McCormick8: The Early McCormick Residents' Reunion

Design by Janet Bruesselbach and Hilarie Orman

The MIT Women's Leadership Weekend is being held April 30, 2005, and as part of that, we will hold a reunion of the early residents of McCormick Hall. From its opening in 1963 and until 1970, McCormick was almost the only housing option for undergraduate women. Perhaps the names have faded from memory and the faces look a touch older, but we all remember the days when we knew by sight every undergraduate female student at the Institute. If you lived in McCormick in any of these early years, please consider joining us in Cambridge this spring. We are pleased to announce that we will hold a reunion dinner at McCormick Hall on April 30, in addition to our honored guests of past and current housemasters and managers, we will have as our special guest for the reception Susan Hockfield. Now is the time to register! MIT has made this easy to do online: Leadership Conference and McCormick Reunion or Reunion Only. The reunion cost is $70; you may contribute an additional small amount for extra reunion costs. Vegetarian and kosher food options are available, just note your preference in the "comments" section. See the footnotes here about hotel rates and Passover meals. Some "financial aid" and local housing options are available; send email to our head organizer Anne Street ( streeta @ att.net) for more information.

Today MIT has eliminated the gender imbalance that was so striking during our student years, and Susan Hockfield is President of the Institute (they should have chosen a co-ed, but we are still delighted to see a woman at the helm). Many of our classmates have become important and influential. We hear about Shirley Jackson regularly, and Edie Goldenberg is a dean at the University of Michigan. Linda Sharpe is president of the MIT Alumni Assocation. Everyone has a story, and our reunion will be the time to tell them.

If you were part of McCormick's early years (classes of 1963 through 1974), please consider joining us at the Leadership Conference, and we will let you know about the oldtimer's social events. We'd like to hear your stories from those times or how your life turned out because or in spite of your MIT experiences.

Several people have asked "who else from my class will be there?" We have a preliminary list, and, you can join the Yahoo group (below) and try to match up with old friends and encourage them to come to the confab.

* AMITA has made arrangements to have access to the Cheney Room (3-310) through the day and evening on Saturday, April 30. This can be a great place for alumnae to hang out when not attending other specific events and to interact with other alumnae. However, the room can not be left open unless a responsible person is present. We need volunteers who would be present at various times through the day/evening. The room will be open only when we have a responsible person who has volunteered to be there. If you are willing to be such a person, please contact Bonny Kellermann to advise what times you can be present and arrange for access. Bonny can be reached at "BonnyK @ alum.mit.edu" (remove space from email address).

Some Useful Links:

The Reunion Organizing Committee. We need help organizing reunion events. You can join the reunion organizing committee through MIT's alum website, the reunion committee is listed under "Help" and then "mailing lists"; this is a "living groups" activity. You will need to get to this URL for "earlymccorm_org" to join. In order to do that, you will need an MIT "Infinite Connection" account, which is a good thing. See the Alum page for details.

RSVP. You can send suggestions, rsvp's, etc. to the organizing committee even if you aren't a member, using this email list. We are creating an "announcements only" email list for those of you who express interest in attending. If your email "bounces", read this.

Chat. If you want to chat with old friends from the dorm, we've got a Yahoo group just for that purpose: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/earlymccormick/. It's a bit of a pain to sign up for Yahoo if you aren't already registered, but you join more simply by sending email to "earlymccormick-subscribe @ yahoogroups.com" (remove the spaces when using this address) and following the instructions that will arrive in email.

NB: this next list was used for initial notices, but it is being closed; use the Yahoo group for communicating with friends. The mailing list of all early McCormick alums for whom we have email addresses is "mit_mccormick @ listserv.mit.edu" (without the space characters); use this with caution, as your message goes to over 200 email addresses. If you have an MIT Infinite Connection account you can subscribe or unsubscribe using the Alum website. Otherwise, send email to our administrative email list. See information below about unsubscribing from the the general email list.

