Class Notes

The clock is ticking and our 50^th reunion will be here in less than 2 years!!!  Our class gift for this special reunion is a contribution to benefit the mental health center on campus.  If you have already contributed, thank you so much.  We also have a Facebook page, Mary Washington College Class of 1970.

In January ten of us from the Class of 1970 met for lunch in downtown Fredericksburg.  It was wonderful to see and catch up with everyone.  Our group included Karen Anderson Muszynski, Frances Cone, Susan Duffey DiMaina, Suzanne Ferguson Buchanan, Tina Kormanski Krause, Kathleen O’Neill , Gabby Pagin, Elaine Wilson Maloney, Barb Bingley, and myself.  Gabby loves retirement and is becoming quite a world traveler.  In Feb. she rented a house in Mexico and in Sept. she will celebrate her birthday in Greece.  Tina took an Athens to Barcelona cruise in Sept.  She has plans for Alaska in June and also hopes to do some domestic travels, possibly to Santa Fe.  Susie’s news made all of us very envious as she and her husband are renting a house in Florence, Italy for a year!  Kathi went to N. Italy.  Elaine retired from Fairfax Co. Schools after 22 years.  She has 3 grandchildren who live locally so that keeps her busy.  Frances took a cruise to France, Paris to Normandy.  Her twins are now 33.  Karen retired a year ago. She is active in community fundraising and put on a Titanic dinner for 60 people.   Her son married in August and plans to build a firehouse.

Sandy Sayre has been leading a very busy life.  She finally retired from teaching in 2015 and has been raising her 3 grandchildren (now 16, 18 and 20) since her daughter died in 2013.  One grandchild is at UMC this summer in Virginia Hall and will be back in August in Curtis Hall.  Her oldest grandchild is at Longwood College where she is majoring in social work and wants to specialize in working with the elderly (Sandy added a big THANK YOU to that!). Her youngest is in the Science and Medical Academy for Chesapeake Schools.  Sandy stay very busy with church, gardening, volunteering with several different organizations, including helping the homeless.

I have stayed very busy traveling over the past year.  In February I made my dream trip to Antarctica and it was everything I had hoped!  John and I spent Easter in Venice and then took a small ship and sailed down the eastern coast of Italy.  We stopped in very small towns, Sicily, and ended up in Malta. We finally got our entire family together this month and it was wonderful to see all of the grandchildren enjoying each other!

Please, please send me news!

Anne

Maureen Paige ’70 wrote this remembrance:

I feel inspired to say that I really appreciated the article in the closing column of the Spring/Summer 2018 issue of Mary Washington Magazine about Venus R. Jones class of ’68. It was poignant to think of how hard fought her opportunities were, how much she gave back, and how much too soon her passing was. The article also brought back powerful memories of my time at Mary Washington and my African-American roommate and I in 1968.

I transferred to Mary Washington College from Trinity College in Washington D.C. in 1968. I had been living at home my first two years of college and was very excited to move on to a campus. I remember arriving on campus happy to meet my new roommate Eveline Cropper. It was planned that we go to dinner with our roommates after arriving. We arrived back to begin moving in when I was told by the woman in charge of the dorm that my room had been changed and I was headed upstairs to have a different roommate.  I could not figure out why and was preoccupied with my own excitement.  I went upstairs and was greeted by a rather huffy student who proceeded to prance around the room in her slip and state that she was told she was going to have a room by herself, so I went back downstairs and said “I’m really happy in the room you gave me and I would prefer to stay.”  I had no idea I was making history and Eveline Cropper and I were then roomies.  I didn’t realize until a week or so later when the newspaper came to interview me and was told that I was  the first case of inadvertent integration of a white student and a black student, in other words not  requested by the students themselves.  I was asked how I felt about it but I really don’t recall what I said. I had black friends at Trinity College in the District of Columbia and I had been raised to be fairly colorblind. However I realized later that was not actually the case and that my Mom had spoken with the woman in charge of the dorm to try to get me moved upstairs to a room with a white student. It may be hard to believe but I was completely oblivious. I was looking forward to my time with Eveline.  Over time I learned there were definite cultural differences.  She was from a small town on the Eastern Shore, and not at all remotely like my former Trinity College black friends who introduced me to soul music. I am not at all sure Eveline knew quite what to make of me either. I recall her being somewhat scandalized by my “groupie” type behavior when a soul band performed on campus. She just had a better head on her shoulders than I did. I like to think I was just a typically self-consumed and liberated Art major at the time, but that’s probably putting too good of a spin on it. I was a bit wild, often in trouble, even so far as going to dorm court. I received a letter from a friend of mine in Vietnam containing marijuana seeds and when I showed them to Eveline, she went screaming into the bathroom with them and threw them in the toilet. Well I certainly hadn’t planned on growing any marijuana anyway but it is a very funny memory.  I just remember feeling somewhat incensed that she would want to throw away my souvenir from Vietnam.  Later on a field trip we went to the National Gallery of Art and I was intrigued with her ability to flirt with the guards there and lo and behold she did get a date and fix me up with a gentleman from Howard University. When I went home and told my parents that I’d had a date with a gentleman from Howard University I found out that in fact my Catholic upbringing which had taught me to denounce prejudice was not something that was completely swallowed by my parents and my mother would not speak to me for a very long time. With Mother’s Day looming I will say on my Mother’s behalf, as the years went by she became a grandparent to mixed race children very lovingly.

A particularly good memory for me was while studying under Julien Binford, I was employed by the Art department to find models for our drawing and painting groups. I remember how happy Julien was when Eveline modeled. He was already famous and still is, for his painting of the African-American culture in his native Fine Creek Mills, Powhatan, Virginia. He and his wife Elizabeth were highly involved with an African-American church there and they held their baptisms in the creek by Julien’s wonderful Foundry home and studio. The last time I checked there was still a mural by him in a church there, Shiloh Baptist.

I took a Greyhound bus to go to Eveline’s wedding which happened at the end of that very same school  year.  I got off the greyhound bus at T’s Corner, literally a corner, and walked through the quaint African-American neighborhood with a lot of dogs barking at perhaps the only white person they had experienced, which felt like the mirror image of what happened to black women walking to work as maids in the neighborhood I grew up in. In fact I was the only white person I saw until I went back to campus. I was greeted warmly by Eveline’s family and friends and I had the pleasure of playing the record player for the music at her wedding in the beautifully decorated small church there.

It took me quite a while to realize that the photo I submitted (attached)with my college application was taken in one of those old-time phone booth style photography boxes at the end of a very long summer of lifeguarding and that for all intents and purposes I appeared to be African-American in that photo. It is possible that is how I came to be placed inadvertently with Eveline.  I do not know where she is today.  We did not stay in touch, but during our brief time together I learned so much from her about things that were not obvious in my sheltered suburban upbringing, and it enriched my life greatly.