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its campus. But once the idea was presented, I became interested. They invited me to attend events to meet alumnae and current students. The gathering for Smith was at a beautiful, large home in one of the wealthy suburbs along Lake Michigan, while Wellesley’s was in a penthouse apartment on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. I felt out of place at both. All the girls seemed not only richer but more worldly than I. One girl at the Wellesley event was smoking pastelcolored cigarettes and talking about her summer in Europe. That seemed a long way from Lake Winola and my life.
    I told my two teacher mentors that I didn’t know about “going East” to school, but they insisted that I talk with my parents about applying. My mother thought I should go wherever I wanted. My father said I was free to do that, but he wouldn’t pay if I went west of the Mississippi or to Radcliffe, which he heard was full of beatniks. Smith and Wellesley, which he had never heard of, were acceptable. I never visited either campus, so when I was accepted, I decided on Wellesley based on the photographs of the campus, especially its small Lake Waban, which reminded me of Lake Winola. I have always been grateful to those two teachers.
    I didn’t know anyone else going to Wellesley. Most of my friends were attending Midwestern colleges to be close to home. My parents drove me to college, and for some reason we got lost in Boston, ending up in Harvard Square, which only confirmed my father’s views about beatniks. However, there weren’t any in sight at Wellesley, and he seemed reassured. My mother has said that she cried the entire thousand-mile drive back from Massachusetts to Illinois. Now that I have had the experience of leaving my daughter at a distant university, I understand exactly how she felt. But back then, I was only looking ahead to my own future.
    CLASS OF ‘69
    In 1994, Frontline, the PBS television series, produced a documentary about the Wellesley class of 1969, “Hillary’s Class.” It was mine, to be sure, but it was much more than that. The producer, Rachel Dretzin, explained why Frontline decided to scrutinize our class twentyfive years after we graduated: “They’ve made a journey unlike any other generation, through a time of profound change and upheaval for women.”
    Classmates of mine have said that Wellesley was a girls’ school when we started and a women’s college when we left. That sentiment probably said as much about us as it did the college.
    I arrived at Wellesley carrying my father’s political beliefs and my mother’s dreams and left with the beginnings of my own. But on that first day, as my parents drove away, I felt lonely, overwhelmed and out of place. I met girls who had gone to private boarding schools, lived abroad, spoke other languages fluently and placed out of freshman courses because of their Advanced Placement test scores. I had been out of the country only once―to see the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. My only exposure to foreign languages was high school Latin.
    I didn’t hit my stride as a Wellesley student right away. I was enrolled in courses that proved very challenging. My struggles with math and geology convinced me once and for all to give up on any idea of be coming a doctor or a scientist. My French professor gently told me, “Mademoiselle, your talents lie elsewhere.” A month after school started I called home collect and told my parents I didn’t think I was smart enough to be there. My father told me to come on home and my mother told me she didn’t want me to be a quitter.
    After a shaky start, the doubts faded, and I realized that I really couldn’t go home again, so I might as well make a go of it.
    One snowy night during my freshman year, Margaret Clapp, then President of the college, arrived unexpectedly at my dorm, Stone-Davis, which perched on the shores above Lake Waban. She came into the dining room and asked for volunteers to help her gently shake the snow off