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What a Reunion! The Class of 1975 beat Wesleyan’s attendance record for a 50th Reunion with 123 present! 

I can’t possibly capture and convey the weekend’s joy. It felt like the last week before graduation, when our time together seemed so precious because it wouldn’t be guaranteed once we left the Wes womb.

My apologies for not soliciting your news and Reunion stories in time for the Class Notes deadline, but my life’s been a whirlwind. My husband developed complicated vision problems requiring new doctors in arcane specialties and countless tests and visits. Our son’s wedding celebration in July—a beautiful event in an exquisite setting on a lovely day—required weeks of increasingly frenetic planning and errands in preparation to host dinners, brunch, and several houseguests.

So, this column shares some of my personal Reunion memories:

Driving into Middletown brought a wave of nostalgia . . . until I realized it’s not the Main Street I remember. It now bustles with offices, good restaurants, and shops, including the Wes bookstore located near where we hunted bargains at Bob’s Surplus.

Wesleyan is busy replacing or adding to buildings that it bragged about in 1970. Facilities staff led fascinating tours of the old, the refurbished, and the new. Highlights: the almost-finished Science Center; inside scoop on challenges and renovations at College Row and the Center for the Arts; evolutions in campus planning and architecture to promote learning and reduce costs and environmental impact.

In a lively co-education session, Bruce Tyson cracked us up reading from Where the Boys Are, a 1966 Mt. Holyoke/Smith pamphlet on road tripping. Erica Udoff observed that when she transferred in 1973, Wes felt like “it had always been co-ed.”  

Our welcome dinner started with a soggy bang under a tent at Pam and Paul Gionfriddo’s house. There were hugs, shouts, and lots of laughter as folks trickled in from the rain. No one sat still for very long; we were each trying to connect with everyone else at once.

Charlie Stolper had been absolutely determined to be at our 50th. Christy and their son, Chad, came along from Texas to help him navigate the weekend in a wheelchair. It was wonderful to have Charlie with us, and he was seated front and center in our 2025 class photo!

What those of us staying in the air-conditioned dorm atop Foss Hill most wanted was heat. Coats and umbrellas were essential with May rain and high temperatures barely reaching the 60s! After dinner each night, dorm dwellers, including Janet Brodie, Andrew Barnes, Martha Meade ’76 and Steve Miller, Karin Johnson, Risa Korn, Martha Faller, Susan Gans, Bruce Paton, Cutty Wilbur, Mark Nickerson, Jim Daly, Clif Grandy, his wife, Nancy, and others gathered in the common lounge for continuing conversation. There was probably a similar (but more comfy) scene at the hotel.

Friday morning we passed microphones around so that 100-plus of us could each share something from our lives. Stories were by turns inspiring, funny, sad, surprising, impressive, and profound. WESeminars provided opportunities to learn more about some classmates: how Jeff Morgan went from music major “dropout” to kosher winemaker; Beverly Daniel Tatum reflecting with Michael Roth ’78 about college presidency; Amy Bloom’s path as a writer and teacher; Roberto Powers’s foreign service career and life as an expatriate. Saturday breakfast featured short heartfelt talks from Andrew Barnes, June Jeffries, Paul Gionfriddo, Bruce Weinraub, Doug DeNatale, and Erica Udoff about the difference Wesleyan made in their lives and how Wes propelled some of them down unexpected paths. The ability to study and perhaps become anything one could imagine, plus the resilience to change directions and continue learning were frequent themes about Wesleyan’s impact. Another frequent comment was how much everyone enjoyed talking to classmates who they’d lost touch with or hadn’t known well.

For many folks, the most moving session was a WESeminar performance by David Leisner and Elissa Ely ’78, called “Kindness, Sadness, and Steadfastness.” It evoked laughter and tears by combining David’s guitar interludes with stories drawn from Elissa’s personal and professional experience as a community psychiatrist. A small group of us had a video call afterward with Joost Brouwer in the Netherlands, bringing him briefly to Reunion.

My two most surprising highlights? 

1. Lining up for the campus parade, I was surprised and delighted to run into my freshman-year boyfriend, Tom Wu ’72, for the first time in decades. 
2. A group of 2020 grads back for their fifth reunion stopped a few of us to chat. They noted we seemed surprisingly healthy and young—not something it would have occurred to us to say about the Class of 1930! Looks like we’ve held up rather well, after all.

Please share your memories, send me your news, and add your Reunion photos to our Google album.

CYNTHIA M. ULMAN | cmu.home@cmugroup.com
860 Marin Dr., Mill Valley, CA 94941-3955