Bruce Paul Richards writes: “I was wearing an Aloha shirt because it was Friday. I’ve done so every Friday since spending a year in Hawaii after graduation. Having flunked my draft physical (for sleepwalking, of all things), I had gone to Waikiki to celebrate not getting shot in Vietnam, and had gotten shot. But that’s another story. This is about an Aloha Friday two years ago on the eve of Campus Dance. I was in front of my old fraternity house, DTD, drinking a beer, musing about all the wild good times I’d had there, feeling rather ‘studly’ as Johnny-D used to say, in my favorite shirt, when my phone rang. It was my pregnant daughter, Aly Richards ’08, on her way back to campus for her 10th reunion. She and her brother Ryan ’06 had attended a much better place than the bro-fest of my day, but that didn’t taint my rosy visions from 49 years earlier. Aly said not to worry, running late, at the doctor’s and, by the way, your first grandchild and your second will be arriving the same day. Twins! I started to cry. Not just wet-eyed sniffles. Loud and uncontrollably, spilling my beer down the front of my shirt. Passersby looked at me with expressions of pity and alarm. Not that studly, after all. Campus Dance was the same as always. Old timers and young. Same band, or so it seemed. Dancing and drinking (I smuggled in my martinis; told them it was medicine). Even a fistfight. Yup, just the same…Though the old timers of my day dated back to the Great War, some even to the 19th Century. Now they were me. Aly’s friends were nice enough to let me hang out with them instead of the less lively tables of folks more my age. I was a little depressed by the aging of the class of ’68 and disappointed with the dearth of Aloha shirts, but those sorrows proved as transient as…well, you know. Our group celebrated Aly’s great news at the best Aloha Friday Campus Dance ever.”
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Class of 1969