An alumnus' advice to the senior: we've only just begun

(This is an open letter to the Class of 1999)

You have probably been spending many sleepless nights, tossing, turning anxious over your lot in real life only a few weeks hence. More precisely, you have probably been angst-riddance over exactly what it will mean, finally, to be a member of that august body, the Oberlin Alumni Association. I know that back in the spring of '58 that was certainly one of my big concerns.

Rest assured: many of us have survived the transition, A few have dropped by the wayside, but we always refer to them in hushed tones, and I just know you will not suffer the fate of "address unknown" and "no solicitation."

"But what does it mean to be a member of the Oberlin Alumni Association?" you are probably asking yourself daily. And the answer, of course, is airplanes, t-shirts and strangers. But there are other things, naturally, and the most important is that you know it means more than just getting old and wandering around the campus, slightly disoriented once every five years.

It also means that you get to give the college and conservatory (hereafter referred to as !The College!) money. Some of you will be able to give a little, some of you a lot. The important thing to remember is that you should give something-every year-forever and even after. All those terrible surveys that do college rankings seem to include alumni participation as one criterion to pit !The College! against all the other colleges that fancy themselves our equal.

So, today you start a penny/dollar/millions jar labeled "Oberlin" so that you can join with all of the rest of us to keep !The College! great. That will help give scholarships to struggling underclasspersons of the next century, subsidize all those little costs that tuition doesn't cover, build buildings, and grow (the most teeth-gritting of all verb misuses perpetrated upon the English language since the Romans) the endowment (that lovely mother of all slush funds).

Another thing is that you get to give help to students trying to find winter-term projects or experiences or, even, jobs.

And you get to help create a network with other alumni. After a long day of earning money to make your OC gifts and giving jobs and guidance to students and grads, you can get together in an atmosphere of conviviality with your fellow grads, young and old, diligent and slapdash, neat and slovenly, and have picnics, brilliant discussions, parties, and the chance to wheel-and-deal on a very high plateau. And because some Oberlin people take significant others from outside the fold, you can even learn to deal graciously with graduates of other alleged institutions of higher learning.

And if you're very good at the above (excluding wandering) you get to be on the Alumni Council and run some of these events and groups and write lots of letters and make lots of phone calls. If you prove yourself there, you can even become a member of the Executive Board of the Alumni Council and get back to wandering around campus slightly disoriented and run things.

Actually, the bottom line is this: Oberlin alums are a family. The relationship between !The College! and its grads and among its grads can be comforting, useful, warming, exasperating, and everything else that families can be. It's also a responsibility

And now, those answers: I look back on a few moments in my life when the Oberlin connection struck home. I was on an airplane (propellers, pre-jet) going home to Cleveland. I had been babbling to my seat-mate on the bus ride from the Port Authority Bus Terminal to LaGuardia about starting Oberlin in three weeks. In the air, a young man suddenly stopped by my seat and said, "I heard you talking about going to Oberlin. I graduated from there and just want you to know that you'll love it."

As an alum, you get to be proud of your family and encourage those joining it.

I was standing in the Hong Kong airport wearing my last clean article of clothing, an Oberlin t-shirt. A nicely dressed man said, "Are you from Oberlin?" I assured him that I was and we began to talk. Then we discovered that we had a mutual friend and exchanged addresses. I contacted the friend when I got back in the States and related the incident. And then I discovered that I'd been useful in reuniting two old friends who had lost track of each other, the one in the US assuming that the other had been murdered in China's Cultural Revolution.

As an alum, you get to be part of something special that even the outside world recognizes as special.

You get to be part of an organization that believes strongly in service and the humanities. You get to be an active part of a dedicated liberal arts tradition.

So rest easier tonight, seniors-and the rest of you who will be facing real me in the next three years. You get to be part of The Oberlin Alumni Association, a group of people who will welcome you and help you-and darned well expect you to do the same for them.

-Maxine Wenzler Houck, class of 1958, is a class agent and a member of the Executive Board and reunion gift committee.