2021 updates to come
From February 17, 2016
We are only 3 months from our 40th Reunion! This reunion occurs on Commencement Weekend, which always adds to the excitement. In addition to the plentiful programming that the college is offering, we have added our own touches:
- A family archiving /how to do your own genealogy lecture by Nanci Young, the college archivist — 1 p.m. Friday
- A Memorial to our deceased classmates including the launching of
sky lanterns — Friday night - An interactive discussion mediated by our own Anne Witsil — Friday night
- A community service project benefitting Safe Passages (a woman’s shelter in NoHo)
- A fabulous lecture, Not 4 $ale, about breaking international sex trafficking —
2 p.m. Saturday - A Silent Auction during Saturday Cocktail Hours
- A surprise guest entertainer for Saturday dinner
- We also hope to squeeze in some yoga sessions…
Thanks to the generosity of the $40 for our 40th Campaign, we have been able to set aside some funds for those who may need some financial assistance to get back to campus. Lillian Pliner (plinerlf@gmail.com) is the contact person with whom you should speak. The deadline for requests will be April 8th. Your requests will be held in confidence, in fact ole Lil will not even be attending this reunion… : (
As you have noticed, registration for reunion has gone live. I found the registration website to be pretty user friendly. Alternatively, one could contact the college directly at 413-585-2150 to register. We set the reunion fee for our class at $50 (less than most other classes). Again, thanks to our having some money from the $40 for 40 campaign.
We also added a silent auction this year which hopefully fuels future reunions. Judy Knowlton Wright (jaw711@cox.net) is heading this project. She will be asking for donations of services, vacation rentals or cool stuff (no white elephant tchotchkes!!) I know Sally Scott Moser and Mary Schimminger Hinds are needle pointing their fingers off making some sort of Smith-related something or other, but those broads won’t show me their project, so it’s a surprise!
So the stars and the moon seem to be aligning to make this a fabulous 40th Reunion. More details will follow. Check out our Facebook page to see who is coming. Hope to see you there!
Deb
From January 2016
Hard to believe that we are only 5 months away from our 40th! Your reunion planners have been hard at work (with a little fun thrown in) to organize a fabulous forthcoming 40th for us. Ain’t alliteration great?! So before we all get sucked into the vortex of the holiday season, keep this on your radar screen:
Our reunion takes place over Commencement weekend (May 12th -15th). We’ll be staying in Scales, King, and Jordan houses. Please update your contact info with the college via this link: alumnaerecords@smith.edu. Alternatively, just follow us on our Smith 1976 Facebook page or visit our class website through the Alumnae Association link.
We chose OUR CHOICES OURSELVES to be our theme and there’s a cool logo to go with it. I just can’t seem to transfer it onto this letter… graphic design was never my forte…This theme harks back to the book OUR BODIES OURSELVES, which many of us read as students. We all confronted/ enjoyed/abused (depending on one’s perspective) many choices back in the 70’s. Forty years later, many options still exist for us…So this theme will be a springboard for discussions/lectures/activities held during the weekend. We’ve also added some new options for this reunion including:
A community service project
A Scavenger Hunt
Yoga classes
A silent auction
A class quilt
Stipend for travel
A remembrance tree honoring our deceased classmates
No doubt my ADD went a bit wild planning this thing, but we should have something to satisfy just about everyone. Also built in is some down time for reconnecting with old (poor word choice) friends – HEY WE MAY BE GETTING OLDER BUT WE ARE NOT DEAD YET!
So starting early in January, I will post more info on what help we still need, who’s coming, how to donate stuff for the auction, whom to contact to apply for financial aid, how to interact with ride boards etc.
The $40 for our 40th campaign really jumpstarted the funding for this reunion. If you are so inclined or are feeling particularly generous over this holiday season, we can still use the help. Send your check payable to Smith College Class of 1976 to:
Sally Scott Moser, 301 Caversham Road, Bryn Mawr, Pa 19010
Deb Davis, Class President
From August, 2015
Hello ’76 friends,
This is your reunion chair Deb Davis to update and psych you up as we approach our 40th reunion, occurring on Commencement weekend, May 12th through the 15th 2016. Mary Lee Grisanti and I had a ball observing the class of 1975’s 40th reunion this past May. We saw some great things, learned lots and that experience has gotten my mojo on for planning ours. What was apparent to me is how the college has really buffed up the programming and activities for the weekend. For example, you can attend interesting lectures – I went to a great one about the aging brain – unfortunately I forget what the Professor of Neuroscience said I was to do to prevent dementia!!! One can take campus tours, enjoy a theater production, attend interactive panel discussions with current students, etc, etc, etc. In addition, there was ample down time built in to just jaw with fellow classmates. The food was good, the accommodations as good as campus living can be – don’t know how we slept in those tiny beds – but what I was most happy to see is how the chest thumping, bragging about curing cancer, climbing the Himalayas, while simultaneously having perfect children and partners is no longer a big part of reunion. Instead, the time was spent reconnecting, rebuilding friendships, and re-grounding oneself with women of similar minds.
