The Raclare Cordis Kanal Memorial Scholarship Fund

Agnes Raclare Cordis Kanal (October 22, 1933 - February 24, 2016) was the first woman from the University of Arizona elected to Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor society. This page was created for the Raclare Cordis Kanal Memorial Scholarship Fund. You may make a tax-deductible donation to the scholarship fund by clicking one of the "donate" links on this page.

A. Raclare Cordis Kanal 1933-2016

Raclare Kanal  (Agnes Raclare Cordis de Kanal), a Tucson native, passed away on February 24, 2016 in Bethesda, Maryland. Death was caused by Ovarian Cancer.

Born October 22, 1933 to Edna Ruth George and Samuel Lee Cordis, she attended Tucson High School, where she excelled in Mathematics. She graduated from the University of Arizona with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in June, 1954, the only woman in her graduating class. Featured in a 1953 Arizona Daily Star article (“This Coed Finds Study Relaxing”), she was also the subject of an Arizona Republic article on November 16, 1953 for being the first woman at U of AZ to be elected to the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi. She was a member of the Alpha Phi sorority and the Arizona Historical Society.

Raclare worked as a computer engineer on the BIZMAC computer at RCA Corporation in Camden, NJ from 1954-56. She left RCA to study Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and received an M.A. in 1963. She married Laveen Kanal, a UPENN graduate student from India, after he received his June 1960 Ph.D  degree in Electrical Engineering.

Over the course of her life, she pursued several interests with passion and excellence: photography, history and culture of Native American Tribes, research and identification of grasses and plants, study of spoken and written Spanish, Arabic, Hindi and other international languages and cultures, the history of Spain in early America, and genealogy. For the past 25 years, she became a valuable resource for families searching for their ancestry, especially from Mexico and the Basque region of Spain. A long-time volunteer with the Family History Center of Washington, DC, she enjoyed helping people discover their ancestry and loved spending hours researching her own family history. She was a fan of the arts, from Italian opera to Mexican Mariachi music, classic film and ballet. A devoted pet rescuer, she cared for many dogs, cats, birds – and the occasional turtle, mouse, and squirrel.  She also cared deeply about the wellbeing of her fellow humans and supported several organizations working for social justice in the U.S. and abroad.