Another 1968 Photo from the Wells Archive

Reasons to Attend Your 40th Reunion at Wells

25 March 2008

Greetings from your Class of ’68 reunion chairs. We’ve had a little trouble getting it together ourselves — using email to make phone dates that were confounded by the vagaries of our lives. But here we are, ready to go, and to do whatever we can to encourage you to join us in —

OUR 40^TH REUNION

(We know. You think we’re talking about some other class. But this really does mean all of US.)

Reunion weekend is May 29 – June 1

Those of you who have been with us for other reunions will remember the unique combination of revisiting the past while making and renewing connections firmly in the present. Those of you who wanted to be there and were not able to: here’s your chance. And for those of you who can’t quite wrap your minds around making the trip to Aurora, here are some points to consider:

• Feeling swamped? Time away could do you a world of good. And Aurora is exquisite in May.

• We laugh a lot when we get together, and laughter has aerobic benefits.

• You will be fed really good food all weekend and not have to wash a single dish.

• The networking possibilities are considerable.

• Almost everyone you see will smile at you.

• Don’t worry about remembering names; we wear name tags.

• No one cares if you’ve gained weight.

• Pajama parties are not just for ‘tweens.

• Everyone is as curious about you as you are about the rest of us.

• No one else is perfect, either.

• We need each other.

• A serious note: One of the most moving aspects of the reunion experience is finding deep support and acceptance among Wells friends and acquaintances. We can both vouch for how often this has happened. Besides being a lot of fun, reunion can be transformative.

• You should experience for yourselves the positive energy at the college — and the positive energy of our classmates.

We’re setting up a contact tree so that each of you will be contacted by someone you know, encouraging you to be there for all or part of the weekend. Also, we have leaped into the 21^st century and have a class blog. The address is: http://wellscollege1968.wordpress.com/. You can go to that address and read and comment on the posts; if you want to post messages yourself you need to contact Carroll (see below), who is the blog administrator. She will provide you with easy instructions for registering as a user. Photos are encouraged on the blog, so please contribute your favorite current or historical pictures.

Hope to see hordes of you! — we’d love to break our 25^th reunion record of 75 attendees. Please call or write with any questions or concerns. See you soon.

Rhea & Carroll

Rhea Hirshman • 132 Lenox Street • New Haven, CT 06513 • 203.466.6263 (h + o) • rheahirshman@mac.com

Carroll Wetzel Wilkinson • 131 Hoffman Avenue • Morgantown, WV 26505 • 304.598.0042 (h)
304.293.0308 (o) • cwilkins@wvu.edu

Wells College Alumnae Office • 315.364.3221 • alumnae@wells.edu • www.wells.edu (click on Alumnae Association link for updated Reunion info)

A request: Please send both of us your updated contact info, including email addresses. Also please send contact info for classmates who may have been out of touch. Thanks.

Friendraising AND Fundraising

Greetings to All! If you have not yet received a letter from Rhea and me encouraging you to come to our 40th reunion, you will shortly, through snail mail, no less! The College will send it out to everyone in our class in an effort to reach as many of our classmates as possible. In another post, I’ll copy and paste that letter, just so any readers of the blog can see it here as well.

Wendy Wilson Hilty is doing a fabulous job of reminding us to contribute to the 40th Reunion gift fund if we have not already. It is important to remember that the College needs our financial contributions.

It is also good to remember that renewal of Wells friendships and reaching out to encourage new connections with classmates is what Rhea and I have promoted throughout our work as your reunion chairs. We are counting on each of you to reach out to a class mate and bring her along to join us again.

Our Reunion Fund Chair’s Class Gift Update

Dear Classmates,

Just to give you an update on our Reunion fund – -
Thanks to the generosity of a small number of our
classmates, our Class Reunion gift is up to $60,623.00
as of the end of February with 47% participation. Not
bad, but I would hope that we could do a little better
as this represents the last three years of giving to
Wells as well as this final year before our Reunion.

If you have not already done so, please consider
making a gift to Wells within the next month or so.
Just write “Class of 1968″ on the memo portion of your
check and the Development Office will do the rest. It
would be gratifying to see the participation
percentage inch up towards 100%. Any amount is
welcome to add to our goal of funding the Martin
Luther King scholarships as well as contributing to
the unrestricted use by the college. To all those who
have contributed — a huge thank you.

I look forward to hearing from you with any questions
or concerns and hope to see many of you at Reunion
the end of May.

