The Winding Road: Class of 1974 Newsletter

Reunion Event Details:

When: June 13-16, 2024
Where:  Carleton College Campus in Northfield, Minnesota
Accommodations: Class of ’74 Participants will be housed in Watson Hall (with elevators!)
Cost to Attend:  50th Reunion alumni (and their spouses/partners) pay a fee of only $50 per adult for the full weekend (including all meals, events, and housing). 
How to Register:  Registration will open on the Class of ’74 website in March 2024
Tell Your Classmates You’re Coming: Let others know you’re planning to attend.

Important links to Class of ’74 Reunion Information
Our various 50th Reunion newsletters and e-mail messages have included links to many important reunion-related pages and sites.  Feel free to bookmark this page for easy access in the months ahead.

The Program Committee has been busily working to come up with a set of interesting and stimulating activities for our reunion. We have a variety of activities in the works, from panels to poetry and from tours to talks. Right now, we are asking for your input on several activities.

Congratulations to the Class of ’73 on their 50th Reunion, which was just celebrated a few weeks ago. A total of 108 classmates, about 33% of the class, gathered on campus for an enjoyable four days of laughter, fellowship and thoughtful conversation. Just a few fun reunion facts:  attendees came from 27 different states and countries; approximately 61% of the class contributed to a total gift of $28.2 million; there were 131 songs on their Reunion Class Playlist. Insiders report a very successful event!

In our interview, classmate Maggie O’Connor reflects on the twists and turns in her life that brought both personal and professional gifts.  Arriving at Carleton from a year with her family in India, Maggie felt out of step with the cultural sea changes underway in the United States of 1970. By graduation she had adopted interests and experiences that re-shaped her identity. Entering a career in medicine in Minneapolis, her awareness of feminism, patriarchy and her own sexuality blossomed, this time ahead of the cultural tide.

No matter one’s major or the dorm in which one lived, there was one thing at Carleton that regularly united us: the weekend movies in Olin Auditorium.  The serious films in the student-faculty film series, usually shown on Wednesday nights, presented movies as an art form.  The Co-Op’s weekend series was supposed to be for entertainment, either on the screen or through debates with Mansco Perry over his selection of movies when he ran the program in 1972.  In particular, two movies have stuck in my memory: “Casablanca,” because it was so good, and “Red Line 7000,” because it seemed so inane.

We told you about the Class of ’74 Flickr photo site titled “Carleton Memories” in our first Newsletter, but since then we have added over 200 new images to the galleries after scouring the Carleton Archives, so we thought it was a good time to invite you, again, to explore this resource. There are now over 700 images in the “Carleton Memories” photo stream, but to make browsing easier, we have created several separate albums to organize photos into topics such as sports, music, theater, student life, and graduation. We have also created a “Farewells” album to honor deceased classmates, a “Do You Remember” album with some whimsical memories of our Carleton years, and “Colorized Algol” and “Colorized Zoobook” albums to take you down memory lane.

Our classmates continue to be busy with new plans and projects.  Here are a few more bucket list items that may interest or inspire you.  Send us a note at 50threunion@carleton.edu and let us know what’s on your own list for the winding road ahead!

Carleton Homecoming Football game on Saturday, October 7th at 1 pm.  The plan is to meet before the game for tailgating, enjoy the game and hang around afterwards as well.  St. Olaf has also designated that weekend as their Homecoming even though the game is at Carleton, so it should be a big crowd!

This game will also mark the 50th anniversary of Carleton beating St. Olaf in football our Senior Year. It was our only victory versus St. Olaf over an 18 year period.  Last year Carleton beat St. Olaf in football, so we are hoping to cheer them on for two in a row.

More details to follow.  Any questions, feel free to contact John McCracken.

That’s all for now. Our next issue is scheduled for late September, so remember to send us your bucket list items, your suggestions for classmates who might like to share their stories in an interview and your own special memories of life at Carleton.  We can be reached at 50threunion@carleton.edu. Meanwhile have a great summer and we’ll be back in the fall with more information about what’s shaping up to be a magnificent 50th reunion!  

It’s hard to believe that it has been more than 50 years since we first set foot on the Carleton campus as new students. Much was happening in the country and the world in 1970. The Vietnam War had just intensified with the invasion of Cambodia. Television shows like “Monday Night Football”, the “Mary Tyler Moore Show”, and the “Odd Couple” premiered on our television screens. The transition to co-ed housing on campus was still a work in progress, and Howard Swearer had just been installed as the new college president. Music of all kinds played from speakers mounted in dorm windows, and the Beatles had just released their last album, including Paul McCartney’s “Long and Winding Road”.

With all that’s gone on in the world and in our own lives since then, the 50^th Reunion Committee thought those words resonated well as a theme for our reunion. It truly has been a long and winding road from those early days until now, with more adventures still to come. We look forward to coming together to reminisce a bit about those times, but also to share our experiences along the road thus far, to talk about where we are today, and to imagine what’s still ahead for us. We hope you will save June 13-16, 2024, to join us in Northfield for our Class of 1974 50th reunion.

50^th Reunion Committee Co-Chairs:  Pam Luecke, John McCracken, Jean Watson Thiel