A Ryors Hall reunion 50 years in the making
Several of the women who resided in Ryors Hall during the 1969-70 academic year gather for a group photo outside of their former Ohio University home during a 50-year reunion this past October. They are: Kathy Drummer, BSED ’73; Mary Adams; Mary (Riestenberg) Rush, BSHSS ’73; Anne Taylor; Debby Tinker, BSED ’73; Mellen (Monaghan) Reckman, BSHSS ’73; Roberta “Birti” Hardie, BSED ’73; Donna (Murr) Mast, BSC ’73; Marianne Moyer O’Donnell; Jean (Vincent) Wykoff, BSHSS ’73; Gay (Leeka) Schueller, BFA ’73; and Jan (Cunningham) Hodson, BSHEC ’73, MSHCS ’96.
The last time they were all together, they were frantically dismantling their first Ohio University home and preparing to leave Ryors Hall.
It was May 15, 1970, and President Claude Sowle had announced the closing of Ohio University following days of increasingly violent protests that swept campuses across the country after members of the National Guard opened fire on a crowd protesting the Vietnam War, killing four Kent State students. Ohio University students were given 24 hours to vacate campus.
It was an abrupt ending to a turbulent academic year. For a group of first-year women in Ryors Hall, it was an abrupt ending to a year marked by building relationships that they would quietly carry with them throughout life.
Fifty years later, those women resumed those relationships, reconnecting online and reuniting in Athens for a weekend of reminiscing, fun and a visit to the residence hall where it all began.
“All my life, I’ve had vivid memories of that particular time on campus,” Jan (Cunningham) Hodson, BSHEC ’73, MSHCS ’96, said of her first year at OHIO and the reason she organized a reunion for a group of women she resided with in Ryors Hall during the 1969-70 academic year.
At the time, Ryors Hall was an all-female, first-year residence hall – a dynamic that Hodson credits for the close bonds formed amongst those in her first-floor floor section and a few others in the building.
“We didn’t have to worry about looking a certain way. Our doors were always open, and we just got to know each other,” Hodson said. “We shared everything. We did everything together. We were women, and we were young, and we came from all over.”
Many of those women lost track of each other in the years that followed, but Hodson never forgot about them and the moments they shared that formative year. She would come to find out that they, too, had not forgotten.
About 10 years ago, Hodson took the first step in reconnecting with those women. A resident of Athens who worked at OHIO, Hodson worked with the Ohio University Alumni Association to try and find her two Ryors Hall roommates. She found an address for one of them, Renee (Mayo) Jackson, BSED ’73, who shortly thereafter received a letter from Hodson, complete with photos from their time in Ryors Hall and Hodson’s phone number.
Renee (Mayo) Jackson (far left) is pictured with fellow Ryors Hall residents Leslie Fuller, Mellen (Monaghan) Reckman, Birti Hardie and Mary Adams.
“I called her, and Jan and I have been connected ever since,” Jackson of Alpharetta, Georgia, said. “It was a blessed event. All that time that had elapsed between when I left campus the day the University closed to the day she got in contact with me was like time just stood still. We started back just where we left off.”
The former roommates caught each other up on their lives and reflected on the months they unexpectedly found themselves living together. Jackson and a high school friend arrived on campus in the fall of 1969 expecting to live in a double in Ryors Hall only to find Hodson in their room. High enrollment that year forced the University to turn many doubles in the residence halls into triples.
Jackson and her high school friend came to OHIO from an integrated high school in Cleveland and were two of the only black women on the University’s West Green. Hodson was a “townie.” Their backgrounds couldn’t have been much different, but they – and the group of Ryors Hall women they befriended – committed early on to getting to know each other and to learning from one another, often through what Jackson described as “soulful sit-downs.”
“During that first year we forged so much that helped me become a better person,” Jackson said. “The things we learned from one another we still value today, and I carried these women in my heart all the way through college and life. … My education from OU and the cultural diversity I was involved in when I was at OU prepared me for life.”
During their phone call, Jackson and Hodson also reminisced about the Ryors Hall women with whom they lived and grew, and they began to imagine a scenario that would bring them all back together.
The idea stuck with Hodson, and in 2018, she reached out to Alumni Association staff for their assistance in locating her former Ryors Hall residents. (Click here for information from the Alumni Association regarding on-campus reunions.)
