June Glory Biber was born July 10, 1928, at Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, N.J. Her mother, Hilda Zuckerman, was born in 1904. Around 1908 she immigrated to the United States with her parents from Ciechanowiec, a small town near Warsaw. Hilda's mother died when she was 16. Hilda assumed responsibility for the care of her younger siblings.
June's father, Irving Biber, was born in Newark. His parents, Sarah and Leon, immigrated from Brody, a city once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now part of the Ukraine. (For centuries before the Holocaust, Brody's population was 70 percent Jewish.)
June knew her maternal grandfather and both paternal grandparents well, but as she told Scott Lunsford in her 2009 interview with the Pryor Center, "they never talked much about what went on ... in the past. People wanted to be assimilated--wanted to be Americanized--and I think their children ... just wanted to forget, if they could, their so-called origins."
Hilda and Irving Biber did not attend religious services, but did send June to Sunday school at a Reform congregation prior to her confirmation. Though never religious, June identified herself as a Jew throughout her life.
Irving Biber was head pharmacist at Beth Israel Hospital when the Depression struck. Though they never went hungry, the Bibers lost possession of the four-family apartment house they owned. For a while, however, they remained there. In a nearby garage, Irving began a tube-filling company; he bought equipment and metal casings to fill with various creams and gels for local physicians. He called the company Day Chemical because running it was his night job. Government contracts and contracts with Mennen Company led the Bibers to prosperity by the mid-1940s.
June was a good student at Newark public schools. Her civic-mindedness can be seen early in her membership in a girls' charitable group called the Cardiac Starlets. A teacher noticed her talent for drawing and suggested Saturday lessons at the Newark Art Club; June at age or 9 would take a bus, alone, to attend. Numerous adults, however, discouraged her from pursuing a career in art; her mother arranged lunch with a professional illustrator, a woman, who told her, "No, you don't want to do this."
June attended Weequahic High School in Newark (as did Philip Roth; his older brother Sandy was in June's class). After her family moved "up the hill" to South Orange, June commuted to Weequahic High on two buses. After graduating in January 1946, she enrolled at the University of Chicago, where Enrico Fermi was running the Institute for Nuclear Studies beneath the unused football stadium.
The revolution in American sexual mores was not confined to the 1960s (or the 1920s). At Chicago, June was aware of, though not a part of, the "dungarees and diaphragms" set. "They were liberated," she said in her Pryor Center interview.
Having learned much about naval machinery, ordnance, gunnery, celestial navigation, and electrical engineering at the U.S. Naval Academy, Edmond Freeman decided to spend a year studying philosophy at the University of Chicago in order, he said, to become educated. He and June met there while she was doing graduate work in psychology. They married in 1950.
Ed and June moved to Pine Bluff briefly during 1951 so that Ed could help run the Pine Bluff Commercial (owned by his family) during a strike. Ed's naval duties took them to Massachusetts and Rhode Island. In 1952, they returned to Pine Bluff, where they stayed until they moved to Little Rock in 1995.
That's how June Freeman got to Pine Bluff. Her impact on the community, and on the arts scene statewide, was noted in the Pine Bluff Commercial after her death on July 4, so I'll just skim: she started Pine Bluff's Great Books program; became involved in the League of Women Voters; through the Junior Auxiliary, saved the WPA firehouse from becoming a parking lot and turned it into an arts center that later merged with another entity and became the Arts and Science Center for Southeast Arkansas; ran said arts center from 1958-1966 (it was once written up in the Commercial as "the Little Firehouse Communist Arts Center"); directed the state services program for the Arkansas Arts Center during the mid-1970s, establishing the ArtMobile and a traveling theater troupe to perform for children and arranging traveling exhibits at a time when only Little Rock, Pine Bluff, and El Dorado had arts centers--northwest Arkansas had no Walton Arts Center or Crystal Bridges; established Pine Bluff's sister city relationship with Iwai, Japan; and founded the Arkansas Arts Center's Friends of Contemporary Craft.
After reading June's Pryor Center interview, I wondered that there was no mention of her founding the Architecture and Design Network before remembering that the interview was taped in 2009. She hadn't founded ADN yet. She was only 80.
I had been wondering about her relationship with the Women's Emergency Committee to re-open Little Rock's public high schools after Orval Faubus closed them on Sept. 15, 1958. (Little Rock voters upheld the closure on Sept. 27, 1958.) June invited Vivion Brewer to speak to a group in Pine Bluff, and they all became out-of-town members of the WEC for $1.
In Little Rock, the WEC met at the home of Adolphine Fletcher Terry, a Greek Revival mansion built by Albert Pike, which served as the home of the Arkansas Female College as well as the childhood home of Adolphine Fletcher Terry and her siblings John Gould Fletcher and Mary Fletcher Drennan. The Arts Center housed its Decorative Arts Museum there from 1985 until 2004. As a member of the Arts Center's Decorative Arts Committee, June also led the effort to find a new purpose for the Pike-Fletcher-Terry Mansion after the closure of the Decorative Arts Museum.
June was, in the words of a mutual friend, a valiant soldier and exemplary citizen. I will leave it to her children and grandchildren to testify to her goodness and creativity as a mother, but must note a remark from her Pryor Center interview, in reference to permitting her oldest child to dig endless holes in the backyard: "My feeling with kids was you let 'em do what they wanna do [as long as] it's not endangering them."
I've not read much in the public literature about June's work as a personal advocate, nurturing (along with Edmond) talented young people who came to work at the Pine Bluff Commercial and encouraging her friends in their creative work; by "creative" I mean much more than "arts-related." June was behind anything that sustained and expanded life.
Gabriel Marcel called the quality that makes a person a person disponibilité: readiness to respond, availability, openness, welcoming. Reading their Pryor Center interviews and looking at old photographs, I am reminded, powerfully, of their intelligence and intense curiosity, their welcoming, their openness, their readiness, always, to respond.