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By the time we graduated, Vietnam and
civil rights had rocked the country, hippies constituted
a sizable part of the student body, protest marches were
being organized outside the Student Union, Woodstock and
the Summer of Love had set the rebels free, birth control
pills were beginning to be available, a man had walked on
the moon, bubble gum was out and heavy metal in, and Easy
Rider had set the zeitgeist. Around us, the world was
exploding, but we couldn’t hear much over the roar
of our bonnet hair dryers. What was revolutionary to us
was that girls were allowed to wear slacks and jeans to
class and that girdles had gone the way of the dinosaur. But Millsaps did teach us to question, our professors left their marks, and the ensuing years wrought their changes on us. While several of The Group stayed home raising kids and five found teaching a good fit, the other half gravitated into school administration, journalism, computers, statistics, magazine writing, accounting, bookstore and sporting goods store ownership, screenwriting, law, stock brokering, and real estate. Working for Gannett, Baxter, Allegiance, AT&T, Merrill Lynch, Coldwell Banker, Money Magazine, a large, privately held corporation, and a corporate law firm, some of us found ourselves – though to our horror at first – playing with the big boys. Judging by our past reunions, the next one, in ’03, will follow a predictable pattern. We’ll play bridge, talking across the table as we did in college, and tell the stories that have grown even more hysterical with the years. We’ll trot out all the vintage ’66 expressions, our private jokes. We’ll talk fast, stay up late. We’ll try to solve the unsolvable, the mystery of how the Bitch Pin – awarded monthly during college with suspenseless regularity to one of the same two short-fused girls – disappeared and where a replacement might be found. We’ll save one night for dressing up and going out to a really wonderful restaurant. We’ll take many photos. We’ll call the ones who didn’t come and try to make them feel they’re missing out so they’ll never miss again. And, once the long weekend is underway, we’ll notice that the stress has left our foreheads, our smiles, even our shoulders. On Saturday night, we’ll interrupt our reminiscing to ponder why The Group still feels so close, especially now that we have so much less in common. What is it that draws an average of fifteen farflung, busy wives, moms, and professionals to converge in the South every five years in blazing mid-July? Given the extraordinary nature of our connection, we’ve never come up with a fully satisfactory answer. In speculating how The Group began such a tight-knit friendship, Tru (Rodgers) Arcuri of La Place, Louisiana, whose daughter Leigh Ann is a Millsaps freshmen, says that “we were all individuals, very independent, but great as a group.” I think we’d all agree. But culture and history deserve credit as well. Had we not gone to Millsaps, with its unpretentious and welcoming campus, or had we gone during a different era, I’m not so sure The Group would’ve become – and stayed – so close. It was still the age of innocence and simplicity when we nineteen – all naive, conservative girls from Mississippi and Tennessee – moved onto the second and third floors of Fae Franklin Hall. “We were parochial and homogeneous,” Fran remembers. “It was easy to be friends.” It was easy, too, because many electronic distractions – the VCR, CD player, computer, cell phone, and microwave – did not yet exist; and telephones, TVs, and refrigerators were outlawed inside girls’ dorm rooms. Other than the electric light, our only technology – inconceivable now but true – was the hot plate and popcorn popper (both illegal), the lighted makeup mirror, the radio, the alarm clock, and, of course, the bonnet hair dryer. We all recall huge blocks of time spent with each other. Donna (Daniel) Jackson of Houston, Texas, remembers hurrying back to the dorm every day to see who’d get to play bridge, throwing “Group” birthday parties, eating every meal together. Margaret Ann attributes our bond to “being trapped in the dorm in a city larger than any place most of us had ever lived.” Betsy (Furr) Kimbriel of Jackson speculates, “Maybe it was living in fairly close proximity, having to eat in the cafeteria, the perpetual bridge game in the dorm, the fact that virtually no one had a car.” For an entire semester, the lone vehicle serving all of us was Jonelle (Nicholas) Wooldridge’s ungainly, lumbering “Bomb”– vintage before vintage was vintage, with a spontaneously opening trunk. For our entertainment, every day, every night, we sought out each other. PREVIOUS PAGE | PAGE 3 OF 4 | NEXT PAGE |