The Missing. Being true techies, and operating on a low budget, we don't plan on sending out paper-based mail, so we are relying on email. You can let us know about classmates who have email addresses but who aren't on our list yet (listed here; these are people who are in the Alumni Assoc database but do not have email addresses listed). There are additional people who have not registered any info with the Alumni Association, so we haven't any way to list their names; please help us spread the word to them by sending them the URL for this webpage.

Websites related to the reunion:
MIT 2005 Women's Leadership Conference
AMITA. AMITA will hold a reception at the MIT "Infinite Corridor" on the evening of April 29, as part of an exhibit they have prepared about the history of women at MIT.

Survey.

It's difficult to characterize us, we've gone out in so many directions. But, at an anonymous and superficial level, maybe we can get some interesting data. Please take a look at our SURVEY FORM and fill out as much or as little as you like. We'll summarize the data before the reunion.

We've had over 100 responses to the survey, and we don't have a comprehensive analysis yet, but we're still hoping. In the meantime, if you want to know our favorite books and shows, here they are.

History.

Ellen Swallow Richards.

MIT Archive exhibit of Katherine Dexter McCormick's student notebook.

History of McCormick Hall.

Did All Coeds of Our Era Live in McCormick?
Some students lived in Westgate when McCormick filled up and before the second tower opened. Others were able to live in MIT Student House, across the river. Others, especially those in the early years, were able to live in apartments, even though McCormick was the mandated residence. Marriage was always a pathway to married student or off-campus housing.

How many coeds were there?
A numeric list of counts of students by year, women per year, etc.

In memoriam, the deceased alumnae (requires the password for this site; you got it in email).

Note that March 4, 2005 was the celebration of the annual MacVicar Day at MIT.

Lynwood S. Bryant, housemaster in the 1960's, died recently. The Boston Globe printed his obituary.

Nostalgia.
Here is the infamous bathroom guide, courtesy of Elaine Kant: Page 1, Page 2
McCormick Timeline, contributed by Sandy Harris and updated by Elaine Kant. A work-in-progress, view latest version here.
Very nostaligic essay by Gail Marcus, from the Class of '68 25th reunion.

Freshman pictures
(You got the username and password in email; use lowercase!)

Coeds class of 1965, freshman picture book, courtesy of Barbara Townsend

Coeds class of 1966, freshman picture book

Coeds class of 1968, freshman picture book

Coeds class of 1969, freshman picture book.

Coeds class of 1970, freshman picture book.

Coeds class of 1971, freshman picture book.

Coeds class of 1972, freshman picture book.

Coeds class of 1973, freshman picture book.

The 1972 MIT Women's Crew team won a medal in the Head of the Charles Regatta. Elaine Kant, a member of that crew, has the program cover, the women's page and the MIT medal, and two articles in spring of that year about the team's improvements from The Tech (April article and May article).

Katherine Swartz, '72, wrote an article for The Tech in 1971 with a perspective on the MIT-Wellesley exchange. (Requires the username and password).

Photos from Anne Vallee Williams' wedding reception at McCormick in 1966. (You got the username and password in email; use lowercase!).

Eve Sprunt's bio, including a guest editorial, "Mentor's Feminine Side", for the Journal of Petroleum Technology (you'll need an image viewer with "zoom in" to read this). (You got the username and password in email; use lowercase!).

Biography of Gail Marcus, published by the American Nuclear Society in 2001 (includes many photos).

Ruth B. McDowell ('67) is a renowned quilter; see her fantastic website

Sue Weiss Liebman took several photos around the time of graduation in 1968. She's got herself, Razel Wittels, Ellen Greenberg, and and the dorm.

Candid photos, 1968; I got a 35mm camera in January '68, and I took a lot of photos. Some McCormick photos, 1968.

Send contributions and suggestions about the website. If you are going to send photos, send a separate note without attachments telling me how many photos to expect.

Unsubscribing from the general email list. You can unsubscribe from the general email list in several ways, listed in the next paragraph. But, if nothing seems to work, or you are too busy or annoyed to try them, then send email to Kim Cole (kcole @ mit.edu) in the Alum office and she'll take care of it. Let her know your name so she can look you up in their database.

