The Fiftieth Reunion Memory Book

Kit Doyle sat down on the low stone wall by the Old Chapel at four past three, opened the spiral-bound book across her knees, and read page forty-two twice.

Katherine Anne "Kit" Halloran Doyle — Middlebury '76, Vermont Law '79, Vermont Superior Court from the January of 1998 until the March of 2023, retired now to a small yellow farmhouse on the Weybridge Road with three horses, a Wirehaired Pointing Griffon named Tavish, and a granddaughter who will start kindergarten at Weybridge Elementary in the fall — had driven the twelve miles from home that morning in the green 2011 Subaru Outback with 214,000 miles on it, parked in the visitor lot behind the Kirk Alumni Center, and walked up College Street to the Bicentennial Green in the summer sandals her daughter Nora had told her, on the phone the night before, to please just wear the good ones for once.

At the folding registration table, under the elms, a work-study senior named Priya Chandran, class of 2028, from a suburb of Bangalore by way of a boarding school outside Chicago, had checked Kit's name off a printed list and handed her three things:

A white cotton drawstring bag with the college's seal in navy on the front.

A folded campus map with the Reunion Weekend 2026 schedule printed on the back, in the small careful sans-serif the alumni office has used since the print shop switched from letterpress to offset in 1989.

And the Book.

What the Book is

The Fiftieth Reunion Memory Book has been printed at the campus print shop off Cross Street since the June of 1961, when Dean Peyton Hastings — Middlebury '18, a Great War veteran of the American Field Service — asked the class of 1911, meeting for their fiftieth, to each mail in a photograph and a paragraph about the intervening half-century, in your own hand or your own words, as you please. Sixty-three of the ninety-eight surviving members of the class of 1911 did. Dean Hastings had the paragraphs typed by his assistant Mrs. Louise Beecher on a Royal Quiet De Luxe, the photographs mounted with rubber cement, and the whole thing bound at the print shop in a run of two hundred and fifty copies with a plain navy card-stock cover and a title in the same sans-serif the print shop had used since Woodrow Wilson was in office.

Every fiftieth reunion class since has done the same.

The current Book — Kit's Book — is eight and a half by eleven, spiral-bound in black plastic, and four hundred and eighteen pages long. It has a photograph and one to three self-written paragraphs for every one of the hundred and forty-seven members of the class of 1976 who returned the questionnaire the alumni office mailed on the second of February, together with the seventeen paragraphs written by classmates about the twenty-nine members of the class who had died between the June of 1976 and the March of 2026.

The instructions on the questionnaire had been the same instructions Dean Hastings had drafted in the winter of 1960 and Mrs. Beecher had typed and mimeographed for the class of 1911:

Tell us, in a paragraph or three, about the fifty years. Where the life went. What is dear to you now. Who is around your table. What you hope for what comes next. Please include a photograph you like of yourself, alone or with the people who matter. Please write in your own words. There is no correct paragraph.

The class of 1976 wrote back. In their own words. In three paragraphs. About the fifty years.

What is on page forty-two

Page forty-two, in Kit's Book, was the page of a woman she had not seen since a spring afternoon in 1977 outside the Grille in the basement of Proctor Hall.

Her name was Meredith Ellen Colby Whittemore. Middlebury '76, English major, second-team varsity field hockey her senior year, from a small stone farmhouse north of Rutland, in the town of Chittenden, where her father had run the general store on Route 4 from the winter of 1958 until the winter of 1993. Kit had known her by way of a shared Whitman seminar and a shared bench outside Warner Hemicycle in the spring of their junior year.

The photograph, on page forty-two, showed Meredith on the front porch of the stone farmhouse in Chittenden, on a warm afternoon in the September of last year, in a light blue barn jacket, with a black-and-white spaniel-mix rescue dog on her lap and a small dark-haired girl of four or five on the step beside her.

The paragraph read, in its entirety:

I went home. I married Danny Whittemore, Rutland High '73, in the June of 1978, at the small stone Episcopal church on North Street. We had two daughters — Ellen (Chittenden, married to Rob, three children including our granddaughter Sarah at Skidmore in the fall) and Caroline (Middlebury '05, DVM Cornell '11, mixed-practice vet in Middlebury, married to Andy, two boys). I taught tenth-grade English at Rutland High from 1981 until the June of 2019 — thirty-eight Septembers of "Julius Caesar," and I would do every one again. Danny farmed with his father until 1995 and then ran a small excavating business until his stroke in the April of 2021. He passed at home, in the small back bedroom of the farmhouse, on the tenth of September, 2022. Nettie Bevill, RN, from Bayada Home Health, was in the room. I was in the room. Cricket was on the rug.

I was diagnosed with early-stage ovarian cancer on the Tuesday after Easter, 2024. The Dartmouth-Hitchcock team have been kind and clear. I am in remission. I am well enough today to have written this paragraph, and to plan to be at the reunion in June to read it out loud with the rest of you.

What is dear to me now: the granddaughter, the porch, the maple in the side yard, the horses at the barn a quarter-mile down the road, the small stone church, the Chittenden library where I read to the preschool group on Thursdays, and the college that taught me, in the fall of 1974, that a paragraph is a small careful room and every word is a piece of furniture in it. I have thought, for the last two years, about the small brown envelope in the second drawer of the rolltop desk. I have decided. I am glad.

Kit read page forty-two twice, and then she folded the corner of it — the small folded corner she had learned to make in Miss Emmeline Hollister's fifth-grade classroom at Weybridge Elementary in the fall of 1963 — and she walked, across the Bicentennial Green, and along the path past the Old Chapel, and down the hill past Mead, and along College Street, until she reached the small brick door of the Kirk Alumni Center, and she knocked.

