Guilford College: a land of bratwurst, punk rock, and an inflatable Titanic.
At least it was for this past weekend’s Homecoming, the time for students of graduations past to return, revel, and reminisce amid the sounds of an Oompah Band.
The weekend’s final statistics are as follows: 300-500 attendees, $8,200 dollars, and a 34-7 football victory over Washington and Lee. When asked about the cost of the events, Student Union Treasurer Taleisha Bowen replied, “I’m stingy, but if people had a great time, screw it.”
Between the pork sandwiches, banana custard, chai, s’mores, football game, fires, inflatable fun, caricatures and German sing-a-longs, it might be easy to lose focus of what Homecoming is really about. That is, those who are coming home to Guilford.
When asked about the weekend’s events, current students cited “glass bottles of IBC rootbeer,” “the metal jam band” and “watching Jeff Jeske play the accordion” as their highlights.
Alumni took a more introspective stance, taking advantage of a rare opportunity to physically walk down memory lane and marvel at just how much “the buildings are closer together,” in the words of John Mims, ’97.
Mims was accompanied by David Nash, ’95 and Mark Sadowsky, ’93. Together they shed their current personas of loan coordinator, brokerage manager, and U.S. Marine Corps captain to recall the students they were a decade ago.
“By this time on a Friday night, this hall would be crawling full of people,” Sadowsky said. “We had two big recycling bins down at the end, and by Saturday morning, they’d be full, you know what I’m saying?”
It was a time when “students ran the college” and the disciplinary buck stopped with the RAs.
They recalled when dorm floors were single sex, and the stairwells were kept locked.
They also recalled “pennying” shut doors, “the condom lady,” Binford Formals, discovering everything from newspaper vending machines to fully-made beds sitting on a pole in the middle of the lake, and a smattering of other memories that left no doubt as to why “friends (from Guilford) are friends for life.”
No matter how hard I pried, no matter how much I prompted (“Teachers? Classes? Cafeteria Food?”), no unpleasant recollections surfaced from the trio, who all seemed thrilled with what Guilford had given them.
As Nash said, Guilford was “a true representation of the outside world.