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Howard Jones), for funding those gifts! Betsy L. Bruce ’73 Oberlin, Ohio
THE ULTIMATE GAME I particularly enjoyed the Ultimate Frisbee story in the Fall 2018 issue. Having served as the director of recreation and club sports at Oberlin College, I am fully aware of the wonders of this game. Oberlin’s Flying Horsecows and Preying Manti (men’s, and women’s and trans clubs, respectively) claim to have been playing Ultimate since the mid-1970s. I was part of NMH’s MODOs (Motet-Double Octet) when it became the first American choral group to travel to Romania, in 1972. We took a “gross” of Frisbees [12 dozen] with us and distributed them wherever the bus stopped. Throwing and catching those discs certainly caught our hosts’ attention. Thank you, Margaret Jones (wife of former head of school
NORTHFIELDERS PAVED THE WAY I hope NMH’s Women’s History class got more from their Northfield tour than surprise at Emma and D.L. Moody’s lopsided tombstone billing (“In Class,” Fall 2018). To many “Northfield girls,” the campus, even in its transitional state, still shouts, whispers, and sings of how our time there made us the women we are today — scientists, artists, homemakers, activists, teachers, CEOs, mothers of feminist sons, nurses, doctors, lawyers, and world travelers. We learned to read critically, think deeply, challenge ideas, and stretch our minds and hearts, free from the pressure to compete in male-dominated hometown high schools. For me, the Moodys’ gravestone inscriptions never even registered. Round Top was where we made out with Hermonites after a mixer or snuck a smoke on the way to the Bookstore. Sure, equal billing for Emma would be swell, but I want NMH students to hear about our weekly current-events assemblies, our days-long celebration of Shakespeare’s What’s better than getting a package on a sunny day? #NMHlife 400th birthday, the sit-down meals in @wetherbeeklein: Especially if it the dorms, how Bible was a mixtape (in 1989)!
NMH Magazine
PHOTOS: GLENN MINSHALL, EMILY HARRISON WEIR, COURTESY OF NMH ARCHIVES
SOLDIERS’ STORY I can’t thank you enough for the World War I article (“The Sound of History,” Fall 2018). Like Mary Wells ’18, I love history and read a lot of it. This article was as informative and well-written as any piece of history I can remember reading. William A. Kolb ’55 Memphis, Tennessee
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courses and chapel affected even non-Christians, the sad summons of the Sage Chapel bells during the Cuban missile crisis and JFK’s assassination, or — talk about unequal treatment! — why MH seniors could smoke in “the Cloud” but a Northfield girl caught smoking risked expulsion. The imagined “Old Time Woman” in Holly Near’s 1974 tune says to a young friend: “If I had not suffered/You wouldn’t be wearing those jeans.” Next time the Women’s History class heads to Northfield, invite some of us NSFG girls along. We’ll have a lot to share with our GenZ sisters and brothers about how we paved the way for the experiences they’re having now at NMH. Beth Zelnick Palubinsky NSFG ’65, P’00 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
