West of the Moon
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“you have to do it like you did it then.”
In college, I worked part-time at the Radcliffe Alumnae Association. The RAA, among its many other functions, handled housing and events for Radcliffe reunions and junior reunions. (“Radcliffe reunions” are for classes who predate the semi-merger of Radcliffe and Harvard classes; “junior reunions” are for any class younger than their 25th reunion. Conventional wisdom, back in the day, was that the Harvard Alumni Association didn’t feel that the alumni giving rate for junior reunions was high enough to justify the administrative overhead of reunions for the 5th, 10th, 15th, and 20th classes, so Radcliffe picked up the slack. As Radcliffe so often did.)
Reunions, both the Radcliffe-run and the Harvard-run, were staffed pretty much entirely by students. We had a core staff of six or eight full-time non-student employees who oversaw our operations, but everything else was student-run. Students processed the registration packets, stuffed nametags, and handed packets out at registration tables. Students drove the transportation vans and shuttles, served food and drinks, and provided alumni childcare. Some alumni stayed in campus housing during reunion, and students processed those registrations, assigned those rooms, carried the bags, changed the sheets, stocked the rooms with towels and blankets, and cleaned the bathrooms.
What I did, as one of those student employees, was coordinate housing assignments. One year I was the housing assistant, and the next year, I was pretty much single-handedly in charge of housing. It was a huge task, with a lot of moving pieces, and I loved it. I loved it, even though I had to work eighteen-hour days throughout reunion week, even though I was seeing floor plans and database interfaces in my dreams that week, even though I started crying at the table one afternoon because I couldn’t find a pen, was sent up to my room for a nap, and came back two hours later to find that my boss had fired my entire linens-and-housekeeping staff. (It turned out that my boss also needed a nap, and that we were able to rehire the linen crew more-or-less without incident.)
Every year, around the first week in June, I find that I start telling reunion stories. For instance: there was this one woman, the wife of a 20th-reunion alum, travelling with two kids and a nanny, who found it unacceptable that their dormitory housing didn’t include a couch and a television. When told that she’d been informed of the bare-bones nature of the accommodations when she registered, she got this incredibly haughty look on her face, and snapped out: “My husband is a Harvard graduate.” (Harvard reunion? Not the smartest place to try and leverage that particular bit of biography.)
A more cheerful story: the woman in the Radcliffe 60th reunion class, a recently-widowed veterinarian from Vermont, who went to a mixer with the Harvard and MIT 60th classes and met up with an old beau. They made plans to go out for dinner the next night, and when he came to pick her up, he was wearing a seersucker suit, a straw hat, and the sunniest smile I’ve ever seen.
I learned a few general lessons from working reunions. First, I need more than five hours of sleep a night if I’m going to maintain a sunny disposition. Second, the younger “junior reunion” classes (fifth and tenth) are cheerful and easy to deal with, while the older ones (fifteenth and twentieth) are more likely to act irritable and entitled. Third, people -think- that they remember how small and sad dorm rooms are, but they really don’t. (The title of this post comes from something a woman in the fifth-reunion class said. She and her husband, both in the reunion class, had registered for one room, but hadn’t realized that a single room meant a single bed. We offered them a second room, adjoining the first, and they looked at each other for a long moment. He said, “Twin beds?” She shrugged and said, “Hey, you have to do it like you did it then, you know? It’s reunion.” They stayed with the single-room reservation.)
In case you haven’t guessed, it’s reunion time, my tenth. I’m in Cambridge, and I’m finally staying in exciting reunion housing. (There’s nothing exciting about it, and it is -exactly- as sad and small as I rememebered, but come on. I spent so much of my life coordinating these housing assignments for other people, of -course- I’m going to want to take advantage of it myself.)
Tomorrow, I’ll tell you my absolute favorite reunion story ever.
Posted Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 7:00 pm. Filed under: personal.
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Heh. I work for the alumni association of a specialized high school, & our reunion is coming up very soon. I’m kind of terrified (this is the first reunion I’m working). No 18-hour days for me (yet???), but we’re definitely getting a ton of crabby alums calling us already!
I hope your reunion goes well, now that you are on the attending side of it!
Hah! Your “my husband is a Harvard graduate” story cracked me up. I wonder if she pulled that all weekend and got blank stares.
Hey! You should’ve said something…maybe we could’ve had lunch or some such (in, I’m sure, your copious spare time…).
But really I wanted to say that this:
>he was wearing a seersucker suit, a straw hat, and the sunniest smile I’ve ever seen.
has totally renewed my faith in humanity.
Woo reunions! Woo Radcliffe! Are you coming to Radcliffe Day today?
I used to work reunions at K too, and my favorites were the women who came from the class of 44 who talked about being on campus when the men’s dorms were loaned out to be military barracks and they’d have to walk to class between the men drilling on the lawn and they’d say “eyes right!” and all the guys would turn to look at them. :) (It took me longer than it should have to catch on to the significance of all the women being class of 44, and all their husbands being class of 48.)
This probably isn’t as obvious at Harvard, but at K, the reunions were always great for telling us what buildings had been built since they’d gone to school and what had been there before.
Johanna– The 18-hour days were an artifact of our registration desk schedule. The desk was open from 7am to 1am every day, and we all pretty much had to be there all week. (Everyone was supposed to get one late morning and one early evening, but the people in the high-workload positions never felt they could spare the time. Thus the inevitable tearful breakdowns mid-week.)
Jessie– I know, right? And that she just said it, without thinking, suggests to me that it’s her go-to line in times of trouble. I can’t believe it gets her very far, but who knows?
Hannah– I’m sorry! It’s such a quick trip, and super busy, alas. (Which also means, Kristin, that I won’t make it to Radcliffe Day. But you should come to the HRSFA mini-reunion! Or the afkmn unofficial mini-reunion tonight.)
Celia– I love the stories the older women have about college. I also found something really intense about working an event with one of the mid-70s classes, one of the first to have any integration with the Harvard classes. The school did a completely halfassed job of integrating the Harvard and Radcliffe classes; they took the same courses, but the men had full library access and the women didn’t. They moved to co-ed dormitories, but the men could eat in any dorm dining hall while the women were restricted to their home building. Those transition classes have, unsurprisingly, not particularly fond memories of their experiences here.
The thing that’s surprising to me about your last note is that these women, despite the bad experiences they had, still came back to a reunion. It’s a personal reaction: I don’t have any interest in the reunions for my school where I was not particularly welcome, despite the handful of nice people I met there. I’m curious about what brings them back.
I’m still thinking about where “my husband went to Harvard” would have worked for you all your life. And how sad it would be if you didn’t have anything to say about yourself!
Dan, maybe they come back because of the other women in their year?