You could not have wished for a better Commencement this morning with temperatures in the sixties, a break from the rains, lush green lawns and magnolia blossoms at their peak, bursting to the size of salad plates. It was my first view of Wake Forest graduation exercises since a very hot day in 1982 when I marched reluctantly to the stage to receive my diploma from then-Provost Ed Wilson (’43). I wasn’t ready to leave Mother so dear, but, thank you, Wake Forest, all these years later for allowing me to return to this place I love to work on its behalf.

This Commencement, I enjoyed my vantage point from the outside stairs of Reynolda Hall facing the Quad, where I surveyed the marvelous array of grandparents juggling cameras, fathers in fine suits (one had a cigar in the lapel pocket), mothers with bouquets of yellow roses and children prancing about (one little girl turned cartwheels and bowed while President Hatch spoke).

Then, amid the sea of black robes and summer suits, other-worldly, extraordinary graduation finery caught my eye.

A Nigerian delegation in splendor

I had no trouble tracking down the group among the hundreds of spectators on the Quad. As someone who spent about a year and a half in Africa, I have a deep appreciation for the continent and its people. I wasn’t sure what country these members of the graduation audience considered home, but I couldn’t wait to meet them and find out.

They were the friends and family of graduating senior Oreofe Olutimilehin of Lagos, Nigeria. “I feel so good. I feel on top of the world,” said Oreofe’s mother, Olufunmilayo Olutimilehin. “She has done us proud. She came so young, but she has coped well.”

I’ll say. Oreofe’s mother told me her daughter is not yet 20. Her birthday is in August. Oreofe started her schooling at one year and five months of age. Now, after four years at Wake Forest, she has a B.A. with a double major in political science and international studies. She will begin the master’s program at the University of Pittsburgh this fall to study international development.

Taiwo Olutimilehin, Oreofe’s father, was pleased by today’s rite of passage for his daughter. “She’s been impacted,” he said, by her time in the United States and at Wake Forest. Added her mother, “She’s actually transformed. She can handle situations confidently and well.”

It helped that Wake Forest was not unfamiliar to the family. The mother’s cousin is Simeon Ilesanmi (JD ’05), Washington M. Wingate Professor of Religion, who teaches courses in comparative ethics, international human rights, African religions and religion and law. He wore his academic robes for Baccalaureate on Sunday, he said, but sat in African sartorial splendor with the family for Commencement.

After the ceremony, I met Oreofe.

The Olutimilehin family celebrates

She called her time at Wake Forest “a good learning experience” and named her highlights as rolling the Quad and studying abroad at Worrell House with Tom Phillips (’74, MA ’78), a professor and director of the Wake Forest Scholars program. He watched his London students from the steps of Reynolda Hall beside me, proud of their accomplishments. (For him, it was the third Commencement in three days, two for his children — from Raleigh to Connecticut — and then at WFU for his Worrell House students.) Oreofe had traveled before to England, so “it wasn’t like it was a big cultural shock” to come to Wake Forest to college. But there was a singular shock: “The food. Back home there’s a lot more spice.” Eventually, as is the case for so many of us, she grew used to the Pit: “You kind of have to,” she said.

From the Pit to the Quad, all who love Wake Forest have followed those familiar paths from the pinpoint on the map we call home to that blessed stage on graduation day. Congratulations, Class of 2011.

In University Advancement we’re packing boxes in Reynolda Hall for our move to a building behind the law school later this month. That means most of us are sorting files, recycling papers and happening upon treasures like this June 1957 edition of “the Wake Forest Magazine” that I found in a glass case in the hallway.

Kitty Booth ('57) of Morganton jumped for joy after exams.

This bit of history includes the 1957 speech by Alumni Association President John R. Knott (’23) at the senior class breakfast on Commencement Day in which he proclaimed that seniors would be taking their place in “a fascinating yet impersonal world — a world, if you please, that invites you, that will challenge you, a world that desperately needs you.”

Knott wondered, “What will your world of tomorrow be like?”

I’ve compiled highlights from his list of prognostications:

• Every year a population equal to Maryland’s will be added to the country.

• By 1987, half the working population will be working on goods and services that today are unknown.

• Your world “will gradually emerge as a clean world, for the soot and smoke will disappear as atomic energy takes over the job now being done by coal and oil.”

• Space “will yield all of her secrets to those of you who dare to fly into the unknown.”

• Cancer will be “completely conquered. You are to witness and play a part in this achievement.”

• The human heart will be “trained to beat longer in the human body. You will help bring this about.”

