Saratoga News

Point of View

Carl Heintze

For Class of '47, it seems to have worked out all right

It's the custom of my university, like many others, on the occasion of a 50th class reunion to send everyone a book, a collection of individual biographies, written by class members.

So the other day in the mail I got a big thick paperback about the Class of 1947 and its members. Well, not quite all its members. A third of the class is dead, judging by the "In Memorium" section at the back of the book.

Some, perhaps another third, have lost touch with their alma mater. But the rest all wrote a short history of their lives to date. Somewhat unmercifully, the university included with each entry a picture of the class member as he or she was in 1947. Most graduates included a picture of themselves as they are now.

In some instances the difference between then and now is so vast as to make them unrecognizable. In others, the individuals haven't changed all that much. But I suppose that's true for most classes.

A few didn't want to tell us anything about themselves. They sent in blank biographies. One class member, a physician, arrogantly scrawled across his form: "If you want more information, call me," and then stamped his entry with his office number. So much for the old school spirit.

But most wrote thoughtfully about what they had done, where they were and sometimes something about what going to college had meant. And most, also probably not very surprisingly, had similar stories to tell.

The vast majority had been married. A few had been married and unmarried. Some few more had remarried--one or two or even three times. Almost all of the marrieds had children and professed to love them dearly. Most had had grandchildren. They loved them dearly, too. Some had had quite a few. Most also appeared to have become affluent.

There were teachers, lawyers, business executives, newspaper reporters, college professors, diplomats, engineers, bankers and so on. Even one or two farmers. Surprisingly enough, most of the women in the class had had working careers, even though they had started their married lives in the days of "Leave It to Beaver." Somehow, they had balanced being wives and mothers with being other things. And done it successfully.

A couple had been movers and shakers in Planned Parenthood. A few others were out-and-out Republicans, but political or religious bias wasn't very evident.

A lot looked back to the days when they had been in college as better than college today. But then they weren't much like the college classes of today.

For one thing, they were a much more homogeneous group than the diverse college enrollments of the present; there's not an African American and hardly an Asian in the bunch. For another, the class of 1947 had a characteristic not true of most graduating classes: It was the last "mixed" class to be graduated after the end of World War II.

Most of the men had returned to college after serving at least one and sometimes as many as five years in the service during World War II. They thus graduated with a group of women most of them had never seen before. Most of the men were at least two or three years older than their female classmates.

Most of the women spent most of their time in college sans men, except for 4Fs and members of the Army Specialized Training Corps. I'm not sure what effect this had on either men or women except that some of the women inevitably married some of the men and appear to have lived happily ever after.

There's one other fascinating item about the biographies, a recitation of their travels. They've been everywhere: to Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, many to Africa; the list in most biographies is very long.

One male, an international businessman, listed all the countries he'd visited. He apparently didn't miss any.

No one had been an astronaut, but you tend to wonder, Why not? Perhaps the war had something to do with this.

But then college, especially the last year or two of college for the Class of 1947, was a lot different than it was for most college graduates before or after their time. In retrospect it was a time of great rush and uncertainty.

When they were freshmen, most of the men argued over whether or not to intervene in Europe, a question that was neatly solved by Pearl Harbor. Then the question for them was when to join up and in what, followed by how and when to get out. I'm not sure what it was for the women, except to wait, although some apparently joined up, too.

Thus 1947 was a blur, readjusting to life as a civilian, readjusting to life with many more men in it, readjusting to study, to marriage, even to children some of the class had never seen before.

But it would seem, 50 years later, that it all worked out all right.

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