Meryl Stowbridge

— 35th — (2006) George W. Bush

The kids are launched: the youngest is in college and the other two have graduated from college and are independent and employed; their accomplishments are their own now, and I restrain myself from enumerating them here. The husband was ejected; enough said. So here I am, with a new sort of freedom, and the responsibility to be self-supporting emotionally and otherwise. After various part-time endeavors while the kids were younger, I am now a full-time professional in the nonprofit sector, variously called development, advancement, or just plain fundraising. My expertise includes two areas. Prospect research involves finding people who have the financial capacity and the inclination to be donors. It has a huge Internet search component and is a burgeoning field. There is always something to learn, and since expertise is gained by apprenticeship rather than coursework, always someone to teach. The second area is planned giving, which involves the technicalities of trusts, gift annuities, bequests, and financial planning, as well as the psychological issues of helping to chart donors' monetary and moral legacies as their charitable intentions are formalized. I have also begun to link up as a volunteer with several organizations that are eager for professional development experience.

Gathering with the Boston-area Radcliffe biannual brunch group has been a reminder that old school classmates, even those I did not know in college, have a shared experience that facilitates connections and understanding among us. The embattled minority status of 'Cliffies still makes us cohesive. From that group, I was pulled in to join the Thirty-fifth Reunion Committee, most of whom have organized multiple previous reunions yet welcome new volunteers. I will be on the committees organizing Radcliffe events and food/hospitality; any complaints will be met with an invitation to help plan our Fortieth! Discussions of where to direct our Worst Class Ever Thirty-fifth Reunion gift make me proud to be a member of HR'71, and they remind me that the guys were and are struggling with us to reshape our world. A sol rel major, I recall that women tend to get more politically radical with age – something to aspire to. Still uppity after all these years.

— 40th — (2011) Barack Obama

When our Thirty-fifth Reunion ended after Sunday brunch, reveling in what fun I had and wondering how it all went by so fast, I took the shuttle back to my car, turned on the ignition, and saw the clock said exactly 12:00. Noon, not midnight, but luckily my car did not turn into a pumpkin. I know others felt the afterglow, which led to increased class activities, and a sixtieth birthday party in 2009 just because we did not want to wait until our next quinquennial Reunion. I was on the committee for our Thirty-fifth and am now the Radcliffe co-chair for our Fortieth. As I compose this in late April, our Reunion plans are well in hand, thanks to my very experienced co-chair, a great group of classmate volunteers, and responsive Harvard Alumni Association staff. On behalf of our Class, I agreed in 2009 to take on a three-year term as an HAA appointed director (not one of those illuminati elected by alumni every spring). I work on the alpha (morning meetings) committee serving Fortieth Reunion and older college alumni. Idiosyncratic for each Class, relationships between Harvard and Radcliffe alumni of those apartheid years are not easily understood by post-merger alumni and younger staff. We attempt to respect their experiences while offering new possibilities, including assistance with class websites and planning events on the historic, but ever-changing, campus. The zeitgeist of the 1960s and earlier may only be glimpsed by younger Classes through watching Mad Men, though I hope they pick up on the social issues as well as the fashions. We have lived through some stunning cultural changes, even while we despair that society keeps repeating mistakes that we thought had been rectified. My Omega Committee aims to interconnect students and alumni of all Harvard schools, beyond the current Crimson Compass (a currently underutilized networking resource that is worth exploring). At the three annual meetings, I have enjoyed learning about new programs, current challenges, and awe-inspiring students at the university.

Since our last Class Report, my mother died, and my father is getting along gently in a comfortable senior care facility in Raleigh, North Carolina, their retirement home. Helping my parents through these stages has inspired me to arrange my affairs, and to simplify my worldly impedimenta — works in progress Joining her siblings, my third and youngest child graduated college and is self-supporting despite the economy, which opens the option of downsizing my home. The next question is: where to go? I expect to keep working for another five years, and since my job and my network of friends and business contacts are in the Boston area, I plan to stay local.

Family care and self-preservation are recurring themes among the area Radcliffe women who gather four times a year to share a tasty potluck brunch and a generous, nourishing spirit. You lovely women are a joy to know!

