A Toast to DePauw
To Old DePauw we toast today
And raise our voices high,
We’ll honor thee and loyal be
And praise thee to the sky.
Let every son and daughter stand
United e’er for thee,
And hail Old Gold throughout the land,
Here’s to you, Old DePauw
Universities, including my own alma
mater, DePauw University, are quick to sing the praises of outstanding alumni,
especially those who donate heavily to the school. That’s great.
They deserve the honors.
But I’d like to recognize another kind of gift to the university, one I
think is equally worthy of praise.
I’d like to tell you about my friend, Jim Wright, DePauw Class of ’64.
Even though Jim’s and my student
days at DePauw overlapped by two years, our paths didn’t cross until we both
showed up at a Southern California high school college fair in the fall of
1990. We were there to learn how
to be alumni representatives for DePauw’s admissions office. Twenty-some years and umpteen college
fairs later, I was a pretty good volunteer, but Jim was a DePauw alumni
admissions representative extraordinaire – the gold standard.
Late
every summer Jim would organize our little band of volunteers to staff the
DePauw booth at college fairs from North San Diego County to the San Fernando
Valley. Early on Jim plunged into
the college fair scene with gusto, contacting school districts to get DePauw on
their lists, making friends with other school reps and finding out all they
knew about which fairs were the best, recruiting new DePauw alums in the area
so more fairs could be covered, coordinating with an ever-changing DPU
admissions staff for materials before the fairs and follow-up about promising
prospective students after the fairs.
You could say that once September and fair season rolled around, Jim
lived and breathed college fairs.
With fairs sometimes three or four times a week, Jim’s family didn’t see
much of him until mid-November when the last of the fairs wrapped up.
We
worked a lot of fairs together over those twenty years. Here’s what I remember:
Jim
was always early for fairs. At
first it was because he wanted to snag a well-located table, but then schools
began assigning tables, and Jim wanted to make sure our neighbor schools didn’t
encroach on our territory. No
matter how early I got there, Jim had already spread out the black table
blanket with “DePauw” in gold letters across the front and arranged all the
brochures. Pens were placed next
to interest cards, ready for students to fill out.
I knew I’d find Jim in the lounge having
dinner with the other college reps. He knew them all – the competition – and
what they offered. But he also
knew them as friends and colleagues.
And everyone knew and respected Jim. In the college fair community we all supported each other –
every fall – night after night – no one more so than Jim.
We took to rating the fairs
according to how good the dinner was, because you had to have nourishment to
last you through the evening. One
district only had cookies, so you’d better have had dinner before or you’d be
sick on cookies by nine o’clock.
Another district was a step above with little plastic boxes of crackers,
cheese chunks and a few grapes.
Most districts had catered buffets – submarine sandwiches or maybe
pasta, salad and cookies – always cookies.
But the best fair of all was Laguna
Beach High School, because the parents put on a fabulous spread of home made
dishes. We used to argue over who
would get to do Laguna. It wasn’t
really a big enough fair to justify two reps, but we settled our differences by
working Laguna together anyway. I
don’t know if we ever convinced any Laguna student to travel from the beach to
Indiana farm country for college, but we had some darn fine meals.
Rural Indiana is a hard sell in
Southern California, and at the fairs Jim and I made bets on whether people
would come up and talk to us or just walk by. We’d flash big DePauw smiles at the kids and parents who
walked by at a safe distance, as if we would suck them into a scary black hole
if they got too close.
Jim had his opening gambits down
pat. If the kids stood there
looking puzzled at the name, DePauw, he’d say, “Indiana.”
“Huh?” they’d say.
“You were wondering where it was,
right?” he’d say, and the kid would flash a little grin and come closer. The ice was broken.
Or Jim would say, “What can I tell
you about DePauw? Like, where is
it?”
“Yes, that’s it,” the kid would
say, and Jim was off and running.
The university sent us a new table
blanket that had “Greencastle, Indiana” in gold letters underneath the golden
“DePauw” but Jim only used it once before he passed it on to me.
“They just look at that, shake
their heads and walk by,” he said.
“I can’t reel ‘em in with my Indiana bit.”
After he’d reeled ‘em in, Jim had
plenty of materials to hand out. For years he carted all this stuff from fair
to fair in a couple of well-worn cardboard boxes perched on a rickety rolling
luggage carrier, secured with bungee cords. Sometimes the bungee cords kept the boxes in place,
sometimes not so much. We usually
had to stop several times between the fair and the parking lot to readjust the
boxes and bungee cords. One night
at Laguna, after a hearty meal and a busy fair, we watched helplessly as the
boxes slid loose and toppled down a long flight of concrete steps, sending
DePauw brochures everywhere. Jim
took the opportunity to hand out a few more brochures to the kids who helped us
pick everything up. Shortly after
that Jim got a new luggage carrier and some sturdy Rubbermaid boxes with
interlocking lids. He still used
the bungee cords, though.
There were nights when we were
mobbed, were hoarse from talking to so many kids, and we ran out of
materials. There were nights when
the only people we talked to were each other. Some nights were hotter than blazes and we fanned ourselves
with brochures. Some nights the
table next to us was Dartmouth or Cornell and so many kids swarmed their table
waiting to talk to their rep that no one could even see us. (Jim didn’t let them get away with just
standing there, though. He gave
them the spiel anyway.) Then there
were nights when we’d get an outstanding student who liked the idea of a small
liberal arts college in the Midwest, and we’d feel like all the effort was
worthwhile. There was nothing Jim
loved more than learning about the kids and telling them how they could
flourish at DePauw.
No matter what, we never sat down
and we never left early – Jim’s rules.
“We might miss a good one,” he’d
say. So even if most of the reps
had packed it in for the night, we’d be there until the end.
Sometimes we met at the fairs. Sometimes we carpooled, trading stories
of our families and our lives since we’d seen each other the year before. The most memorable trip was actually to
a rare spring fair. We were on our
way to the Redondo Beach fair on a Saturday morning in early March, and Jim
made a wrong turn putting us right smack dab in the middle of the Little League
Opening Day parade. And we
couldn’t get out of the parade until it ended at a local elementary school
parking lot. That might have been
the one and only fair Jim ever got to late.
This year in mid-September it
crossed my mind I hadn’t gotten my college fair email from Jim, but I was busy with
other things so I forgot about it.
In mid-October I felt like something was missing from my fall calendar
and realized I had no fairs scheduled.
When I tried to contact Jim, I found out he had passed away in early
October after a short illness. The whole Southern California college fair community must be mourning his
loss this fall. I know I sure
am.
Twenty years is a long time to do
anything, and I can’t say I’ll miss doing college fairs. But I will miss reconnecting with Jim
each fall. I’ll miss his smile and
his zeal for DePauw and for the kids who came to talk to us about their
futures. No one could have been a
better cheerleader for DePauw, and no one could have been a better example of
what a DePauw education meant.
What a priceless gift he gave DePauw. So, from one alum to another, here’s to you, Jim.
