Golden Age

by Michael Moran

The School of Social Work Alumni Association brought people back in 1988 for a twenty-five year class reunion. I was in the class of 1963, and I think we invited the class of '62 and '64 to join us. The then dean, Fred Seidel, had graduated from one of those classes.

I was in charge of entertainment. As far as I'm concerned, when you get groups of people like that together the most entertaining thing to do is to give everyone in the room a chance to speak and say what it is they've been doing, especially when you haven't seen one another in a long time.

I was amazed at people's ability to speak - to stand up and recount the highlights of their life so well. I was also astonished at their accomplishments, at the amount and force of good that was unleashed by these people. You wonder what the world would be like sans all that effort they put into it.

The faculty refers to this era as the Golden Age, and people tell you, unabashedly, the class of '63 was the best class. Maybe it's because everybody was welded together, and we knew one another so well. We all had this belief that we were going out to do some big deeds. People really believed we were going to radically, drastically change things. As a matter of fact, most of us wound up in various administrative or leadership capacities or at universities. We did have an impact.