Dr. Dora Anne Mills ’82, the former director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and current vice president for clinical affairs at the University of New England, recalls the early days of athletics following the passage of Title IX. The law turns 40 on Saturday.

In an interview with the Portland Press Herald, Mills describes eating dinner in Bowdoin’s cafeteria one night in the spring of 1979, when fellow student Joan Benoit walked in. Benoit had just won the Boston Marathon. “She had to go behind this wall to get her food, and when she emerged everyone was standing on chairs, clapping, giving her a standing ovation,” Mills said.