Emerson College - Emersonian Yearbook (Boston, MA)

Page 10 text:

Now it ' s time to roll up our rugs, pack the coffee pot (how well it served), and hit the road. We ' ll take only what we need — our skills, our tales, our memories - and spit to history the four years that are no longer ours. We are obliged to graduate, tritely tried and true; the thirty- three percent We are the tincture of the people we have met, the people we were, are, and what we will evolve to be, without a single nose twisted by heroes.

Page 9 text:

Emerson introduced us to the fine Augustinian concepts of research papers and our free perusal of the Abbot Memorial. We learned the art of staying up until five a m. typing and working, (and then again, of course, times when we were definitely not working). And while some searched the record li- brary at the radio station (with or without visions of grandeur dancing in their heads), some kissed mi- crophones (believe it or not, that was the supposed essence) with Emersonian speech, others sweated unit counts for headlines, or began the twenty- second draft of a poem. Others memorized anato- my (in the book! from a book!)!! Boredom and hallalujahs, excitement and folly, quibbled in our brains. Elaborate or simple lifestyles emerged. Perhaps not the assemblage we had antici- pated. Perhaps not all with improvement, or at least with the elevation we had expected, Knowledgeable of cynicism, pickings of some newly formed sensi- bility, we were all tripped or ran a good mile. Having stopped looking for a utopia or a romantic suffering, we took each day as it came and stopped counting on our fingers. 5

Page 11 text:

DEDICATION There seems to he such little time for offering thanks. Each of us has shifted our needs, ways, our modes of living. Shuffling or running not-long-ago footsteps are usually soon forgotten, or at best, difficult to remember. What remains are the echoes heard on a cold evening, when the crispness conjures the low-lying backlands of the brain. Yes, it was a long time ago: over twenty years. Women and men see their children now, and have their doubts. No, their offspring are not exactly like them. But perhaps these men and women should remember that they endowed their children with the early thoughts of dreams, ambitions, and the recognitive tools of energy and talent. While parents were busy, frantically busy, with the chores of this business of living, they left their children with the companionship of ideas: a forum for the realization of self. If, twenty years later, they find that their children are not copies of themselves, then quite possibly, everything is as it should be. For most men and women knew that there was always a chance of something better. And, most importantly, they were strong enough to allow their children the freedom of taking those chances; giving freedom by the best of means. Mothers made their daughters aware of the very real fact that they possessed good brains, aside from those qualities which were much more readily accepted in the world. Fathers found, upon sceptically attempting to relate to their daughters through means other than dolls, that they ivere pleasingly swqirised to see that their daughters could pull a ball to right field or make a fine shoe-string catch. Many young girls were given the capacity for truth . . . They were, in fact, whole human beings. And sons were offered more options. They learned that insight and subjecti- vity were not evil, or a sign of weakness.