M. Lenore Drew (j. 2/1960; d. 1992) joined All Souls after the death of her husband, Dr. Charles R. Drew, the renowned surgeon and blood researcher who headed Freedmen’s Hospital Surgery Department (now Howard University Hospital) and developed the process that preserves blood plasma. Drew was widowed at the age of 36 with four young children when her husband died in 1950. During an online Story Corps interview of Sylvia Drew Ivie, Drew’s youngest daughter noted how her mother didn’t have a job or a car and had to leave university housing because her husband was no longer faculty and had died in a tragic car accident. “I thought my mother was pretty wonderful. She held the family together by herself at age 36 with four children and that was really pretty heroic . . . I think the lesson she taught me was you just put one foot in front of the other, whatever your challenges are, and you just keep going.”
Drew’s eldest daughter, Bebe, and Kline A. Price Jr. were married at the church by Rev. James Reeb in 1962; her youngest, Sylvia, attended Sunday school at All Souls and got to know Marjorie Myers; and her middle child, Charlene Drew Jarvis, became a member.
In the 1960s, after her children were older, Drew taught at Burdick Vocational High School and the United Planning Organization. Then, in the 1970s, she joined the faculty at Morgan State College, where she served as chairman of the Home Economics Department.
Drew was a graduate of Cheney State Teacher’s College in Cheyney, PA, and earned two master’s degrees, one in home economics education from Cornell University and one from Columbia University. She died at the age of 81 of Alzheimer’s disease.