Here's to You, Jim

by Liz Zuercher

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. 

The Women We've Become

Eleven of my sorority sisters and I are back on campus at De Pauw University in Greencastle, Indiana for our forty-fifth reunion, staying in a dorm where we’re crammed two to a tiny room and the bathroom is a long walk down the hall. We’re wondering how we lived that way for four years. We’ve come from all over North America, and for some of us it’s been decades since we’ve seen each other. Still, the conversation is non-stop and the memories flood in. It’s as if we never left campus.

One of us tells of overhearing a woman from a class younger than ours say to her college girlfriends, “I really love the women we’ve become.” We all nod in agreement. We feel that way, too. And it makes me think about who we were, what was expected of us and the paths we ended up taking.

Our school was small and friendly and provided a sheltered environment in which we could first try our wings away from home. It was a place steeped in tradition and we were traditional girls from solid, mostly Midwestern families. When we entered college in the fall of 1962, we were girls on the verge of discovering who we were, who we were going to become.

We have been on the cusp pretty much all our lives. We were on the cusp of the baby boom, not technically a part of it, but the forerunners, the ones born just before the wave of post war births began. Ahead of the trend – that’s what our generation has been.

We were on the cusp of women’s lib, too. In our day girls went to college to find a husband. Failing that, they became teachers, nurses or secretaries. We became all those things and more, because even though the envelope of discrimination against women in the workplace was sealed pretty tight, we were starting to poke at it, looking for spots where the glue on the flap had worn thin so we could slip through to forbidden territory. We still became teachers and nurses and secretaries, but we also grew into administrators, artists, writers, and experts in special education, orchids, native flora and fauna. We became designers, business owners, college professors, bankers, fundraisers and tireless volunteers. We followed tradition and became wives, mothers and grandmothers, too. But we are also world travelers thirsty for knowledge of our planet and the people who inhabit it. We are involved, curious, always seeking to expand our horizons, learning something new and enjoying every minute.

We were on the cusp of the civil rights movement, too. And in our protected little corner of the world we innocently thought it would be a simple thing to invite a black college student from a Southern university to live in our sorority house for a semester or a year. What could be wrong with that? Plenty, according to the national sorority president, who came to scold us for our outrageous behavior, shaking her finger at us. That wasn’t what the sorority was about the president said. The black girl wasn’t one of us, couldn’t possibly live with us. There were rules, she said, and we must follow them. She put us on probation. But to us, the sorority was about the bond of friendship we had, not some exclusionary set of rules. We only wanted to share that friendship. Rather than breaking our spirit, the experience brought us closer together, made us value each other even more. We became more tolerant, more inclusive.

On the cusp. On the verge. Right before. Ahead of time. On the leading edge. That is where we’ve lived our lives as wave after wave of change has washed over our world. We’re there now, too, as we have passed 65 and head toward 70. We’re a new kind of sixty-something. We’re still exploring, still learning, still pushing the envelope instead of retiring to a front porch rocker.

At the reunion we talk about our lives now and how we were in college. We laugh over old times and cry over losses and illness. We have somber conversations about those in our graduating class who are gone and we’re thankful it’s none of us yet. So we celebrate each other and our friendship that has persisted through nearly fifty years and vast geographical separation. We hit the dance floor with the kids from the Class of 2006 who are forty years our junior, and we all rock out to “We are Family”.

A young man from the Class of 2006 taps me on the shoulder and asks what class we are.

“1966,” I say proudly.

“Wow,” he says with a big smile. “You guys are awesome!”

I look around at my sisters, smiling, vibrant, dancing with abandon.

“Yes we are,” I say.

Copyright 2011 by Liz Zuercher