From there, it snowballed. Connecting with one Ryors Hall alumna often led to finding another. In the end, 15 of those Ryors Hall women began reconnecting online and preparing for a fall 2019 reunion.
“I thought it was a brilliant idea, and I couldn’t wait,” Debby Tinker, BSED ’73, of Springfield, Virginia, said of the reunion that was held Oct. 18-20 and that reunited her with 12 women she had not seen in 50 years.
“It was like no time had passed since I’d seen them before,” Tinker said. “The energy was just as positive as it was in our dorm, and it was like we had never been apart.”
The women, who came from as far away as Oregon and Florida, took up residence for the weekend in an Athens-area lodge, spending most of their time doing what they were looking forward to the most: talking.
“That first night was like a pajama party all over again,” Hodson said. “It was almost as if we couldn’t talk fast enough and as if we couldn’t remember things fast enough. It was magical.”
They reminisced about their lives in Ryors Hall, recalling everything from the curfew they lived under (and their ways of circumventing it) to the day the University closed. (Click here to read their memories from the 1969-70 academic year.) They talked about the Ryors Hall friends they couldn’t find, grieved the one they learned had died in an automobile accident, and simply got to know each other again.
“The really important thing to me at the reunion was becoming reacquainted with my roommate, Anne Taylor,” Tinker said. “Although we lived together, I didn’t get to know her as well as I could have in college. I’m glad I got to spend time with her, that I got to become acquainted with her and hear about her successes.”
A highlight of the weekend was the trip back to the West Green and Ryors Hall where a student treated them to a tour of their former home. Their first stop at Ryors Hall? A side window on the first floor – the window many of them had crawled through as students when out past curfew – where they seized the opportunity to recreate a photo from that first year.
During their visit to campus, several of the women seized an opportunity to recreate a photo taken outside of Ryors Hall during their first year at the University. Pictured in the photo from 1969 are (from left) Jean (Vincent) Wykoff, Marianne Moyer O’Donnell, Leslie Fuller and Birti Hardie. Pictured in the photo from 2019 are (from left) Jean (Vincent) Wykoff, Marianne Moyer O’Donnell, Birti Hardie and Mary (Riestenberg) Rush.
The inside of Ryors Hall didn’t much resemble what they experienced as students. The lobby, described by Hodson as “very conservative and colonial looking” in 1969, now looked like “a five-star hotel.” The individual mailboxes were gone, the individual room numbers had been changed, and most of the students’ doors were shut and the building quiet. It was a far cry from the Ryors Hall they had known – except for the bathrooms, which the group swore hadn’t changed at all.
The changes they saw at their old cafeteria were equally as shocking.
“We walked in that day to see Boyd Hall cafeteria (now the District on West Green), and there’s a grocery store right as you walk in, which we totally freaked out about,” Hodson said. “We just sat there in awe.”
As the women prepared to leave campus that day, Hodson said they paused for a moment to collect their thoughts.
“We all sat outside the cafeteria for a while and just kind of thought about what we had seen,” Hodson said. “And we thought, this is so different, and it is probably so much better, but we wouldn’t have traded anything for what we had.”
Tinker felt similarly, lamenting in particular how coed living, which occurs in all but one residence hall at OHIO today, affects a student’s residential college experience.
“Everybody living in coed dorms thinks that’s great, but they have no idea how much they’ve missed out on,” she said. “It was so much fun to live with a bunch of women, and every single one of us was glad there were no men.”
“At some point during that weekend, it occurred to all of us that we had only lived together for less than nine months out of our entire lives, yet we had formed relationships that have endured for 50 years,” Hodson said. “Even though we hadn’t been in touch, we were able to come back together, and we connected as older women. It was a beautiful thing.”
“It was like going to the gas station,” Tinker said. “I just got all filled up with love and positive energy. It was good to have a weekend, and I wish I would have had more time.”
In the days and weeks since the reunion, the Ryors Hall women have continued to stay in touch.
Tinker and Kathy Drummer, BSED ’73, who lives in New York were already planning to get together in Washington, D.C. And the entire Ryors Hall group is planning another Athens reunion in two years – the same year most of them will turn 70.
“This whole experience just showed me that you really can connect after all these years, and now we have all new friendships,” Hodson said. “It was one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life and was one of the best weekends of my life.”
Calling all, OHIO alumni! We want to hear from you! Share your memories of Ryors Hall, your time on campus during the 1969-70 academic year, or from your reunions with your Ohio University family in the comments section below.