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Dearest friends
Bethel alumnae’s round-robin letter has endured for more than 60 years.
by Melanie Zuercher
There are dozens, scores, perhaps hundreds, of stories about how friendships formed at Bethel College and how they have endured in an increasingly transient world.
The grandmother of them all is the Round Robins, a group of 11 women, mostly Class of 1941, who knew each other through connections made by living in Irish Castle, the front section of a now-vanished campus residence called Carnegie Hall. Several years after graduation, Shirley England – living far away in the state of Washington, during the years of World War II gas rationing – contacted several of the others about starting a round-robin letter.
That letter has now endured for more than 60 years, with the six surviving members continuing to write each other. So has the tradition, begun in 1945, of holding periodic Round Robins reunions. The most recent gatherings have been to celebrate 90th birthdays.
As Ada Mae (Gressinger) Haury remembers it, the group began to gel in her second year of college. She lived in Carnegie Hall her first year, rooming with Ada (Ruth) Unruh, also from Halstead. The second year, Haury moved to Irish Castle.
“It had a little outside deck,” she remembers. “Several times, when it was hot, we would sleep outside on the deck. We tried to keep it quiet, but some boys heard about this and they would turn hoses on us.”
The Carnegie Hall housemother was Sister Marie Lohrentz, whom both Ada Mae and another of the Round Robins, Roberta (Enns) Renich, remember as being “very strict.” The young women could not quite resist testing Sister’s patience.
“Our room was right above her apartment and we would sit on the floor and play [the card game] Slap,” Roberta says. Ada Mae says, “We had to turn lights off by 10 p.m. We’d sometimes sit in the dark and eat. Louise [Langenwalter] worked in the co-op, downstairs in Carnegie Hall, and she would go and get food.” Lovella (Schneider) Goering adds, “We had a hot plate and a small refrigerator. We ate [together] a lot.”
One activity that involved several of the Round Robins was a pep club called the Doxies. They wore gray skirts and maroon sweaters, carried stuffed dachshunds as their mascots, led cheers from the stands and marched during halftime at football games, as Lovella remembers it. “It was the closest we could get to a sorority,” Roberta says.
Another thing that connected them was music, with a number of them singing in the choir under the direction of Walter Hohmann ’15, including Ada, Lovella, Irene (Roth) Mauck and Mary (Eby) Bickford. “We felt like we ran the place,” Lovella says with a smile.
In addition to Ada Mae and Ada, three other women who would eventually form the Round Robins were from Halstead: Shirley England, Margaret (Woodworth) Schroeder and Meribeth (Haury) Dyck. Louise Langenwalter was living with two aunts in Halstead when she came to Bethel but was originally from Gulfport, Miss. Roberta was from Inman, Irene from Whitewater, Mary from Wichita and Lovella and the 11th Round Robin, Phlorence (Hiebert) Rousell, from Buhler.
“Phlorence and Lovella had cars,” Ada Mae remembers. “They would take us to town to eat at a restaurant. We liked to go to a hamburger stand that was north of the high school, Young’s Lunch.”
Lovella and Phlorence had been friends since babyhood. “Our mothers sewed together, and we had dresses alike,” Lovella says. “Phlorence was a year older and so she went to McPherson College [her first year]. When I graduated from high school, I begged her to come to Bethel with me, and she did. She met her husband, Charlie [’41], there.”
So did Lovella (Joe W. Goering), Ada Mae (Bob Haury ’40), Roberta (Paul Renich ’42), Ada (Bill Unruh) and Margaret (Allison Schroeder ’41). Weddings became another occasion to get together. Lovella was a bridesmaid for Roberta. She and Joe stood up with Phlorence and Charlie when they got married at City Hall. An organist for her home church since she was a high school student, Lovella also played for at least one Round Robin’s wedding, she says, and Mary, an accomplished harpist, did for several.
The first Round Robins reunion took place at Ada’s home in Halstead. By that time, there were already six children among the group. They continued to meet every two or three years, going wherever someone volunteered to host.
“A lot of times it was just a day when the girls got together,” Lovella says, but occasionally they included children and husbands. At least once, they invited their mothers to a Round Robins reunion. “My mother thought this group was special,” Lovella says. “My two daughters were at the last reunion and they knew everyone. They enjoyed it.”
Several times the reunion lasted for a weekend. One of those that Ada Mae, Lovella and Roberta still talk about was when Lovella hosted in Moundridge. The women went to her home and the men to “the Wagoner,” where the Goerings have a cabin.
“I’ll never forget when Lovella had us for the weekend,” Ada Mae says. “We started with a meal in a restaurant in Hutchinson. Later, Lovella fried fish for us.”
“Joe had catfish out at the Wagoner,” Lovella adds. “He caught some and brought them to me and I fried them for one meal.”
“Our husbands all got along well together,” says Roberta. Paul, the last surviving spouse, adds, “We would see who could brag the most.”
Other longer reunions took place at Phlorence and Charlie Rousell’s home in Memphis, Tenn., and at Ada and Bill Unruh’s when they lived in Shawnee Mission.
And through it all, there were the letters that gave the group its name. “We would write about what we were doing and about our children,” Roberta says. “Sometimes we enclosed snapshots. We didn’t all live close together so we didn’t see each other in between [reunions].”
“I always looked forward to having the packet come so I could read what everyone was doing,” Lovella adds.
Roberta was involved in another round-robin letter from Bethel days as well that also stemmed from living in Irish Castle, but the Round Robins has endured the longest. “The Round Robins’ letter has died a couple of times, but we always revived it,” she says. “Especially once we all moved [back] here, we thought we didn’t need it any more, but then Ada [in the Kansas City area] was left out, so we started again.
“We don’t have as much to write about, but we still do. This is a really special group of people. We’ve been so intimately involved with each other through the years with the letters – we know all about each other’s families.”
The letter has lasted these 60-plus years because “people were determined – committed,” says Ada Mae. “It was our duty to write, but it was also fun. Nowadays we sometimes have to wait a while until there’s enough news [to write about], but we’re always happy to get the letters.”
“The type of student who comes to Bethel has a lot to do with [the letter’s longevity],” says Lovella. “They’re studious and they also want to work on friendships.
“I would have missed this group – these have been good friends and they still are.”
Nowadays, five of the six surviving Round Robins get together periodically at or near Lovella’s Moundridge home. Her daughters, Pat Smith and Joyce Saricks, happily take responsibility for transporting everyone there. Ada Mae and Margaret live in Newton, Roberta in Hesston and Louise in Wichita. (Ada lives in Kansas City, Mo., and is not able to travel.)
“This group has been my dearest friends all these years,” says Roberta. “They are closer than any friends I have made since college. I think Bethel must be a very special college in developing friendships in this way.”