Don’t Sit Under the Alumni Files
North Hall at Lake Forest College is an old residence hall. My guess is that it was all men or all women–these were the days before co-ed living facilities on college campuses. The building was renovated in the fifties or sixties to house the College administration. Business office on the first floor, President’s Office on the second, and the alumni and development office on the third. On the fourth floor, which was never really renovated, the old dorm rooms house file cabinets–one after the other, full of alumni records. Every bit of information is in those files, from the student’s original application to the College to any note or letter that was ever sent to him/her as an alum of the College. The files fill a number of the rooms on the fourth floor of North Hall, and I can tell you that it is a bit disconcerting to be sitting in an office on the third floor, thinking of all that weight one floor up. Hey, it’s an old building! I often sat there wondering when that file cabinet with Richard Widmark’s file (he was a graduate of the College and a former acting teacher) would end up in my lap! Trust me, it is hard to concentrate with thoughts like that running through your mind.