Just Some Quick Thoughts

Hello All! I trust you are home safely and adjusting to whatever is normal for you. I find myself exhausted, but energized and hopeful because of our time this weekend at our 40th reunion. It was wonderful to be on campus with you and to see you again. 44 years is so long ago, but 1964 is when we met and started our studies together. How is that possible? And how did the weekend go so quickly?

I know many of you have pictures of lovely moments during our days together. I hope some of you will share a few here. And I hope those who could not come will have a look too; so many of our classmates were missed and remembered fondly. I am proud of our turnout and our contribution to Wells. Many collaborated to make the weekend successful and Rhea and I could not have done it without Wendy, Joanie and Kathy, Pam and  Jen, the Development Office staff, Janice Gavan, and our classmates.

We encourage those of you who came to campus to candidly evaluate the reunion using the form provided in your packet and send it to the Alumnae Affairs office. They will use your views for future planning.

Warm regards to everyone in the class of 1968!

Time to Register for Reunion!

The college’s registration form for reunion arrived at my house on Wednesday of this week; the class letter from Rhea and me with news notes collected by Joanie and Kathie came yesterday. The end of May is right around the corner. Are you coming? We want to see you. It’s not too late to make plans.

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.

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.

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

Wanted: More Class Bloggers

Hello all-Just a quick note to report that eight class members are now set up to participate in our reunion blog. This is a good start and you’ll see that Barbie Kimberly joined us today. But if you look at the posts so far they are heavy on CWW reaching out. I want to hear/see more voices! If I can be of any help as you figure out how the site works, don’t hesitate to write me offline through email.
Please talk to other classmates and encourage them to sign up. I am truly hoping we can get some interesting discussion going as the weeks progress. More active participants will mean more lively conversations. I am hoping the blog can connect many of us virtually so once we get to campus, we can just keep those conversations going. There may even be some classmates who cannot join us for the reunion but who will participate virtually through this site.

Behind the scenes

Hello again. Things are going on behind the scenes to prepare for the big event. The event of course, is our 40th college reunion. (I just need to say that from time to time in an effort to establish the fact for myself. It still seems a bit unreal.) Classmates are volunteering to help us in various ways and Rhea and I really appreciate their interest and support.
Wendy Wilson Hilty has agreed to work on fund raising for our class gift, Kathie and Joanie have agreed to stay on through Reunion as our class secretaries, Susan Mills has offered to help Wendy, and Rhea and I are making slow progress with the blog launch. Pam Sheradin of the Alumnae Office has offered to help us in any way she can. We have planned to not only contact people by email, but also through snail mail, because we recognize that there are different communication preferences. I’d like to thank Wendy, Kathie, Joanie, Susan, and Pam for their efforts to make our reunion a fun, unique, historic, and memorable experience.

Just a thought about the blog…if you have photos that you’d like to scan and upload with your posts, please feel free to do so. Images add so much. If you have audio or video files to share here that would also be very cool. We’ll have to figure out how that works. But you know us…we’ll get it done! Look below the post box for a list of the file types that are possible.

Hello Classmates!

Tonight I am practicing posting on our reunion blog for the fun of it. I have been exploring various features of wordpress.com. Here are just a few things I’ve discovered. Once you have set up a username and password at wordpress.com, I encourage you to look around the site, and our blog too.  There’s some interesting material to read at wordpress.com There isn’t much at our site yet because it is just on the brink of its launch.

At the general site if you are interested, explore the faq’s, the information about usernames, the various statuses of posts, the story behind wordpress.com, and/or the meaning and uses of tags. (They are just subject categories that search engines will hit as they search on the open web.) As you get used to this method of communication, be sure to add tags to your posts before you publish so others interested in the subjects you have discussed can also find your message.

Rhea is preparing an email message about this blog to everyone for whom we have a working address . It is definitely a work in progress so I hope you will explore with us.

I just wanted to drop by this virtual space and say hello on this Monday night. I send greetings to anyone who might be a Wells’68 classmate, or a surfer interested in college reunions,(especially those for women’s colleges,) or someone doing research on new uses of web 2.0 software for social communication.

When you look at out site you’ll see that you can log in at meta, and then choose to write. You can just begin to type as I have. When are you are done writing you can scroll down and save, or go ahead and publish. That’s what I am going to do right now.

Best to all-

Carroll