My day job is university fundraising, and those skills are also in demand in volunteer work. I serve on the development committee for Revels, a forty-year-old music/theater/culture organization that marks the folk/ pagan/ecological traditions at the four points of the solar calendar. In Cambridge, we put on the Christmas Revels every winter in Sanders Theatre and celebrate the autumnal equinox on a Sunday (when Memorial Drive is car-free) with River Sing on the banks of the Charles between the Weeks and Anderson bridges. I am on the board of Green Vietnam, a nonprofit 501(c) (3) supporting classmate John Berlow's ecological project in Vietnam — see his entry. As a community ambassador for WGBH, I represent at public events Boston's superb public television, radio, and Web source of intelligent programming. If I have kept up a respectable layman's understanding of science since taking Nat Sci 5, I owe a big chunk of that to PBS and NPR. My new musical favorite is Chris Smither, a local singer-songwriter whose mature, funny, and compassionate lyrics about relationships and self-delusion/ realization hit home with this lady who is still lookin' for love, but evidently in all the wrong places …. I have a pile of actual books to read, and a heap of half-read New Yorkers that breed when I do not recycle them promptly, but I admit that after working on a computer all day, getting some exercise, and fixing dinner, I gravitate to music or videos, rather than to more reading. I have a long Netflix queue of foreign and indie movies, having hooked up my Apple TV, though it also turns on my computer. I hope to become competent with the digital camera given to me by an offspring who has traded up to more complex equipment. Our Reunion is my incentive to liberate some of the untapped photo and video capabilities of my various technologies. Hope to see you at the Reunion in September!

— 45th — (2016) Barack Obama

On the first day of spring, I started to compose this quinquennial update, conscious that in order to exhort others to submit their entries within the next four weeks, I had better well have done my own. The Red Book will land in hard copy at about the autumnal equinox, and my reflections on the last five years are overshadowed, as I wonder, "How will this read in September?" The intervening six months are likely to be as politically tempestuous as any political season since 1968. So many of the issues dividing the electorate now are questions we thought we had exposed and settled back in our college era: equal rights for everybody, in practice, not just in statute; equal opportunity in housing, education, and employment, across genders and ethnicities; clean air, clean water, and responsible stewardship of the planet Earth; no swaggering foreign interventions and ill-conceived impositions of US power (the absurdities damned in protest songs of the era: "We are the cops of the world, boys," and "Let's drop the big one now"). Our sexual revolution of morals and access to birth control happened in a brief, halcyon pre-AIDS era, until the eighties brought a reality check about responsible behavior. And now, forty-five years later, reproductive rights are constantly under siege, and the gender double standard, in ways egregious and subtle, still applies in the pay gap and so many other facets of our society.

Some things have improved. We are careful to distinguish opposition to military policy from the support and respect due to veterans. While work remains, I am grateful that the LGBTQ community has liberated us all, and I am stunned at how far we have evolved, at least in some jurisdictions. In college I was so busy with my own concerns (politics, feminism, relationships) that I can't imagine I was ever actively opposed to other orientations, but I was too clueless to be inclusive, which I regret. Since writing my entry for our Fortieth, my second parent died. Dad went gently at age eighty-six, two weeks before Reunion. One of his choir friends used to go to his nursing home weekly to sing with him. She explained to him that she would not be coming on Labor Day, but he said, that's okay, he was going to Lake Mohawk, New Jersey, for the holiday. That's where he met Mom in 1947; so we know they are there together. Sunday afternoon, reunion co-chair duties discharged, I exhaled. In the following year I was repeatedly surprised at the paperwork and fortitude involved in closing a simple and ordered estate, which inspired me to get my own act together.

One goal I stated in the Fortieth book was to downsize and shed a great deal of worldly baggage, which I did two years ago. Having no idea of where eventual retirement might take me, I am so far renting an apartment not far from work (UMass Boston in Dorchester, by the JFK Library). I am above the treetops, with views of the Boston skyline and harbor. I thought it might take a month, but stuff kept coming out of the woodwork, and it took me all summer to whittle down the accumulations of three decades and three kids. I bought a new bed and sofa, gradually brought over what I needed to the new place, and got rid of the rest. I confess that my closets contain more than I would like, but the twice-yearly turnout of seasonal gear is an opportunity to discern what I really need to keep. I should miss having a garden, but I fill my balcony with pots of flowers for color, and after trying an abundance of herbs last summer, I may taper down to just rosemary, parsley, chives, and lots of basil to snip for dinner.

Technology will outpace my effort to keep up, but my iPhone 6 Plus is large enough for me to read and has a good camera. A trip last fall to Portugal — highly recommended — gave me an incentive to learn some photo editing techniques to capture the wonderfully weird gardens at Quinta da Regaleira in Sintra and the vistas of Lisbon. I have discovered Internet radio: WMVR Martha's Vineyard for a mellow beach feel all year long; WUMB UMass Boston for folk and acoustic; WGBH for Celtic and multiple classical streams, including early music; and WHRB.

