The following was written by Ted McGill ’66 and appeared in the April 10, 2002 edition of the Louisville Eccentric Observer in Louisville, Ky.

If the fund-raisers at my old school see this, they will send me a note soliciting a contribution. That’s their job. After you graduate, they locate you somehow. After all, they know that you’re grateful for your educational experience and are willing to share the wealth you have because of it. Yes, I am grateful.

The pioneer road through town became a four-lane highway; now the road is an interstate route. My old school is church-related and was designed so that one could always see the spire of the chapel from that road. The architecture of the chapel is referred to as “modern gothic,” and the numerous symbols incorporated into the interior take a student a full four years to appreciate.

I was a student there in the ’60s. And it was at school where we sat by the TV one October, waiting anxiously for the Cuban Missile Crisis to be settled. It was there that we heard that JFK had been shot. We went to the chapel that November day not knowing that, as we searched for answers to what was happening to our world, we also were losing our innocent view of the “Old World” of Ozzie and Harriet.

When I was caught up in the civil rights movement, we locked arms in a great circle around the inside walls of the chapel singing, “We Shall Overcome.” I graduated just two years ahead of the great protest over the war in Vietnam. But I had already learned about social justice, and we integrated my fraternity because it was the right thing to do. But I regret that we didn’t understand more when we still had the chance.

As well as great memories, I enjoy ongoing connections with my old school. A student from what is now Zimbabwe let me be with him when he first experienced snow. That was a spiritual moment all its own. We are still in touch. A dorm mate from those days some years later tried to date my wife before she was my wife. Occasionally, I meet someone whose relative went there, too.

The old shagbark hickory tree still stands by the chapel. I have pictures of it and of myself when we were younger. It’s always good to see that tree again. I grew because of my school, and it grew because it is a tree.

My university was where, beyond the classroom, I was introduced to haiku poetry, Thomas Merton, my first beer (but no drugs), good music and my last serious cigarette. I published some poems in a little campus magazine we made for ourselves. I remember the night when one of the members of a small group of great German-American women professors chose to stay home to watch The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show rather than hear the symphony perform.

Here we stood on the bridge to the “New World.”

It was at this school that I met the woman I should have married; she was a hippie before Time magazine heard the word. She walked on low retaining walls, went barefoot to classes, played the guitar, painted great abstract art and chalked flowers on the sidewalk outside the Student Union. She had green eyes and black hair. She taught me to come out of my shell and now lives happily ever after in England.

My first dorm and fraternity house are gone, both replaced by grass. There is no more Honor Code, no curfew. Yet much is the same. It is still a family school, and the students are still caught up in political things. Alma Mater Hollow, where I once fell in love, and Kissing Bridge are still there. I hope the administration is not revising the curriculum any more, but I guess it must be!

The school motto is, “Having light, we pass it on to others.” If I walked on beams of light during those days, I hope I am passing them on — especially to the generation of kids I now teach, so their days will not grow evil.

I look for that chapel tower on the horizon at least once a year. I walk around anonymously each spring on the campus and am eternally grateful, for there I had the time of my life.

— Reprinted with permission of Louisville Eccentric Observer