Oberlin Alumni Magazine

Oberlin Alumni Magazine - Celebrating 100 Years
By Yvonne Gay Fowler and Kelly Viancourt
Photos by Sandy Rochowicz, assisted by Oberlin Archives

Happy Anniversary OAM! We faced an impossible task, attempting to relive your colorful history in just a few short pages. Only by leafing through your dusty volumes, with their brittle pages and fading photographs, can readers begin to grasp the magnitude of Oberlin history that you bear. You were there for it all—the births and deaths of campus landmarks, the inaugurations of presidents, the end of a divinity school, and the emergence of modern activism. Over the decades, you’ve shared the news of tens of thousands of Oberlin graduates, and by doing so, have proven to younger generations that the values learned at Oberlin do, in fact, last a lifetime.

This magazine’s mission statement remains much the same as it was in October 1904, when your founders sought to keep alumni in “closer touch with the College” by giving them “the news of the College and of the graduates.” In its more modern form, your mission is also “to be informative and educational, engaging and entertaining, and to reinforce a sense of community and a shared past.”

In reaching your Centennial, you’ve joined a select group of peers; fewer than a dozen other college or university alumni magazines have reached such a milestone. To borrow from the words of former editor Mercedes Holden Singleton ’26 upon your 50th anniversary in 1954: “Let us hope that in 2004 this issue will be combed for information and quotes to instruct and amuse alumni who will be reading a bigger and better Oberlin Alumni Magazine on its Hundreth (sic) Anniversary.”