Women of '59 Celebrate 75 Years - May 2012

Re: The Women of 59 Luncheon on May 17

From: MIM SELLGREN <MIMSEL@COX.NET>

Date: April 11, 2012 7:56:18 AM PDT

To: stypula@comcast.net

Subject: women of 59 luncheon

Dear Gail--

I have been very torn between attending the luncheon on the 17th and attending the 50th anniversary weekend of the U.S. Grant Association meeting on May 18-19-20.  This association has published all of U.S. Grant's papers.  I was determined to find a way to do both but getting to Starkville Mississippi (where the papers are lodged at Mississippi State University) is no easy task and so I must start the day before (the 17th) to arrive in a timely fashion on the 18th.

Why would I want to do that?  Well, U.S. Grant is my great, great grandfather and in recent years I have found I rather enjoy learning more about him at these gatherings, especially since others have  done and are doing the work to uncover different aspects of his life.  It is also an opportunity to see some cousins that I don't get a chance to see otherwise.

Would you mind forwarding this message to others?  I can't figure a way to reply to all.  I look forward to more gathering!!

Love to all   Mms

WOMEN OF '59

           SAVE THE DATE!

When:              Thursday, May 17, 2012
                         11:30 am for luncheon

Where:             The Faculty Club, Stanford
We will gather once again, this time to celebrate a milestone birthday, one we share with the Golden Gate Bridge! Most of us will observe it this year or next year, so the timing is just right. We hope to have a stimulating speaker, followed by great conversation.

Many thanks to Kay Sprinkel Grace for being our sponsor at the Club.

Some of you might want to organize other activities for after lunch or the evening, or even the next day.

Details to follow.

Questions? E-mail Gail Stypula

or

Connie Turkington

 

P.S.  It has been some time since we've done a mass e-mail like this one.  No doubt some of the addresses have changed or become obsolete.  Please pass this e-mail on to other classmates we might have omitted and let Charlotte Turner know if anyone wants/needs to be added to this Women of '59 group.  Thanks!

MEETING OF THE MINDS BULLETIN

February, 2012

Hello friends....we send you greetings and hope that 2012 is going well for you so far.  Here are few items we want to share with you.

• DEBRIEFING WITH THE  SAA

In November, Kay, Gay and I met with Carolyn Manning and Leslie Winick of the SAA to report on the M.O.M. event. With great enthusiasm, we told our story, with an emphasis on what made it work and what made it unique:

• The spirit of '59 was embodied in the original concept, creative planning, our strong volunteer bench, and the enthusiastic response.  Past reunions and other class gatherings have fostered a sense of class identity which is alive and well after fifty plus years.  

• It was an "intellectual feast" with a simple, flexible and uncrowded schedule. In fact,  as an "un-reunion", M.O.M. attracted many classmates who had not attended class reunions in the past.

• The program design was ideal: the idyllic summertime campus, the dSchool which unleashed our creative juices, and our incomparable A-list speakers. Other program elements that worked so very well: Open Space discussions, Jeffersonian Dinner conversation, the Power Point presentation, Lagunita dorm life, breaking bread together morning, noon and night! 

•  The personal touch in our messages and responses to requests made everyone feel welcome on arrival and ready to hit the ground running. The initial email survey was indispensable, giving us valuable ideas for the program, schedule and logistics, as well as confirming that we had enough interest to make it a GO.

• The group's size and informal agenda facilitated  spontaneity, full participation and candid interactions with our speakers and among ourselves. We shared the stories of our lives in an atmosphere of support and trust. 

• Building community: for our three and a half days together, we built a true community. Lifelong friends shared a new experience; new friendships were forged between classmates who had never met before! 

• Impact: Participants reported on major changes in their lives as a result of M.O.M. Many reported wanting to be more intentional and committed going forward. The impact is best exemplified in this quote from a classmate: "These three days have made me want to re-invent myself."

Carolyn and Leslie were very positive in their response, though we think somewhat surprised, not that we had pulled it off but that we had created something entirely new in the world of alumni activities. We came away from the meeting understanding that the most critical success factor was that M.O.M. was ALL OURS...from beginning to end, built upon what we know about each other, our interests,  passions and style.  And of course, now we know a lot more! 

• NEXT STEPS?

Many of you have asked when is  the next one? We've realized we can't do it every year because of the enormous effort required.  We agreed, however, that we want to infuse every future class of '59 event with the spirit of M.O.M.: the warm welcome, full participation, learning, listening, and always creating the space and the time for our great conversations. 

We promised the SAA we would provide a summary of the concept, planning and execution, potentially as a model for other classes who might want to do something similar, as well as a good record for ourselves. This "M.O.M.-in-a-Box"  summary is a work in progress!

• DONATIONS TO SPEAKERS' PROJECTS

At the final accounting of our M.O.M. funds, we had a surplus, thanks to the greater than expected turnout. We decided the best use of the surplus was to donate to the projects that each of our faculty speakers told us about. Your planning team felt that you would all support this decision because of your enthusiastic response to their projects. These donations will be on their way soon, and we can provide details when they are complete. 

