Good News April 1970 Edition

Fifty years ago we all got the good news that set the path for our lives–our Cornell acceptance letter!  Unlike today, we didn’t have to wait for a specified hour and day the last week in March (Ivy Admission Day), when several hundred thousand people tried to log in at 7 pm to learn their fate at eight elite schools, often finding the sites frozen or crashed. Instead, 50 years ago we raced home to check the mail daily, hoping for the thick envelope. (We thought thick was good.)

Classmate Bill Howard posted a wry meme about acceptance letters on our Class FaceBook page .  It resulted in a flurry of walking-memory-lane comments.  Everyone has their own fun memory of that day and we all seem eager to reach out and share that with each other.  Good news, even 50 year old good news, feels good!  So call or write to old and new friends to connect. Visit our FaceBook page, Zoom, Skype or FaceTime.  Also, share news of you and yours with Class Correspondent Jim Schoonmaker at js378@cornell.edu, who’s writing the next Cornell Alumni Magazine class notes.

Looking for those green shoots wherever we can find them these days, our campus may be quiet but the Cornell community has been busy helping.  The Johnson Art Museum has donated 2,000 gloves to Cayuga Medical Center and Bartels (the athletics building connected to Lynah Rink) is filled, at socially-appropriate distances,  with community members sewing for the Med Center.  A Cornell parent has donated 1,800 sets of PPE (personal protective equipment) to Weill Cornell.

If you haven’t seen this friends & family Zoom video with a Weill Cornell pulmonologist that literally went viral, it’s informative and comforting.

There is a lot of good (news, works, feelings and information) out there to help us through these tough times.

Please be well!