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50-Year Club Out in Force for Homecoming

Chilly fall temperature, football loss don’t dampen nostalgic reminiscences.

Elmhurst Friendships Are for Life
Click here for one alumna’s journey

Posted on: October 14, 2009

Elizabeth Postula remembers her first two years at Elmhurst College. World War II was underway and the majority of college-aged men were serving in the military. As a result, the campus population, only a few hundred strong, consisted primarily of women—many of them ministers’ daughters—and campus life was peaceful. “If you had a boyfriend, you were lucky,” recalls Postula, class of 1947. Days were filled with studies, and evenings in the dorms revolved around an early dinner and quiet conversations with girlfriends. Official “lights out” was 10 p.m.

That changed dramatically in 1945. When the war ended, veterans returned to college campuses in droves. “When those fellows came back, the whole place changed overnight,” says Postula, a native of Columbus, Ohio, whose father (class of 1911) and three siblings also attended the College. “The college reawakened. The guys had been overseas and, in our eyes, came back worldly wise. Many of my girlfriends married those fellows.” As did Postula, whose husband, James, had been an Elmhurst student before joining the military. When the war ended, he came back to finish his degree, the two met, and marriage and family followed.

Stories such as Postula’s abounded during Homecoming Weekend, when more than 80 members of the 50-Year Club—those Elmhurst students who graduated in or before 1959—joined in the campus festivities, undaunted by rain and unseasonably chilly temperatures in the low 50s. Activities for Club members included such special classes taught by Elmhurst professors as “Drama Helping Senior Citizens to Stay Sharp” and “Elmhurst Students Today: The Use of Technology in the Classroom,” as well as afternoon tea at Chaplain Rev. H. Scott Matheney’s home. There were also reunion breakfasts, lunches and dinners, and opportunities to mix with the student body at Elmhurst’s production of “Carousel” and Saturday’s disappointing football loss to Carthage College.

A forward-thinking spirit
Another 50-Year Club attendee, Warren Mueller, class of 1959, recalls “a communal atmosphere” at Elmhurst. The campus population in the late ‘50s was still relatively small—fewer than 1,000 students—and “you knew practically everybody,” he notes. “We were a close-knit group of people.” Buoyed by post-war optimism, there was a forward-thinking spirit among the students, as well as a desire to reach out to the community. He remembers an annual circus event that the college put on for Chicago-area children who lived in orphanages. Hundreds of children attended, and every Elmhurst student participated (Mueller was a clown). “We felt like a family, and we wanted to share that,” he says.

The Chicago-born Mueller, who became a United Church of Christ minister, also met his spouse at Elmhurst. His wife, Barbara, who was raised in Denver, had come to Elmhurst because of its reputation in Christian education, her major. She and her husband met in choir—“the first place we remember laying eyes on each other,” he says—and will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary next year.

Spousal connections seem to be a common refrain among 50-Year Club members. One of the Muellers’ classmates, Joel Herter, also class of 1959, met his wife, Nancy, class of 1961, on a blind date set up by one of his basketball teammates. It actually wasn’t so blind, since she had seen Herter play basketball. But from her vantage point in the stadium, he had seemed about as tall as her 5-ft. 4-in. height. She was pleasantly surprised when he turned out to be 6-feet tall.

Herter, a commuter student and the first in his family to attend college, played basketball for four years, an experience that taught him teamwork and leadership that he has used throughout his career as an accountant. He also recalls advanced accounting classes with fewer than 10 students—“a real plus,” he adds—and tough professors that understood how to prepare students for careers.

The legacy of that experience was passed to the next generation. The Muellers’ oldest son attended Elmhurst, as did the Herters’ two daughters (with the older one meeting her husband there). “They grow up hearing about the Elmhurst experience, and they wanted to have that for themselves,” says Herter.

Elmhurst Friendships Are for Life

Dorothea Schuch graduated from Elmhurst College in 1947, but her ties to the campus extend back to the 19th century. Her grandfather, Herman Henry Fleer, began his training as a minister at the school in 1872, followed over the next 20 years by his four brothers. Her father, Joseph George, graduated Elmhurst in 1912, and counted the Niebuhr brothers as classmates and close friends. A picture of him having a pillow fight with H. Richard Niebuhr in the dorm and his lifelong reference to older brother Reinhold Niebuhr as “Reiny” testifies to those friendships. George eventually went to work as an associate pastor to Rev. Herman Henry Fleer at Salem Evangelical Church in Chicago. There he met and married Rev. Fleer's daughter, also named Dorothea.

“Elmhurst College has been part of my life for as long as I can remember,” Schuch says. “We never missed a Homecoming game or a special event. We went to everything. When it came time for me to apply to college, it never occurred to me to go anyplace else.”

She remembers the quiet years during World War II when men on campus were few, the noisier post-war years when the returned veterans, now students, sang “bawdy songs” on the gym steps, and her thrill at dining with football players because her hours as a clerk at a local record store kept her from the college’s earlier dinner shift.

There were also sad memories. On Dorothea’s 18th birthday, in her freshman year, the school gave permission for her mother, terminally ill with cancer, to visit, despite a campus-wide polio quarantine (a girl in Dorothea’s dorm had contracted the disease). Later, the college’s first dean of women, Genevieve Staudt, who became dean of students, walked Dorothea to the station, waiting until she boarded the train to Chicago to visit her mother, by then too sick to come to campus. “Only a caring, nurturing college could have guided me through that time,” Schuch says.

She also forged lifelong friendships. Her college roommate, Elizabeth Postula, whose father had roomed with Dorothea’s father, remains a close friend, as does Seiji Aizawa, one of four Japanese-American students in her class who came to Elmhurst from internment camps that housed Japanese-Americans during World War II. Aizawa took Dorothea on her first college date—they saw a production of “The Taming of the Shrew”—and they attended morning and evening chapel together. Although Aizawa worked or 37 years for the federal government in Japan after college, they have never lost touch. “Elmhurst friendships are for life,” Schuch says.

By Deborah Silver