Behind Every Great Reunions Are Significant Others With Significant Roles

When Mary Lou Webber’s daughters sorted her clothes after her death last summer, “the number of orange and black ensembles was just astounding,” says her widower, Ross Webber ’56.

Nothing unusual for a Princeton alum — but Mary Lou Webber never attended the University. She belonged instead to a small, unsung cadre: the spouses and widows of Princeton grads, who, despite lacking formal affiliation, help run alumni events, including Reunions. They are the volunteers who cook for potlucks, manage email lists, decorate party rooms, and store leftover Princeton swag — doing the unglamorous work of community-building.

These non-alumni volunteers, most of them women, make up a small fraction of the roughly 400 people who volunteer at Reunions each year, says Joy Allen, Reunions associate director. Although data is scarce, anecdotal evidence suggests that many non-alumni volunteers are connected with older classes — those that attended Princeton in the years before or just after the 1969 transition to coeducation.

The girlfriends who spent weekends visiting all-male Princeton grew into wives who knew the campus, shared their husbands’ friendships, and felt “connected to Princeton’s rituals, in some cases, more than their own schools’, because Princeton’s tend to be bigger and more dramatic,” Ross Webber says.

Sometimes these non-alumni volunteers participate in formal alumni activities. Pattie Kennedy Friend, the widow of Lloyd Friend ’65, who died in 2008, maintains a contact list for widows of class members, updating them on University activities and hosting periodic Zoom conversations. Sue H. Rodgers joined the Princetoniana Committee in 2011, after the death of her husband, Bob Rodgers ’56, to help realize one of his cherished projects: collecting and preserving class jackets worn at the P-rade. Ev Prather, the widow of Joseph Prather ’61, who died in 2023, is co-chairing 
his class’s 65th reunion this year after helping organize virtual and off-site reunions during the COVID years.

But these volunteers also coordinate informal gatherings that keep class connections alive year-round. With her husband, Tom Meeker ’56, who died in 2024, Joanne Meeker organized a beloved tailgate party that for 35 years convened behind the Cap and Gown Club before home football games. The Meekers brought tables and pop-up tents (“Our car was ridiculous every game morning,” Joanne Meeker says), persuaded the marching band to drop by for impromptu concerts, and marshaled potluck contributions. One year, Sue Rodgers collected the recipes into a tailgate cookbook.

Much of the non-alumni volunteering occurs behind the scenes, however. When Ross Webber served as vice president of his class, responsible for supplying alcohol to class parties, Mary Lou Webber helped him wrangle the bottles. Ev Prather, whose husband chaired several Reunions for the Class of 1961, organized and stored leftover shirts and buttons.

“When we would get to the point of decorating a site, I was always there with the staple gun and the glue gun,” Rodgers says. “I didn’t make big waves, but I was there.”

For some of these women, staying involved with Princeton has brought notable benefits. The connections forged through her work for the Class of ’65 spurred Friend to move to Princeton in 2023; now she attends home sporting events, meal checks at Cannon Dial Elm Club on Sunday nights, and shows her friends around campus as an unofficial tour guide. “It’s just a place for me that is so wonderful,” she says. “It’s like a whole huge new life.”

And for many of the non-alumni volunteers, working for Princeton is a way of staying connected to a beloved, much-missed spouse.

Ev Prather’s husband “lived and breathed Princeton,” attending every Reunions weekend for some 60 years, she says. She keeps volunteering because he would want her to. “I’m doing it for him. I know he’s smiling down on me.”