As you will read elsewhere in these pages, another university event for alumni was inaugurated this spring. Planned as an annual occasion, Reunion Weekend provides a new venue for class reunions, which traditionally have been held during the fall Homecoming celebration. Now, exes will be given two opportunities during the academic year to come home.
Long before I became a student at TCU, I was well-acquainted with its reunion rites. Fall Homecoming was the only alumni event of the year then, and it caused great stir on the campus and in my home, as well. I can’t remember a Homecoming in those days that our house on Rogers Road wasn’t full to overflowing with my parents’ TCU friends and colleagues, gathered to revisit, recollect, and reclaim their college days.
They would begin to arrive about noon on Saturday, park their cars in our driveway or at curbside, register their presence with us, and take the short walk to the stadium for the afternoon football game, which was almost incidental to the balance of the day. Afterward, there was the sumptious buffet my mother had prepared for them–baked ham, bite-sized cream puffs stuffed with chicken salad, potato salad, Boston-baked beans (a real winner!), relishes, and made-from-scratch hand-fashioned-that-morning Parker House rolls, with apple crisp or chocolate cake to satisfy the sweet-tooth–and more opportunity for revisiting, recollecting, and reclaiming. Not unlike the tail-gate picnics so popular now, those after-the-game gatherings were full of stories and winks and looks and smiles that came from way down inside where we store the special things. We kids–my sister and I–would sit on the floor and listen, encircled with the light and love and laughter of good times and good friends that hung in the air long after all had said their goodbyes and left my mother and daddy with more fond memories to savor until next time. Every year, it was like the reprise of a favorite old song to which everyone had contributed a verse.
After I enrolled in TCU in the early fifties, the magic of Homecoming continued. A theme would be chosen for the celebration and the whole campus seemed to be involved in the preparation for welcoming back and honoring the past. Just after classes began in the fall (which was in mid-September then), various campus groups would begin work on the floats. The floats were built on long flatbed trailers which were to be pulled by truck units down the length of Main and Houston streets in downtown Fort Worth for the Saturday morning Homecoming Parade. During the building stages, the trailers were parked under the west stadium stands for protection, and each fall afternoon and evening leading up to Homecoming, that area of the stadium took on the semblance of an anthill as we busily fashioned our chicken-wire sculptures stuffed with crepe paper.
My freshman year, the theme must have had something to do with fairy tales, for my class created a huge paper pumpkin, in front of which would stand our Cinderella, blond Bobbie Lou Gibson, sceptered and crowned, looking for all the world like a princess in her white ball gown. There was the exhilirating rush of working together to finish that float before the deadline, the panicky reality of having to stabilize such a structure, and the dashing out to yet another five-and-dime in search of more orange crepe. Building a giant pumpkin close to Halloween can present a challenge. The excitement of actually riding in the parade behind the proud high-stepping, strutting TCU Marching Band and winning first prize for our wobbly pumpkin has never left me.
This is all by way of saying that homecomings and comings- home have always been special to me, and until this past year, I never questioned that the idea had anything but strong merit. However, an article in the student newspaper,(a weekly in my day), made me take a closer look at this rite of returning and view it from a different angle. The article, ill-conceived and ill-phrased by student staffer, Greg Weed, carried the title, “Why did you come home, anyway?” Weed held up to ridicule the whole idea of coming back to “places that don’t exist anymore,” derided alumni for their “silly clothing,” (believe me, Greg, black high-topped tennies that girls wear now and thigh warmers under jogging shorts are not too cool to us), and ended by asking us to “look back in your yearbook or write an old college buddy,” but “please stay home.”
At first I was puzzled by such a rude attack on what seems to me a harmless, healthy, happy event, but as what he wrote kept nibbling at my consciousness, I began to be grateful to this immature, nasty little innocent for making me think, making me say why I find the return to earlier haunts and happenings a gratifying experience.
So, indeed, why do we come back? Why aren’t we satisfied to leave and forever after depend on yearbooks and letters and chance encounters with our old college buddies? We know we won’t find things as we left them. We know that little will be the same, cannot be the same. We know the barn burned and that biology is no longer taught in the basement of Clark Hall, that, in fact, the Clark Halls and Goode Halls we knew fell to the wrecking ball long ago, and that the little chapel in a third-floor corner of the old Brite College building has been supplanted by the Carr Chapel across and down University Drive, and that there are Greek societies now where there were none then, and that the trees are taller, the rules looser, and girls wear shorts to class, and going barefoot is okay (Dean Shelburne’s ghost just stirred!). Most of us are even astute enough to know that the past is not something fixed and unalterable. We even know that time will have left its mark on youthful beauties. We know that; so why do we come?
It has to do, I think, with sense of place, as in a French impressionistic landscape. There are no people, no activity in those paintings, but one senses what has happened there; the place is the stage onto which we set and reset our own characters and the action. When we visit the room we lived in, it is not to see it as it was. It is the ambiance remembered that we seek. Around this corner of the east wing were June and Sally, in the corner suite were Molly and Elaine, next door were Tank and Marguerite, and Sara and Mary Sue, and across the hall were crazy Sylvia and her roommate, Joann–our family for that while. If we happen to be accompanied back by those who shared the time remembered, all the better, but the ghosts of those who won’t or can’t return will be there when we come again. Being in the physical place helps us to recapture some of what made our lives good then.
It has to do, I think, with reclamation. The scene revisited, however changed, helps us search out and reclaim what the mind had snared there in the ago. It has to do, I think, not so much with going back in time, but rather going outside of time, arresting it for a moment, in order to get back.
I fervently hope that Greg Weed’s most memorable time at TCU is not, as he puts it, “throwing up in the Tom Brown toilet.” I hope that he will yet experience something of value to take away and stay with him–a sense of belonging, of being a part of the parade, a brief shining moment in a home to which, given the vehicle of homecoming and reunion, he can periodically return and reclaim. Sometimes the best vacation is to the past.
©1992 Joan Hewatt Swaim