• Slums will disappear, thanks to your being “the magicians” who will provide “the touch” to change the appearance of American cities.

“Your world of tomorrow will pay a premium on integrity and character,” Knott said, adding a quote from Peter Drucker: “What will be decisive above all, in the future even more than in the past, is neither education nor skill; it is integrity of character.”

In the world of tomorrow, Knott said, “sons” of Wake Forest College will be meeting each other at the corner drugstore, on the church steps, over an operating table, in a business deal and on a golf course. “They will be engaged in endeavors similar to yours — that of making the world a better and happier place in which to live … (W)henever they meet, wherever they meet, there’s a lift to the spirit, there’s a quickening of the pulse, there’s a light in the eyes, for Wake Forest men are together!”

He failed to mention the obvious fact (see 1957 magazine cover) that there were at least a few women around. The magazine noted that the West Dormitory for women would be named to honor Miss Lois Johnson, “the first and current dean of women.” Indeed, 1957 was a time of firsts, including the first Commencement for Wake Forest on the new campus.

As I observe how the Quad is being readied for Commencement all these years later, and as I prepare to say goodbye to seniors I have come to know, teach and admire, it all makes me wonder: Seniors, what will your world of tomorrow be like?

I hope there’s a lift to your spirit and light in your eyes when you meet fellow Wake Foresters (“sons” and “daughters” of WFU) in a business deal, on the church steps, at the corner drugstore and beyond, from Paris to Beijing, to the hamlets of Indonesia and to the villages of Ethiopia. I hope you change the world for the better because the world desperately needs you. (See Knott’s list of unfinished business.) Above all, may you be as happy all the days of your life as Kitty Booth, who on a spring day in 1957 leapt for joy at Wake Forest.

Yesterday was a day for notable events. “You could be celebrating the start of the Civil War” or David Letterman’s birthday, Harold W. Tribble Professor of Art Margaret Supplee Smith told those of us who squeezed into 102-C of the Scales Fine Arts Center at 5:30 p.m.

Perhaps.

Those occasions have their followers, but yesterday we gathered at Scales to celebrate Dr. Smith, better known as Peggy Smith. We had come to hear what was dubbed her farewell lecture on what turned out to be her birthday (don’t ask her age; you wouldn’t believe it if I told you. She’s ageless). It also marked the anniversary of the lecture she gave 32 years ago for her job interview at Wake Forest.

Peggy Smith once thought her destiny was Williamsburg.

Am I ever glad she got the job! Peggy (I didn’t dare call her that then) was one of the finest teachers I had at Wake Forest, a true role model for me and a good number of my friends. I carried my pocket-size “American Architecture” guide from one of her classes for years and was inspired in part by her passion for art to collect paintings myself. I remember studying the slide of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain, and wondering why my art history professors made such a big deal of a bizarre, unfinished monstrosity church by a wacky dreamer named Antoni Gaudi. Then, nine years after graduation, I found myself standing in front of the church in awe of the unfinished, magnificent masterpiece. It had not come to life in a slide box in Scales but in the words of professors such as Peggy and the late Bob Knott. I remembered my Wake Forest art history professors in gratitude on that day of awe in Barcelona. They had been right all along.

Peggy surely felt the admiration of students, colleagues and old friends at her lecture called “Architecture Matters: past, current and future research, including American ski resorts.” Architecture, she said, “is the one art form that everybody encounters in everyday life.” We who view it bring our sentiments to it. “Wake Forest is a good example. Ask students why did they come here,” she said. They usually say it’s because it looks like what they think a college campus looks like.

Her lecture was a personal journey. She showed “some buildings that have mattered to me.” With characteristic wry humor she said, “Don’t worry. It’s not year by year.” She began with a photo of Friends Select School in Philadelphia; a 5-year-old Peggy sits on what appears to be a jungle gym teeming with children. That was her school, and its location meant that in Peggy’s early life she was surrounded by great buildings: Philadelphia City Hall in its Second Empire-style splendor, Wanamaker’s Department Store designed by Daniel Burnham, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts designed by Frank Furness and George Hewitt. Every school day she rode with her mother from their home in New Jersey across the Benjamin Franklin Bridge into central Philadelphia. “To a child … buildings fed my memories, gave me a sense of place and influenced my awareness of cultural values,” she said. All those buildings she encountered “influenced my sense of the public realm.”