What was on the second floor

On the second floor of the Kirk Alumni Center, on the metal shelf just inside the door of the mailroom, was a stack of one hundred and forty-seven identical Books, wrapped in brown kraft paper, tied with jute twine, addressed to alumni whose reservations had come in after the print run and who would receive the Book by post the following week.

The stack had been there since the previous Tuesday.

No one had opened one.

The last time anyone in the Kirk Alumni Center — in advancement, in annual giving, in stewardship, in gift planning, in prospect research, in donor relations — had opened a Fiftieth Reunion Memory Book, and read it slowly, page by page, with a pen and a notepad, was a Tuesday in the second week of June, 2016, when a rising senior work-study student named Ben Ashworth, class of 2017, majoring in English, had been asked, by the director of the annual fund, to see if there was anything useful in there. Ben had read one hundred and eleven pages before the director had needed him for something else, and had made a list, on a yellow legal pad, of thirty-one signals — a diagnosis, a widowhood, a grandchild born, a farm sold, a small business retired from, a second home named, a granddaughter at the college — that were, in his careful undergraduate hand, probably worth someone talking to someone about.

The yellow legal pad was in a manila folder in a filing cabinet in a storage closet on the third floor.

No one had opened it since the following August.

What the Book knows

The Fiftieth Reunion Memory Book is the single richest per-word document your file will ever receive.

It is written by the donor, about the donor, in the donor's own words, at the age when nearly every wealth-transfer decision — the will, the beneficiary form, the second-home disposition, the closely-held business sale, the intent letter — is being drafted or has just been drafted, in the last quiet room of the life, with the granddaughter in mind. It is unsolicited. It is not a wealth screen. It does not use a proxy. It is the primary source. It is the paragraph a woman like Meredith Whittemore, of Chittenden, Vermont, sat down at a small pine table on a warm Sunday afternoon in the March of this year and wrote out, in her own careful hand, with a fresh Papermate, on the ivory stationery her daughter Ellen had given her for Christmas.

It says, in one paragraph:

The health status of the past two years.

The date, the manner, and the specific in-home hospice detail of the widowhood.

The county and the town.

The name of the granddaughter, and the college she is starting in the fall.

The name of the daughter, the daughter's degree, the daughter's veterinary practice, the daughter's town, the daughter's husband, the number of the daughter's children.

The rescue dog, by name.

The small stone church, by proximity.

The volunteer commitment, on Thursdays, at the town library.

The horses, at the barn a quarter-mile down the road.

The rolltop desk. The second drawer. The small brown envelope. And the sentence — I have decided. I am glad.

If a wealth-screen vendor produced that paragraph, from public records, on a Tuesday afternoon in July, and emailed it to your director of gift planning, she would clear her calendar Wednesday and drive to Chittenden Thursday.

The college printed it. Bound it. Mailed it. Stacked one hundred and forty-seven copies in brown kraft paper on the metal shelf in the mailroom on the second floor of the Kirk Alumni Center. And nobody in advancement will open one, this year, unless someone remembers to ask a rising senior in English to.

A small honest note about Rōmy

Rōmy did not write Meredith Whittemore's paragraph. Meredith did. Meredith wrote it on a Sunday afternoon in the March of this year at the small pine table by the window that overlooks the sugar maple in the side yard of the stone farmhouse in Chittenden, in her own careful English-teacher's hand, on the ivory stationery, with the fresh Papermate.

What Rōmy can do is read the Book.

Not instead of the director of gift planning. The director of gift planning is the reason the Book exists at all. She is the one who will read page forty-two on the drive to Chittenden on the Thursday morning of the third week of July, and know, before she rings the bell at the small stone farmhouse, that Meredith's husband was Danny, and that the daughter is Caroline, DVM Cornell '11, and that the granddaughter at Skidmore is named Sarah, and that the rescue dog is Cricket, and that Nettie Bevill was in the room, and that the sugar maple is in the side yard, and that a paragraph is a small careful room and every word is a piece of furniture in it.

Rōmy is the quiet Tuesday-morning list on the director's desk that says: these are the seventeen paragraphs, out of one hundred and forty-seven, that describe a widowhood in the last twenty-four months, a health diagnosis in remission, a first-line granddaughter at a college, a small business sold, or a farm still in the family. Here they are, in a folder. Here is page forty-two. Here is Meredith. Please read her paragraph before you read the room.

The reading is the director's. The list is the tool's. The paragraph is Meredith's.

A small assignment, with love ♡

This week, or on the Saturday morning of the second week of August, before the fall appeal goes to the printer and before the class of 1977 Book goes to press, walk up to the second floor of your alumni center, or your development office, or the small back room off the annual-fund suite. Find the shelf. Find the Book — this year's, or last year's, or the class of 2011's fifteenth-reunion book, or the class of 1966's sixtieth. Take one down. Sit with it, at the small table by the window, for an hour.

Read ten pages.

Fold the corner of the page whose paragraph makes you pick up the phone.

Then pick up the phone.

Because on a warm Friday afternoon in the second week of June, on a low stone wall by the Old Chapel, a retired Vermont Superior Court judge is going to fold the corner of page forty-two, and walk down College Street, and knock on the small brick door of the Kirk Alumni Center, and ask, quietly, whether anyone at the college has read what Meredith Whittemore, of Chittenden, has written about her granddaughter, and the second drawer of the rolltop desk, and the small brown envelope, and the sentence she wrote in the last paragraph.

The paragraph is on the shelf.

Please read the paragraph. ♡