alumni news Student letters capture the spirit of a bygone era Cleve Larson ’71, Barbara Morrison James ’71 and David Current ’71 Bydav id br auhn collected about 80 letters from classmates for their project. Idorm. wrote about the strange animals living inside her possibly expensive.” -ou only called on Sundays, because weekdays were imyThe three classmates worked with Associate Director oftoday.Carolyn Dvorakn an April 1970 letter to her parents,Nielsen ’71 “I got lucky Thursday and Friday and got to go to the mountains Alumni Relations Nancy Mitchell to issue a call for letters. with a couple of classes. I brought home a frog … The illegal animals Glen Drake ’71 answered that call for submissions in a big here still abound. The freshman dorm is featuring rabbits and ducks way, contributing 26 pages of excerpts from his letters. along with the usual contingent of cats, dogs, fish and turtles.” “There was a whole binder of things that my mom had saved,” After reading this letter, today’s Whitties wanted to know one Drake said. “As she was down-sizing, she handed me this stack thing, saidBarbara Morrison James ’71: How did students in of stuff and I went, ‘oh my goodness, are you kidding me, you the dorms get away with that? kept all this stuff?’ It was a thrill to relive my college experience David Current ’71told them, “We weren’t supposed to get through my old letters.” away with that!” James said letters preserve those college days more than 40 In an effort they dubbed the Whitmanletter Project, Current, years ago in a way that memory can’t. James andCleve Larson ’71 collected from alumni nearly 80 let- “It’s a completely different kind of thing than it would be for ters that give a glimpse into campus life during the late 1960s and us to sit around at our age today and try to remember college, be- early 1970s, when friction between tradition and counterculture cause it’s just not a problem of memory, but all the filters we made for, well, wilder times. would have, and the way we would interpret things differently.” For the project, the three classmates boiled letter excerpts The Whitmanletter Project isn’t over yet. In fact, it may mark down to a script, which seven student readers presented to alum- the start of a broader effort to collect student correspondence. ni at the 2012 spring reunion. Current said their goal is to motivate alumni to dig up their old “I think Whitman was an example of where the countercul- letters and send them for inclusion in the project. ture movement arrived like the fog,” larson said, “and it swept “What we’re all hoping is that after seeing the results of our over campus, and forevermore, post-World War II, Eisenhower, project, people will realize the letters they wrote are valuable,” 1950s … Wave by wave, we got involved in it during our time he said. here.” Current said the way students of that era surfed the counter- cultural wave moved him to tears. “The changes in the school and the changes in individuals were dramatic, sometimes within months or weeks. And so reading the letters, having been there and remembering that, was just stunning.” The three classmates got the idea for the project at their 40th reunion in 2011, when G. Thomas Edwards, the William Kirk- man professor of history emeritus, lectured on the history of the college in the late ’60s and early ’70s. larson said, “As we were listening, we asked, ‘What else could we add to this history in an age of email, text messaging and elec- tronic communication? What else is out there that could be added to the known history of Whitman to make it come alive?’” The answer they came up with was letters. Hard-copy letters were the primary link between students and their parents in this era. “one of the things that surprised me is the quantity of letters that we wrote,” James said. “For some people, it was almost a daily activity.” Current added, “We were talking to some students the other day about the cost of the telephone. There is no comparison 34 Whitman Magazine
Whitman Magazine July 2012
To see the actual publication please follow the link above