Class Fall Retreat Draws Grateful Reunion-minded Crowd

By Stu Rickerson '71, SWLF Chair, and Chris Connell '71

In what is likely to be the largest multi-day Class Alumni/ae gatherings on and near the Princeton Campus during all of 2021 (and possibly 2020 as well), 119 Classmates and guests participated in ‘71s 50th Reunion Princeton Fall Retreat on October 15 and 16, 2021. 

To highlight just one of the many enjoyable events, Chris Connell provided this summary of Scott Berg's keynote address:

At Princeton clubs and alumni lunches and dinners across the country, Scott Berg has regaled audiences with the remarkable tale of not just the American legends captured in his best-selling biographies, but his own life, set in course after his mother named her son after her favorite author, F. Scott Fitzgerald. No audience has listened more raptly than his classmates, gathered by the score on a sunny Saturday morning in mid-October for our mini-reunion. Scott recounted the thrill of his discoveries in the Fitzgerald archives in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Room of Firestone Library; in the office of Professor Carlos Baker, who gave him access to Ernest Hemingway’s papers; in the vaults of Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn for that Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, and in Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, where he plumbed the 2,000 boxes holding the papers of Charles and Ann Morrow Lindberg, before settling at last to write a magisterial biography of his boyhood hero, Woodrow Wilson 1879. Scott closed the talk with Wilson’s parting words in a Baccalaureate Address to the graduating Class of 1910 after the departing president lost his battle against the eating clubs, including the one in which we gathered: “I do not have to imagine what you feel. I know for I have felt it in days which will never seem to me very long ago. I have lived here now 20 years as a member of the faculty and the work of Princeton has become part of the very warp and woof of my life. But it has never in all those years been for a single moment the same Princeton for me that it was in the magical years that ran their cheerful course from the exciting autumn of 1875 to the gracious June of 1879. The four years of college can never be repeated or reconstructed. They stand unique in every person’s experience to whom they mean anything at all.”