Sigma Alpha Iota

16 Fall 2025 • sai-national.org To my colleagues on the National Executive Board, the board of SAI Philanthropies, Inc., the Regional and Province Officers, the directors, Distinguished Members, SAI sisters and friends in this room, and my Armstrong/Johnson Clan represented today by many of my family members—I am touched by your presence and your love. Being a member of and serving this Fraternity for the past forty-three years has filled the majority of my life. And that has been a life of BIG love, music, sisterhood, joy, more music, work, contentment, grief, challenge, even more music, and of course, more love. Mark Twain said there are two important days in your life: One is the day you are born. The other is the day you found out why. I can still picture standing in my kitchen when Elsie Sterrenberg, SAI National President, called to ask if I would be interested in submitting my name as a candidate for the position of National Executive Secretary (as it was called then). Dorothy Whinery, my SAI hero, was stepping down, and 1992 was poised to be a pivotal year for SAI. Sigma Alpha Iota has met opportunities for change with thoughtfulness, with compassion, with excitement, with creativity, and with love many times through the past 122 years. I said "Yes." And I am forever grateful to those NEB members who selected me to serve. Four of those officers have died: Dorothy Whinery, Elsie Sterrenberg, Peg Maxwell, Brenda C. Ray. Five of those board members are still helping advance the Purpose and the Mission of SAI: Clara Meacham, Jan Nieburg, Dr. Mary Arlin, Sylvia Elton, and Geraldine Barretto-Sims. National Headquarters, or NEO as it used to be called, moved to Asheville, North Carolina on July 1, 1992, with two Selectric typewriters, twelve filing cabinets, an avocado- green rotary desk phone, miscellaneous furniture from the Des Moines office, a card file with the membership records of all 81,398 members, and a stand-alone Wang word processor with the basics of a database. There was no internet, no e-mail, no website, no cell phone. My, how we have grown and changed in the past thirty-three years. One hundred and nineteen collegiate chapters have been installed or reactivated. Thirty-six alumnae chapters have "heard the call." And our total initiated membership now stands at 137,816. And yet—and yet!—our purpose has not changed. We each have promised to encourage, nurture and support the art of music in our world. And why do we do this? For love. There is no music without love. It started inside each of us before our births with the maternal heartbeat providing the cantus firmus of our existence. We are each recipients of that legacy, that rhythm of life. Our world exists inside the framework of all the music elements, both tangible and ephemeral, that swirl around us, shaping our experiences. What an absolute gift our SAI Founders gave us! They said that each of us was important to the whole. The trajectory of Sigma Alpha Iota showed that as one member reached out to another, one teacher encouraged the student in front of them, one composer put a dream to paper, one performer sent the music into the air—the world would be wrapped in LOVE, and we would all be the lucky recipients. Attending the 1984 National Convention in Chicago (my first one), I heard Ruth Sickafus, the director of our People-to-People Project, describing a young student in Africa who was receiving a professional flute that an SAI teacher had requested. That talented student, who had learned on a plastic flute, was able to audition for a place in a prestigious music school in England and was selected to study there. We—the members of Sigma Alpha Iota— had made that possible with our generous gifts It Must Be Love Variations on a Theme Excerpt from Ruth Sieber Johnson's Keynote Address at the 2025 National Convention Welcome Luncheon The 2025 Natial Cvention

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