Tenney Lehman, 90, poet and Nieman Foundation director

TENNEY LEHMAN

If she had been born several decades later, Tenney K. Lehman might have been one of the journalists chosen for Harvard's prestigious Nieman Fellowships. But she was born at a time when few young women went to college and pursued careers, especially in such male-dominated fields as newspaper work.

A voracious reader and a prolific poet, Mrs. Lehman chose the next best thing. In 1967, she got a temporary job with the Nieman Foundation and the next year was made a member of the staff, working for the foundation's curator and serving as the guiding light to generations of Nieman fellows. She retired as the organization's executive director in 1985.

Mrs. Lehman, who edited and wrote a column for the foundation's quarterly Nieman Reports as part of her duties, died Jan. 7 of congestive heart failure at Coolidge House Nursing Care Center in Brookline. She was 90.

Longtime friend Betty Bunn of Newton said Mrs. Lehman "used her writing to face the challenges life gave her." She was writing poetry to the end, said her daughter, the Rev. Daphne B. Noyes of Cambridge,

Rarely without her yellow legal pad and black ballpoint pen, Mrs. Lehman continued to write in the style of Emily Dickinson, one of her favorite poets.

As her poetry nurtured her, she nurtured the Nieman fellows. The fellowships allow midcareer journalists to study subjects of their choosing for an academic year.

"Tenney was a vital part of the staff," said John Seigenthaler, former editor and publisher of the Tennessean of Nashville and a founding director of USA Today, a former Nieman fellow who served on the foundation's advisory board during her tenure.

"For a whole generation of journalists, Tenney was sort of a North Star in terms of guiding them through programs," he said in a phone interview. "She knew the place so well, she provided a road map for them. . . . That year at Harvard is a seminal one for all of us. You really become part of a family, and Tenney became our godmother."

Seigenthaler said Mrs. Lehman did just about everything. "If someone was in a class and a book was mentioned, Tenney would have two books on the subject for him by the time the day was out," he said.

Michael McDowell, who came from Ireland as a Nieman fellow in 1978 at 26, recalled her as "a quiet mother figure to so many of the younger Niemans," recalling that she had gone to meet him at Logan Airport. "Tenney was the sort of quiet, calm administrator behind the program."

Although Mrs. Lehman did not have a career in journalism, she was an inspiration to other women who did. Nancy Day, chairwoman of the Journalism Department at Columbia College in Chicago and a Nieman fellow in 1979, said: "What we women saw was someone who had not had our opportunities to pursue a profession, but got one anyway and succeeded in it."

The four women in the Nieman class of 1979, along with Mrs. Lehman, published an issue of Nieman Reports that year that focused on women journalists, Day said in an e-mail.

"As women, we saw that Tenney was overworked and underpaid, but she did love her work and exalted in the opportunity . . . to edit a magazine of ideas."

Mrs. Lehman wrote an editor's report for that issue, as she had for all the others. "In the media, women enter a domain created by men and well established in the male image," she wrote. "After crossing this threshold, women are not free to progress in routine fashion - their efforts must rival those of men. Their work is judged not on merit, but on how closely it resembles what their male colleagues have accomplished."

Another woman in the class of '79, Margaret Engel, managing editor of the Newseum in Washington, D.C., said Mrs. Lehman had "such a great reverence for words; she was a much more advanced student of language than many reporters I've worked with. . . . She thought she was in heaven working with people in writing, and we got a little bit of heaven in return."

Mrs. Lehman made the entrance to Harvard less overwhelming, Engel said. "As a 26-year-old from Des Moines, Iowa, I was intimidated by Harvard, until I met Tenney."

Alfred S. Larkin, Jr. - executive vice president of the Boston Globe, who was a fellow in 1977 - recalled arriving late and out of breath for a meeting with the board and meeting Mrs. Lehman on the staircase. "Don't worry," she calmly told him. "They're late."

She was born in Winthrop to Wallace and Barbara (Tenney) Kelley and was raised there and in Wellesley. She was named for her maternal grandfather, Fred Tenney, a 19th century baseball player for the Boston Beaneaters (later the Braves) and the New York Giants. Noyes said that although Mrs. Lehman's father, an insurance man, did not think women should go to a four-year college, he allowed her to attend a two-year secretarial course at Chamberlayne Junior College.

For a time, she worked at WEEI as an advertising copywriter. In 1941, she married Thomas H. Lehman of Winthrop, a flight instructor during World War II. After the war, he enrolled in the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge, now the Episcopal Divinity School. His wife helped by typing papers of other seminarians "at 10 cents a page," Noyes said.

In 1953, Father Lehman was assigned to the Episcopal parish on Martha's Vineyard, where they remained until 1959, when he became rector of Grace Church in Newton. The couple retained their ties to the Vineyard by building a small house on Gay Head.

While in Newton, Mrs. Lehman took courses at Northeastern and Brandeis universities and Simmons College and got the job at Harvard through a temporary employment agency. The couple retired to their home on Gay Head in 1986. Her husband died in 1998. A son, Richard, died in 2004.

Friends and colleagues marveled at her energy, even as she grew older.

"Even though I knew Tenney was approaching 90, there was something about her immortal," said Dr. Ned Cassem, a Jesuit priest and psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital. "She had the soul of a poet. She was able to take material that had tragedy, sadness, and pain, and, running it through her wisdom, she transformed its meaning without diminishing the tragedy."

Mrs. Lehman lived at Youville House, an assisted-living facility, from 2003 until last year, on the eighth floor overlooking Harvard.

"Mother's lifelong regret was her lack of a full college education," her daughter said. "When she lived at Youville she wrote, 'Now I look down on Harvard and Harvard looks up at me.' "

In addition to her daughter, Mrs. Lehman leaves four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

A funeral Mass will be said at 10:30 a.m. today in the Church of the Advent in Boston. Burial will be on Martha's Vineyard.