Wendy Wilson Hilty
40th Reunion Fund Chair

____________________________________________________________________________________

Getting beyond the class notes…

Don’t get me wrong…I love the classnotes, but I want more. (Don’t we always?)

How many of us remember the blank page we all filled out for our 25th reunion? I don’t remember who’s idea it was, and initially I didn’t like the idea, but then, when we got to Wells and read what everyone wrote, it was fabulous!! I still find the idea of a blank page intimidating, so what about a questionnaire that has some questions but ends with a blank section in which we can write whatever it is we want the class to know about us…Here are some ideas for the questionnaire… 1) places we have lived since graduation 2) # of kids and husbands or partners 3) latest or best book read 4) best memory about Wells or worst….any other ideas for the questionnaire?

BTW, some of you may remember the amazing time we all had on the first day of our 25th reunion in Morgan Hall. Somehow or other some of us gathered in one of the rooms near the top of the building…and started talking about our lives…and little by little as classmates arrived at the college, they joined us…(how they knew where we were, I don’t know) but we wound up in a huge circle sitting on the floor talking about everything. I think it was one of my best memories of that weekend.

Do other people remember that?

Can We Unify Our Approach To Improve Our Reunion Turnout?

Various people are making wonderful contributions to the goal of a great turnout for our 40th reunion. But I am starting to think that the time is passing quickly and there are great many people we have not reached as yet. Is there some way that all of us who are trying to connect can unify our approach and become a little more strategic?

This blog has had 262 hits so far, according to the use statistics. This indicates to me that there is some interest in its content. Of course we cannot tell who those people are. Some may just be surfing the net for reunions in general terms. Nine people have taken a look since Susan’s post, and our best day ever was 2/6/08. That was the day I started posting the photos. That day we had over 40 visitors. We can only speculate what this means. I hope it means we are at least getting a few people to think about the experiences we shared in college and the opportunity our reunion presents.
I know that Joanie and Kathie have done lots of effective email communication for the Express class news, Pam at the Alumnae office needs Rhea and me to write a social letter that will go out this month through snail mail, and Wendy Hilty must be getting in touch with members of our class reagrding our class gift, though I have not heard from her as yet. Does anyone want to take up Susan’s challenge? Or are there other ideas for outreach to classmates? Maybe Rhea and I can pull it all together in the letter that goes out this month…but I know we are looking to tap the energy and imagination of classmates. Please let us know your thoughts here or at our email addresses.

Remember Phone Booths?

Another Photo from the Archive

Possible Strategies for Susan’s Ideas

The latest copy of the Wells directory lists those who are “lost.” I know Rhea and I tried to “find” people using various strategies for the 25th; we would certainly have new options now, fifteen years later. There are some people listed in the directory for whom we have an address, but contact has been difficult in the past. There are others with whom we have never made a successful connection.

Does anyone want to compile a list; divide up the names; start working on this project? Fifteen years ago,  remember I tried to find Sally Miller, Susan Andres, Marilyn DeSevo, Helen Hardy, Pam Bond, and Marla Mudar, among others. Sometimes you do find the person, but she does not want to be found. Or she feels so out of touch that it is awkward and counterproductive. Sometimes you inadvertently bump up against emotional issues about the past. Sometimes there are just dead ends and no trace at all. There are many reasons our classmates choose to stay distant or have moved on and away; do we want to use the blog to discuss the pro’s and con’s of handling this ?

Back for the 25th I felt it would be so neat to find a few women from our class who wanted to be found. I still feel that. It was so wonderful to find Derry for example.

Your views?

Finding our “lost” classmates

On Thursday, on my way to the airport, I was chatting with my taxidriver, as I usually do, and he turned out to be Ethiopian. Somehow or other, he mentioned Haille Selaisse and I remembered our classmate, Ethiopia H. I thought I remembered her being a granddaughter or some relation to the Emperor. I mentioned this to the cab driver, who said, she lived either in London or Virginia. It’s funny, but usually these expats follow the comings and goings of their deposed rulers and their relatives closely. The Iranians know where the former Shah’s wife and children live, for example.

But it got me thinking about all our lost classmates…I know there had been a horrible story in the New Yorker about the women relatives of the Emperor being imprisioned and then killed, but my journalistic juices started flowing and I thought how can we, as a class, identify and locate our “lost” classmates. There has to be a way in this Internet age…and aren’t we all just six degrees of separation apart?

Should we try and compile a list and work at finding them? I would love to try. When was the last time anyone hear from Ethiopia or knew where she lived? Who else is out there, that we don’t know about?

Mills