Alumni activities (Page 2)

Alumni activities

Awards Bash a Smash

Graduates and friends gathered at the St. James's Club for this year's Alumni Association Honours and Awards Banquet. After being piped into the main dining hall, guests enjoyed good food and a little roasting of the honourees by Vice-Principal Derek Drummond as the awards were presented.

Above right: Andrew Tischler, BA'00, shown with tablemate Roxanne Halko, BSc'01, received a Gretta Chambers Student Leader-ship Award but took a shot from the Vice-Principal before picking it up.

Left, from left: Award of Merit recipient Bill Ritchie, BSc(Agr)'51, Brian McGuigan, BCom'54, Distinguished Service Award recipient Joan McGuigan, BCom'55, Kathleen McGuigan and Timothy McGuigan.

Back to School in Sorrento

It was off to a lovely Italian "campus" for graduates who took part in the Alumni College in Sorrento, part of the McGill Alumni Association's travel program. The trip's McGill host was outgoing MAA president Ian McLachlin, BEng'60 (kneeling, at left), who, with fellow student-tourists, paused for this picture during a field trip to the Isle of Capri.

Canada Day in Atlanta

Atlanta-area grads celebrated the national holiday of the true north at a Canadian-American Society event on July 1.

From left: Guy Mentha, BA'54, MA'56, Jewel Mentha, BA'64, James Ramsay, Heidi Allardyce, BA'79, Bob Wicker, MArch'80, Carl Johnston, Dr. Casey O'Keefe, BSc'92, MDCM'96, Dr. John Gamwell, MDCM'63. In front sporting balloons: Gary Allardyce, BEng'74.

Great Class at the Grand Canyon

Friends for five decades, these members of the Faculty of Arts Class of '50 have been reuniting off and on for almost as long. They celebrated their golden anniversary this year and made a special trip to see each other.

How can you write about a dozen women who met at university and stayed friends for over 50 years without spilling over into sentimentality; and we are a generation suspicious of that.

As products of our time, we all married and we all had children. (Interestingly, six of us have unmarried daughters in their thirties and forties -- a doctor, a lawyer, a creative advertiser, a clutch of what we would have called "businessmen" among them -- whose lives astonish us and give us pleasure). If we ourselves did not have early careers, we had vocations which led to later ones. One of us is a painter of reputation; the one who brought us to Phoenix a potter and a serious promoter of the visual arts; one of us opened a most successful bookstore.

In our time and according to our training we read, challenged, asked questions; all of us volunteered on a range and depth too varied to list. We played golf and tennis and swam and gardened. We stayed thin (with effort). One or two of us took marvelous photographs, and all of us traveled idiosyncratically, one as recently as last January to Honduras to help build houses.

We sound invulnerable and of course we aren't. Two of us couldn't come this year -- Nancy Wilson Mayhan and Judy Taylor Mappin -- and, oh, we missed them. Over the years in various combinations we have written and met; taken part in each other's triumphs and in each other's inescapable sorrows. Now, against the extraor-dinary beauty of Phoenix, Sedona and the Grand Canyon we assembled from England and Boston, from Montreal, Toronto and Florida in a reunion that was a warm and hilarious celebration of what started at McGill in the "class of the half century," as Cyril James declared it. How we laughed and how grateful we were -- and are -- for the kindness of time and place, and for McGill and the furnishing of our lives.