From our Yearbook Editors

Hello, Brothers and Sisters of the Great Class of ’71:

We plead guilty to destroying a small forest in producing our 610-page 50th-Reunion Yearbook in 2021, and we promise not to do that anymore — although we continue to delve into it frequently, as we know many of you do.

Now it is time to update it online for our upcoming 55th Reunion. In the latest version of our Wild Life Class theme, our digital yearbook is dedicated to Exploring the Wild Life Class, and we hope it will lure you back time and time again. Class Technology Chair Alan Usas — working with our honorary classmates and tech consultants Amy Hepler and Cary Bruestle '78 and John Bruestle '78 — deserves a great deal of the credit. And special thanks to Scott Rogers and his team for encouraging you all to be part of the yearbook.

Roughly half the class wrote essays for the 50th Yearbook. The new yearbook asks you to update your contact information so that classmates can connect with you. It also has a few questions to fill out since you last wrote, inviting you to reflect on what's important to you, how you're spending your time, and what you’re looking forward to.

In addition, for those who didn’t write an essay last time, the yearbook provides the space and encouragement to do so now. If you’ve found yourself absorbed by reading classmates’ stories — some of whom you don’t know and others with whom you were close in college — then please take the time to fill everyone in. Reading through these new reflections, you'll likely find someone you'd like to connect with — and what you write will give classmates a reason to reach out to you. 

Mark Swanson, our class memorialist, continues to do an incredible job writing the memorials that appear in the Princeton Alumni Weekly, which has tight word limits, and then expanding them for our class website and for this yearbook. In addition, we are planning a printed supplement of memorials for the more than three dozen classmates who have died in the past four years; the book will be distributed to their families.

So we extend a warm invitation to you to become part of the new 55th-Reunion Yearbook. Enjoy!

Chris Connell and Ray Ollwerther

Yearbook Co-Editors