It was late on a Friday night and I was the last one in the building. Oops, I looked at my calendar and saw I had RSVP’d for an Alumni event across the street from my building. I was buried in work. Just could not go.
Then I thought, “My name badge will be sitting on the welcome desk: a no-show.” The alumni event was in the Horowitz Theatre, right across the street from my building. So I thought, “OK, I will go for five minutes and then get right back to the office.”
The Horowitz Theatre was packed, and I almost left. Then I noticed an elderly man, alone, who was bristling with energy. I thought, “Hmm, this will be the one person I’ll meet.”
That man was Hugh Morrison. He was a Rhodes Scholar who graduated in 1930. Hugh started to tell me about life on campus in the 1920s. Story after story! I was enthralled – but I also felt cheated that for all the years I had been on campus getting my BA and MA, I hadn’t known anything about the life lived in the buildings I passed by every day. I was hooked.
Meeting Morrison made me look at campus not just as a physical place, but as a place where people lived their daily lives.
Ellen Schoeck 