—Margaret, Elizabeth, and Helen Cleaver—figure prominently in the history of Eureka College and each will be featured in a vignette during this month's series. The Cleaver sisters were the daughters of Rev. Ben Hill Cleaver who pastored congregations of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Dixon and Eureka, Illinois. All three of the Cleaver sisters graduated from Eureka College with Elizabeth, the eldest, being the first to do so.

Known as “Betty” Cleaver during her years at Eureka College, the young woman from Dixon majored in English with the hope of becoming a school teacher. She would eventually teach at schools in Magnolia and Ashton before settling down to marry and raise a family. Later in her life, she would teach again but in a different context.

In 1929, shortly after she graduated from Eureka College, "Betty" Cleaver married Glen R. Noonan, a reformer and traveling agent who worked to establish farmer's cooperatives during the years of the Great Depression. The couple had two sons. The Noonan family moved to various communities as a result of Glen's work. They eventually settled for a while in Shawnee Missions, Kansas, where they were active members of the Westwood Christian Church.

Like her husband, "Betty" Noonan became drawn to the important issues associated with rural sociology and economics and saw these concerns as related to the "social gospel" that she had been taught from childhood by her father. For the Noonans it was only a matter of time before they took the talents that they honed in America's Heartland and found the means to apply these to the work of the Christian missions. One of the members of their congregation described the Noonans as "a quiet, unassuming couple" and further noted that "they never said much about the important work they did in other lands."

In the late-1950s the Noonans moved to Laos where they served as unpaid missionaries. "Betty" taught English as a second language to children in schools in Vientiane while Glen worked with local farmers. It was dangerous to be in French Indochina at the time, but the couple found their work to be fulfilling.

As tensions rose in and around Laos, the Noonans moved to Tunisia in 1960 where they worked with local farmers. They worked to effect the transition from hand cart to truck transport so that local farmers could deliver their produce more rapidly and expand their market in the process. The Tunisian farmers were organized into cooperatives in order to make this new initiative sustainable.

Based upon the success that they had in Tunisia, the Noonans were invited by leaders in other developing nations of Africa to visit their region and develop similar programs. Tragically, the Noonans were killed in a two-car collision that occurred in Blantyre, Nyasaland (later Rhodesia; modern-day Zimbabwe) on October 6, 1961.