• CLICK HERE….

Sent along by Emory Lee...

It's all about the space at Stanford's design school

As a spectator on the second floor of the d.school building, you might observe students standing at a project table or sitting on foam cubes or an assembly of executives paired up at cocktail tables doing some cutting and pasting.

• CLASS NOTES & OTHER MAGAZINE ARTICLES

In the January/February issue of Stanford Magazine, check out Margi's column for a great report on Meeting of the Minds. This is the first one she was able to write after the fact so it includes some of the unexpected things that actually happened! Magazine timelines being what they are, her earlier columns had to be written before the event and published after the event. It takes a creative writer to deal with this! 

Also, FYI, take a look at page 29 for a piece on the Longevity Center and page 43 for a book review of "The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb". 

• IN CLOSING....recently I heard Tom Brokaw call ours "the luckiest generation". Our parents left us their "greatest" legacy in the world of opportunity we have enjoyed.  I like his term a lot better than being called the "silent" generation. In any case, it's wonderful knowing that you are all out there making a joyful noise.

Keep in touch! 

Gail Stypula, on behalf of THE QUAD - Kay Grace, Gay Hoagland, and Howard Elkus.

November 2011 MoM Bulletin

Holiday greetings to all of our M.O.M. friends. I think you will agree that our campus gathering in August was a major highlight of 2011.

Linda Euler Anderson sends along a great article on William Perry. Here's the link for your reading pleasure: http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=23193&e=y.

Also, David Brooks of the New York Times has a new project, called "Life Report," that is right up our alley. It's about US! He invites us to add our stories on his blog. I will write to him about our generation, our class of '59  - maybe he can come up with a name that defines us! 

We hope you will stay in touch and let us know what you're doing and what the impact of M.O.M. has been for you. I will assemble your responses for the next M.O.M. bulletin. We will have other updates for you as well.

Gail Stypula 

ON BEHALF OF THE QUAD: Kay, Gay & Howdy

MoM reflections by Carol Magdiel Hoge

Dear Quad,

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

Meeting of the Minds - Bulletin 4

To: All Participants of Meeting of the Minds

 

Dear Friends:  We write today in the afterglow of the time we shared on campus just two weeks ago. You are ALL to be congratulated and thanked for taking a leap of faith with us and signing on to a completely new venture. You each contributed to the "mindfulness" of the program with your thoughts and ideas. You also brought great heart, great spirit, endless humor and the sum total of your LIFE! You made the Open Space Discussions and the Jeffersonian Dinner sparkle and sizzle. You were a great audience with brilliant questions for our speakers. Your openness to the dSchool process and your enthusiasm for it resonated through our days and nights together. 

 

The spontaneous sharing of your personal stories was memorable and moving. The Power Point loop of classmates' creations was awe-inspiring (soon to be a DVD we hope). You were great sports about dorm life as we encountered a few surprises! 

 

We’re hoping classmates will send contributions to further some of the wonderful work we heard about from our speakers. (Links to all of them are on the blog.) They came at great effort but fortunately they each appreciated “the best questions I can remember,” “ the pleasure of talking with an audience this smart,“ and  “the fun of this conversation” ... so we’re hoping  they felt it was worth their time.

 

We were all, of course, blown away by each of our speakers  - their ideas and passions,  their personal examples,  their achievements.  The whole event was an inspiration as well as an intellectual feast for all of us who were lucky to be there. It seems many of us had been seeking a different kind of gathering on campus, one with a more mentally challenging as well as collegial focus than is typically possible. It was exciting to see so many of you who hadn't been to reunions often, or ever, for that matter! 

 

Our 80+ classmates and guests used words like “life-changing”, "it made me want to re-invent myself", and "I'm ready to commit to more active involvement in issues important to this world".....to describe the impact of the experience.  We hope we offered a model of deep engagement with ideas, with each other, and with the University. We hope that it will also be valuable to those at the University who are thinking about the future relationship of Stanford to its growing cohorts of  older, very-active alums.

 

Thank you again for your patience as we threaded our way through the maze of details and requirements for organizing an event on campus. We are proud that we did it on our own initiative, that it was self supporting, that it retained the personal touch and incomparable Class of '59 style throughout! 

 

 

Everyone was a volunteer at this and all of you pitched in with great gusto.  Some people took on specific tasks and we want to single them out for special praise.... Marion Duncan Smith;  Connie King Turkington; Judy Font; Elaine Knoernschild; Randy Fowkes; Ami Sadler; Chatty Collier;  Bonnie Pomeroy Stern; Anne MacGillivray Franke; Dave Cox; Carroll Estes; Jane Sanders;  Jim Seeley; Carole Pewthers; Bob Kahn; Clee Houser; Larry and Marilyn Wagner; Sheldon Breiner. 

WITH FONDEST MEMORIES....'til we meet again....

"THE QUAD"

Kay Sprinkel Grace

Gay Hoagland

Gail Aguilar Stypula

Howard Elkus