Writing About a College That No Longer Exists

Ladycliff College closed in 1980. The campus passed to West Point, Rosary Hall became the West Point Museum, and Mary Hall became a military guesthouse. What survives of the college as something people lived through is, for the most part, text: a journal of pieces sent in by alumnae, a guestbook that ran for roughly eight years, news pages with luncheon reports and obituaries, and a handful of letters that found their way online. This archive exists to keep that text readable. Almost by accident, it also makes a usable workshop for anyone who wants to write about a school, a parish, a workplace or any other institution that has stopped existing. What follows is written by the archive's editors, not by a graduate. We do not speak for the women whose words are kept here. We have read all of it more than once, and have some observations on how it can be turned into writing.

What kind of material this is

The first thing to understand is that nothing here was written as history. Linda Buzzeo Best, class of 1972, opened the alumnae journal on October 2, 2004, while she was researching a book about the college. Her invitation was modest: now that the closing had separated the alumnae from their college, they could keep its story going by telling stories and sharing news. What came in was uneven in length and mood. The journal section holds a class cat named Cliffe, a skirt on a tandem bike, a French teacher remembered by her niece as Aunt Lily, a letter to the class of 1954 from a woman who left in 1952. The guestbook, which ran from about 2007 to 2015, is longer and looser, and most of its entries are looking for someone.

The second thing to understand is what is missing. The original site served a living organization, so it carried contact details, dues instructions, a transcript request page and a list of graduates whose addresses had been lost. All of that was removed when the archive was rebuilt from Wayback Machine captures. The names and class years stayed where the writers put them. Spelling and phrasing were left as written. For a writer, this means the archive is a set of voices rather than a set of facts, and the voices are more reliable about feeling than about dates. The Gray Matter column from West Point describes a reunion on a Saturday, June 12, without ever naming the year. The college song that Mabel Callahan Galu found in her box of papers carries no date at all, and she asks readers to supply one. A careful writer notes these gaps rather than filling them.

One remark, not four years

The most common failure in writing about a lost institution is scale. The writer tries to hold the whole of it, every year and every friend, and ends up with a feeling instead of a story. Julie Lenti Danielson, class of 1972, says so herself: the good times are too many to write, and what remains is the overall feeling of joy, laughter and love. That is an honest sentence, but it cannot be built on.

Compare it with what Susan Wolfrom did. Her piece about Sister Petronilla rests on two remarks. The first is a correction delivered years earlier: she was too terse in her writing. The second came at the 1979 commencement, when the title of Emeritus was conferred on the tiny Sister, who tipped her head up to the microphone and said two words, then had to come back and repeat them. Wolfrom draws one conclusion, that it takes one to know one, and stops. The piece is short, and it is complete. Anyone sitting down with a single remembered line from a teacher can work the same way, and a straightforward guide to writing a reflective essay will show how to move from the remark to what it taught without padding the middle. The method is older than the guide. It is what the better pages in this archive already do.

Letters and reunion notes as raw material

Some of the most useful documents here were never meant to be read as prose. Mabel Callahan Galu's letter about addresses is a piece of association business. All alumnae mail passed through her hands, she kept the file of names, and every year some luncheon letters came back marked return to sender. The files were thinnest for the 1950s, especially 1959, and for the late 1970s and 1980s. The first luncheon planning meeting of that year was to be held at the Red Oak Diner in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and she remarks that the board works well when it talks and eats. Read as a document, this is a membership notice. Read as material, it is a portrait of how a closed college keeps a mailing list alive, one returned envelope at a time.

The planning letter for the Class of 1972 reunion in June 2007 is even better. Two classmates drove the road from Fort Montgomery to Highland Falls checking every motel. The Thayer was sold out. The Econo Lodge had rooms; the West Point Motel had nicer ones, so a block was reserved there, all non-smoking because the smoking rooms were already gone. Dinner was being negotiated at Pineapple's Steak House. The village historian, Stella Bailey, agreed to open the Ladycliff Room with its yearbooks and memorabilia. The mayor of Highland Falls lent a large room behind his liquor store and pizza parlor for a Saturday night party. Nobody set out to write a story, but a story is there, with a beginning, a sequence and a crowd of named people. A writer who wants to shape something like it from their own reunion weekend could do worse than follow the structure laid out in a guide to writing a narrative essay: one weekend, told in order, with the small practical decisions left in. The practical decisions are what make it true.

Writing about the loss itself

The closing of the college is the subject underneath every page here, and the writers handle it in two distinct ways. One group goes back. Laurel K. Kessler-Quinones, a member of the last freshman class, visited the campus decades later. The chapel was gone. Spellman Hall looked the same, but her dorm had become a hotel, with no grand piano, no slate staircase and no open space. She walked the halls anyway and could hear the voices of the girls. The other group refuses to go back. Susan Wolfrom writes that she has never returned, because heartbreak touched once is once enough, and that in her recurring dreams she is always leaving. A guestbook writer from the class of 1981 describes what she calls resurrection dreams, in which the college reopens and the familiar teachers and classmates are all there.

Notice that neither group argues about grief. The strongest passages do not explain the loss; they report what was seen or dreamed and let the reader do the arithmetic. Linda Best's own framing, in the note that opened the journal, is the closest the archive comes to a statement of purpose, and it is still plain:

Now that we are separated from our College experience--in the harshest way possible with its closing--let us re-connect and keep the spirit alive by telling stories and sharing news here.

Her October 2004 note also records what happened to the writer in the process. The book project went beyond tribute and became personal. She reconnected with friends, made new ones, and came to understand her own development more fully. That is a useful warning for anyone starting a similar project: the subject will not stay at arm's length.

Shaping a story from scattered pages

If the material here, or material like it from another closed school, is going to become an essay, a family memoir or a longer history, the editors would suggest a few working rules.

• Choose a frame smaller than the institution: one teacher, one room, one reunion, one winter when the river froze. The institution will show through the frame.
• Keep names and class years exactly as the writers gave them, including the inconsistencies. Marion Ranft appears in the board list as class of 1939 and, elsewhere, as Marion McGlew Ranft, who was 91 in March of one year. Do not tidy that into a single form unless you can prove it.
• Separate what a writer said from what you infer. The guestbook says that a woman graduated from St. Martin's in Washington State in 1980; it does not say why she chose that school. Leave the second part as a question.
• Record the gaps. An undated song, an unnamed year, a reunion whose attendance figure comes from a single column, are all facts about the record, and they belong in the writing.
• Never invent dialogue for a real person. If Sister Petronilla is quoted, it is because Susan Wolfrom quoted her.

The last rule is the one this archive holds itself to. We do not accept submissions, we cannot forward a message to any alumna or family member named here, and we do not add memories of our own, because we have none. What we can do is keep the pages in order and point out where the good writing already is. Most of it was done by women who did not think of themselves as writers, in letters that were only meant to find a lost classmate or fill a motel block.

Questions

Also at the Alumnae Desk: Women Who Went Back: Study and Careers in the Ladycliff Record · The Campus as a Subject: Describing a Place You Can No Longer Visit