Mechanical unsubscribe methods. One way is to send email to "list_unsubscribe@alum.mit.edu" with the subject line "mit_mccormick". However, in order to do this, you must send it "from" the email address under which you are subscribed. If you have an MIT "Infinite Connection" email address, you must know the address to which that email gets forwarded. If you are "Sue.Confused@alum.mit.edu" and the email is forwarded to "Sue.Confused@x.y.edu" then you need to send email with that second address (exactly) as your id. If "Sue.Confused@x.y.edu" is forwarded to "SCfoozed@hotmail.com", then you'll have problems, because MIT will only accept an unsubscribe from "Sue.Confused@x.y.edu", and you may have forgotten all about your "x.y.edu" account. If you don't know where your MIT email is being forwarded, then you'll have to check by using the Alum Assoc website, and you'll need your Alum Assoc password.

It can get even more complicated, and you might have to consult an Internet expert to read your email SMTP header information in order to untangle things. That brings us to the second unsubscribe method. You can just use the website http://alum.mit.edu. Go to https://alum.mit.edu/user/mailinglist/ViewListDetail.dyn?list=mit_mccormick (this will require a login, so I hope you remember your alum password), and select "unsubscribe". If you are subscribed under an email address that is not @alum.mit.edu, then send email to Kim Cole or the organizing committee and we'll have the Alum Assoc IT staff remove your name.

Passover. It's unfortunate that the MIT Alum Office selected the end of Passover for this event, but we are hoping that this isn't an insurmountable problem for the observant. We will be able to get kosher food for the events, there are hotels within walking distance of the campus, and we will have at least one event on Sunday, May 1.

MIT's kosher kitchen in W11 has kosher dining and will serve Passover meals on April 30, 2005 and kosher lunch on May 1, 2005. Please let us (earlymccorm_org@listserv.mit.edu) know which meals you are interested in by April 1 so that we can notify the food services manager.

Email bounces. If your email to the organizing committee results in a message about "moderator approval", don't worry, it will get through, albeit slightly delayed. To avoid this problem, send the email without more than one CC or BCC address, and don't send anything with very large attachments. If the "bounce" messages doesn't say anything about moderator approval, there's some other problem.

Hotel rate

If you register for the conference hotel via the web, make sure you enter the reunion event code (MAW) in order to get the discounted rate ($50 off the daily rate for a king room)

If you try to make hotel reservations for the reunion at the HOTEL@MIT through their website, and if you don't get the group discount rate, even after using the group event code, it is probably because you've asked for extra nights (more than Friday and Saturday). They are going to change this, to allow a couple of nights on either side of the reunion, but for the time being you'll need to call the hotel directly. And if you want an extended stay at the hotel that week, but you still want the discount for the reunion days, you'll need to call them and explain it, because their website has limited intelligence.

There are a small number of reserved and discounted rooms with two queen beds. You might need to call the hotel directly to book them.

Shuttle service, Central Square to McCormick Hall
There will be shuttle service between the Hotel@MIT (where the Women's Leadership Conference is being held) and McCormick Hall. The shuttle will begin at 6:00 p.m. and bring the last group back at 11:00 p.m. There will probably be 2-3 trips to McCormick between 6:00- 6:30 and after dinner.

Parking on Campus
There is sometimes some on-street parking available on Memorial Drive. The West Garage is sometimes open on weekends, but not always. (It is impossible to get a straight answer from the parking office about whether or not it will be open.) If it is open, it should be fine to park there. If it is not open, next to the West Garage is an open lot (West Annex Lot) which is always open on weekends. That is your best bet for a sure thing. Other alternatives are on street parking along Vassar Street or to to use the pay parking at the Hotel@MIT parking garage and take the Women's Leadership Conference shuttle.

The West Annex is in red on the map between W59 and W45. From there, walk through the Zesiger Center (W35) to get to McCormick.