What a gift the four of you created for
your classmates. Whereas a "bad barrel" (to use Philip Zimbardo's
metaphor) produces bad apples, the four of you created a "good barrel"
which allowed us to bring forth our best and share our best with one
another.
What worked so well was the structure
of the reunion. For me, returning to Lagunita Court where I had lived
as a sophomore, sent me back mentally to 1956 and reawakened the
excitement and enthusiasm I felt at that time. When I woke up in my
dorm room on the first full day of our reunion, I woke up with a student
mind set, eager to meet new people and consider new ideas.
If
gathering our group together at a dormitory was the first stroke of
genius, without question, taking us off to the D-School was the second.
There we were, all softened up and expectant, when wow! Welcome to 2011
at Leland Stanford Jr. University! The best part of the D-School
experience was joining in small groups to "learn by doing." Quckly we
realized how much each classmate had to contribute to problem solving,
and quickly we comprehended the power of the D-School techniques.
Suddenly we didn't feel like 74 year-old alumni-- grandparents and
great-grandparents, who had been undergraduates in the era of the slide
rule. The rejuvenation process which began the evening before, was
continuing. We were seeing new possibilities, and we were feeling
great.
The rest of the program was an
unfolding. Our minds were open. We were gelling as a group, and after
each lecture we wanted to hear one another's responses. Here a month
after the reunion, I'm still wondering if what satisfied me most were
the words spoken by the remarkable roster of speakers, or the comments
and discussions which followed. My classmates brought lifetimes of
accumulated knowledge and experience to their observations. It was such
a pleasure to hear what they had to say.
By
Saturday afternoon, when Larry Wagner gathered us together to take our
picture, we were such a happy group. When I look at that picture I
cannot find even one face that isn't positively shining. Sheldon
Breiner's beautiful slide show captured the reunion step by step,
including those wonderful pictures on the deck of the Elliot Program
Center where there is such peace and joy in our faces.
Certainly
by now the Alumni Association is aware of the success of our reunion,
and especially of the structure of the gathering, of the "good barrel"
which bought out the best in us. It's a structure which can easily be
duplicated for mini-reunions of other classes, but aren't we proud that
the Class of '59 thought of it first?
Thank you, thank you, Kay, Gay, Gail and Howdy,
Carol Magdiel Hoge
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