The Radcliffe brunch gatherings in Boston and surroundings, potlucks held four times a year, are a constant joy. The friendship, trust, and good times we share make me grin just thinking of you dear women. Cliffie trivia: Who else still has the mug we were given freshman week — beige, raised Radcliffe shield, with a two-finger grip. Mine is in front of me, on my desk, holding pens; don't think I ever wanted to risk using it.

With my co-chair Chip O'Hare and many devoted, energetic classmate volunteers, reunion planning is well in hand: time to socialize, class survey, seminars, and soirees. Aiming to make our Forty-fifth a fun and meaningful experience, we have reached out to as many members of HR '71 as we can find. We hope to once again welcome back record numbers of classmates, because of the fellowship cultivated through many previous Reunions, class events, regional gatherings, our Listserv, and online sites. Hope to see you there.

— 50th — (2021) Joseph Biden

I am waiting to exhale. It is early September 2020, and everything is on hold. But you can't hold your grandchild, hold the hand of a friend, or hold a school day or a Reunion in person. The last time I wrote one of these, in April 2016, I wondered what politics would have boiled down to by the time our Forty-fifth Report hit our mailboxes in print that September. Unbelievable, and we have been living in the morass ever since.

Option A: In two months, the Democrats flip the Senate, gain in the House, and oust the incumbent. If so, by the time this is in print, we are in the early stages of rebuilding the precarious state of our democracy, repairing our relationships in the larger world, tackling climate change, reversing the damage to civic institutions, and applying lessons learned for the greater good of everyone in this country.

Option B: NO! Just no! And we could not even leave in protest. Our passports are no good; no other country that would be safe to go to would let us in.

Assuming Option A, I shall serenely proceed with my quinquennial report. I understand the privilege of my gilded cage, and except for some sensory deprivation and restlessness, so far my family and I are healthy. My daughters are able to work remotely. But my son and two nieces are teachers, and there is no ideal way to do the jobs they love. I await a safe and effective vaccine, and meanwhile take heart that testing is becoming quicker and more available, maybe more reliable. I retired from data wrangling in higher education development in July 2019. I had given myself six months to square away all the insurance, tax, and entitlement issues, then to embark on a life of leisure, arts, and perhaps travel. With Freud's quote in mind, "Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness," I was also planning how to be useful. (Have you noticed that at our age we are described as miraculously "still" active/attractive/otherwise able?) Then the plague hit. From within my Blue Boston bubble for the last several months, I have been writing postcards and letters to voters in swing states, hoping to clarify and counter the misinformation on voting by mail and to boost turnout in the November election. That there is an effective, cooperative interstate organization behind such a campaign helps me cling to optimism. We can only make progress on the social, economic, and racial disparities in this country by changing our political leadership. Fifty years ago we thought we had exposed the injustices and foolish exploitations that somehow still infect our country and threaten our planet. Just maybe, we won't waste this crisis. On a lighter note, I continue to work with The Revels, on the development committee year round, and as a costume volunteer backstage during our eighteen annual Christmas shows in Sanders Theatre — though they will be virtual this December. I will miss terribly the camaraderie of show biz and the joy of celebrating the season with our audiences. As a longtime volunteer at WGBH, Boston's public media, I have started to work remotely on the Archives of Public Broadcasting, listening to and editing software-generated transcripts of interviews, oral histories, and speeches to make them comprehensible, searchable, and useful to historians. So far, because I know the context, as well as a lot of the names and acronyms, I have concentrated on the antiwar and civil rights movements of the 1960s: William Sloane Coffin, John Lewis, the Freedom Riders, and a JFK White House adviser who worried how the racial upheavals might put the United States at a disadvantage in an upcoming meeting with Khrushchev.

The class Listserv is a source of sociability and information, and these days our experts in politics and medicine are particularly valued. An initial pre-reunion survey this summer showed appreciation of our class secretaries and the monthly newsletter, and of the tech-savvy folk who keep us connected. A silver lining of this viral miasma is that in online class meet-ups, I get to see classmates who live far from our usual Boston area activities. Regional Radcliffe classmates meet quarterly for potluck brunches that are always lovely. So intrinsic to our sisterhood, yet none of us can remember how far back this tradition goes. We met in July outdoors and unmasked, all of us having been safely in lockdown, but how we will manage as the cooler seasons arrive is to be determined. As a reunion co-chair, I can only say that our Fiftieth (or Fifty-first) Reunion plans are still evolving. We will keep classmates informed through the usual HR71 channels, so stay tuned for updates on attending, and information on how to get involved. Your energetic committee will present monthly Zoom seminars and online meet-ups to maintain the momentum until we meet again. So, although life seems to be on hold, stay safe and keep in touch.