She showed us the Chapel of the Holy Innocents, next door to the Episcopal boarding school she attended in New Jersey at ages six and seven. She would grow up to learn that the chapel was a significant example of Gothic Revival architecture. She allowed us to hop aboard in memory the six-week ride she took with her grandmother from the East Coast to California, “traveling exactly as the builders intended” — by train — to grand hotels like Old Faithful Inn at Yellowstone to movie stars’ homes in Beverly Hills. A decidedly inspirational moment came in 1957 when she was on a family trip to Jamestown and Williamsburg, Va. She loved the scenes and decided she would grow up to become “a costumed guide” at Williamsburg.

Years later, in the 1970s, she would be featured in a Glamour magazine article as someone “with a Brown Ph.D” fresh in hand who had abandoned her dream of becoming a costumed guide for a new goal: to be on Williamsburg’s board of directors. Peggy’s thesis involved tracing the history of 3,500 row houses in Boston’s South End at a time American cities were trying to reclaim their sense of place. “I learned that architecture could tell stories and connect people with their history,” she said. She joined Wake Forest in 1979, teaching art and architectural history. She served four terms as department chair and helped establish the University’s Women’s Studies Program.

“I am just retiring from teaching,” Peggy told us. “I’m not dying.”

She has more research lined up and a book on the way about the history of American ski resorts. “But I have satisfaction,” she said, clicking the computer to show a slide replete with gravestones, “that only an architectural historian can — of knowing that my family burial place is in America’s second Picturesque Rural Cemetery,” designed by the same architect who designed the little Gothic Revival chapel, where as a first-grader she carried the crucifix up the aisle at Sunday Vespers.

The circle comes round. The first lecture and the last lecture, both delivered on an April day.

Enjoy retirement, Peggy. You will be missed in the classrooms of Scales but remembered by students everywhere who look up during their architectural encounters in everyday life and savor the delight of seeing a building that gives life meaning or sparks a memory. I’m one of those students. Peggy taught me.

On Saturday I hadn’t expected to find myself on blogging duty. I was meeting a marvelous painter friend of mine Frances Hairfield (sister Nancy is a WFU alum) from Morganton at a historic house in Elkin, N.C., to mark the occasion of the second annual international Obscura Day. Neither one of us knew much about what we were in for. Obscura Day sounded vaguely familiar and yet, obscure. Wouldn’t you know it: The keepers of the flame of the obscure were both Wake Forest graduates.

“Everyone has a cabinet of curiosities,” says Anne Connelly Gulley (’77), an artist in Elkin.

She and her husband, Dr. Paul Gulley (’74, MD ’78), a doctor of internal medicine, opened their house to show off their special room marked above the door with brightly colored paint to let you know you are about to walk into an Alice in Wonderland scene. Look up. There’s a small alligator on the ceiling. How about that praying mantis toy peeping out from a box on the desk? Yes, that is a dissected frog on the wall – a knitted one, almost Kermit-like in a tragic way. Animal skulls abound. Butterflies rest under glass. In a plastic purse is the late pet hamster who landed at the taxidermy shop instead of a backyard grave. Books are everywhere.

Dr. Gulley visits with guests

On a shelf is Anne’s gem collection, including the rock she carried to show-and-tell in fourth grade. Her collecting began with seashells lovingly acquired on summer vacations when her family traveled from Ohio to Myrtle Beach. The rock collection started with a rock cut in half to reveal glittering innards. It came from Gatlinburg. (“Tells you about our summer vacations,” she says.) She insists that we should all look around. We will see the obscura in our own lives. Do you have anything collected on that window ledge above your kitchen sink? Voilà. Obscura.

Entrance to curiosities

The international “holiday” got its start through Atlas Obscura, “a compendium of this age’s wonders, curiosities and esoterica.” A science journalist started the Atlas Obscura online community, and this year 103 communities reported they were hosting Obscura Day, celebrating what one writer called the world’s “most spectacular nooks and crannies.” The point is to create far-flung explorers and a catalog of weird places not necessarily found in the tourist’s guidebook. If it all works as planned, we’ll feel, well, more curious.

A Gatlinburg rock

And so while some of us celebrated with the Gulleys on Saturday on West Main Street, near the Yadkin River, far-flung others traipsed through the Museum of the Weird in Austin; explored artists’ “squats” in Berlin; examined the strongest tidal current in the world in Saltstarumen Sound, Norway; crept through the catacombs of Brooklyn; and pondered how “buttons are communicating time capsules” at the Busy Beaver Button Collection in Chicago. Does it need mentioning that the Busy Beaver is the world’s only button museum? I thought not.

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