So upon my return from that weekend, a group of us met in Cape May to start planning our 40th. Now it is not my intention for this planning group (which currently consists of a few us from the mid-Atlantic region) to be the sole voice and planners of this reunion. I just have to figure out how to use Skype and web-based conference calls for the next meeting so we can patch those interested contributors in. Come to think of it, I’ll have to sort that out before Anne opens another bottle of a French Rose!! Here’s what we have come up with so far:
- The highest priority is getting as many of us back to campus as possible. That will require our having the most up to date contact info. So if you know classmates who are not connected to the college, tell them to send their preferred contact info to the college using this link: alumnaerecords@smith.edu. Alternatively, they could just send their contact info to Sally if they would prefer to not have the college have the info. We should encourage people to join our class Facebook page or check out our soon to be reconstructed website. These will be the avenues we use to let people know of the reunion plans as they evolve. We hope to have some “scholarship” money available to those who might need to offset some of the costs of coming. We are also trying to figure out ways that individuals can donate miles to class mates traveling by air.
- We are kicking around a variety of lecture/discussion topics such as:
– Anti- sex trafficking
– Pros/cons of hormone replacement therapy for cognitive function, osteoporosis prevention, libido (you can imagine where this discussion went…)
– Dog Rescue projects
– Palliative Care and Hospice options
– Financial planning for retirement
– Book club discussions
– Yoga/ meditation/massages/maybe even a Botox bar (should this be in the same sentence????)
Obviously we are in the planning stages and nothing is set in stone. These are just some ideas, so give us your thoughts and if you know a possible speaker, give me the contact information. Some new things that I saw working quite well for the class of 75’s reunion were: a Remembrance Tree honoring deceased classmates, a scavenger hunt on the first night that served as an ice breaker, and a silent auction the second night that raised money for the class.
Current committee victims, I mean Chairwomen:
Headquarters: maybe Anne Cohen
Parade: Mary Anne Denton
Class Dinners: Susan Talsky Paster
House Reps: Sally Scott Moser and Mary Schimminger Hinds
Social Media: Mary Lee Grisanti and Harriet Yake
Programming: Anne Cohen and many others
Newer ones that we will need help with are: Remembrance Tree, Silent Auction, class quilt (Mary Anne will have to spear head this one; I’ll plan on sending a piece of material with a crayoned stick figure on it…)
Of course, the elephant in the room is how are we going to finance this reunion? Yes there is a reunion fee but that only covers the bare bones. The reunion I just observed cost a little over $15,000. Now it had a lot of bells and whistles but I would like to have enough cashola to pay for good class programming and to provide financial support to those who could otherwise not attend reunion. As I see it, we don’t need to spend a lot of money on chotchkies (sp?) and trinkets that we don’t really need.
So to boost our coffers in advance of the event, we are asking all classmates to consider a contribution to our class Treasury. We have not collected class dues in years, thus our balance is pretty low, which strains our ability to plan good entertainment and programs. Would you consider sending $40 ($40 for our 40th!) ? Frankly, any amount will be appreciated. The more we raise now, the less we will have to impose as a class contribution come registration time. In addition, your generosity may allow us to offer financial support to those who might otherwise not be able to attend…so dig deep if you are able! Please make your checks payable to Smith College, Class of 1976 and send them to Sally Scott Moser, 301 Caversham Road, Bryn Mawr, PA 19010.
So hop on board with the rest of these characters who have started planning our reunion:
| Anne Cohen, 1976 Class President | aecohen@debevoise.com |
| Deb Davis, VP and Head of Reunion | dadavis@nemours.org |
| Sally Scott Moser, Reunion Treasurer & Class Secretary | sallymoser@gmail.com |
| Mary Ann Bruce Denton | madenton@optonline.net |
| Mary Lee Grisanti | maryleegrisanti@gmail.com |
| Mary Schimminger Hinds | maryhinds0909@gmail.com |
| Marylove Hearty Moy | ericmoy1951@gmail.com |
| Susan Talsky Paster | susanpaster@gmail.com |
| Lillian Pliner | plinerf@gmail.com |
| Harriet Heldenfels Yake | harrietyake@hotmail.com |
Stay in touch and thanks for any contribution to the cause $40 for our 40th!!!
Fondly,
Deb Davis