I always look forward to getting together with my college friends. During my first three years of college, I became good friends with four members of the future Orchard Street Gang (OSG). Three of us (Eileen, Lin, and I) and a friend of Eileen’s (Lin), decided to live together off campus during the summer following our junior year. During that summer, we made plans to move to a larger house (located on Orchard Street) for our senior year, and we needed two more people to cover the rent, so Barb (another dormmate) and Carol were added to our group. Can you believe we each paid $50/month in rent and chipped in $5/week for groceries and the telephone?! We had a free subscription to the campus newspaper, but that’s an undercover story that I can’t tell here. We paid $150/semester for tuition, and books ran about $50/semester. The minimum wage at the time was $1.25/hour and an annual starting salary of $5,000–more, if you were lucky–was good pay, but even so, I can’t believe how much college costs now!

Only Lin had a car, and we all grocery shopped together. I have trouble now picturing six of us with a shopping cart, but that’s what we did. If we had money left over (more often than you would think), we stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts for a treat on our way home from the grocery store. The food we bought was for us and for our guests. Breakfast, lunch, and weekends were on our own for cooking and kitchen clean-up, and we had a rotating schedule to cook dinner Monday-Thursday. If you didn’t cook, you were on a rotating team of two to do the dishes. We each cleaned our own bedrooms (two of us per bedroom) and rotated cleaning the kitchen, dining room, living room, and two bathrooms. It was a great system, and we never had an argument or a fight. We all married our senior-year college sweethearts within a year of graduation, so we were well-acquainted with each other’s husbands too.

As young marrieds, with small children, we kept in touch, but we didn’t see each other in person as a group until 2018, 49 years later, when we met in Madison. Eileen suggested a group reunion and addressed her email to the “Orchard Street Gang”–and that’s how the OSG was officially formalized. I had seen Eileen and Leila several times because they live in WI where Ted and I regularly visit our families, but I hadn’t seen Lin or Carol in all those years. None of us was surprised that it felt like we’d just left college. We were still BFFs, and we laughed when we learned that we all used the Orchard Street cooking/cleaning rotation with our children as they grew up. Here’s our 2018 reunion photo.

Barb lived in FL, and I didn’t see her until 2020, when four of the OSG members had a Zoom reunion.

Leila, Eileen, and I have met in Madison a number of times–together or in pairs–since our college graduation, and we planned to do so again this year. Fortunately, Lin, who lives in MT, was in WI at the time, attending a workshop for two weeks, and could join us; unfortunately, Leila, who has Parkinson’s disease, was unexpectedly hospitalized for a minor Parkinson’s-related issue, so she couldn’t meet with us. Lin, Eileen, and I had a wonderful time together for a few hours, and here are the OSG-25 reunion attendees in the big chair outside the Great Dane restaurant. (See the logo on the chair back.) It goes without saying–but I’m going to say it anyway–that we’re looking forward to our next get-together.