As an alum who worked on the Old Gold & Black when I was a student, I like to keep up with what the modern-day OG&B staff is producing in print and online. “Breaking the Wake Forest Bubble/Hamlin’s Ramblins” caught my eye in this week’s issue. Senior columnist Hamlin Wade of Charlotte addresses the question of what Wake Forest has to offer “in the sleepy town of Winston-Salem.”

He wrote days before the U.S. News and World Report announcement Tuesday that ranked Wake Forest once again 25th among national universities in its 2012 Best Colleges guide, a point of pride for many. Wade is interested in something else beyond metrics: “something perhaps intangible and undefined” about the University’s character. He recounts how student leaders last spring tried to come up with what composed the Wake Forest “mystique.” No one could pinpoint it.  There was no consensus.

“Wake is a place of reverence and passion, a place of community, and a place of individuality,” he writes. “The mystique of Wake Forest is its diversity and its layers. What may be mystical to one student may be completely common stance and mundane to another.” Take your pick: magnolia trees, bell tower, academic tradition, athletics, or, in Wade’s words, the university’s “long and storied history.”

What do you think? What is that mystique about Wake Forest that Wade urges us as individuals to define for ourselves? Send me an email, and I’ll share your comments: hensonm@wfu.edu

P.S. I, for one, can point to one element of the mystique: enduring friendships. You know who I’m talking about, fellow Deacons.

MTV News today recounts how Matt Gallagher (’05) will remember 9/11. Gallagher was a first-year student who had stayed up playing video games in his Wake Forest dorm room the night before the attacks. The attacks meant that “in many ways, the world as we knew it was ending,” he told MTV News. In 2010 he said the terrorist attacks and the Wake Forest motto of Pro Humanitate led him to join the Army.

Author of "Kaboom"

Gallagher gained notoriety as a veteran and a popular Iraq War blogger whose battalion commander ordered him to shut down his blog. The controversy, which made national news, led to a book deal. “Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War” is Gallagher’s memoir of his time in Iraq and the subject of a Wake Forest Magazine story (see the Fall 2010 issue at www.magazine.wfu.edu).

Here’s an excerpt from the MTV News piece: “As a then 18-year-old whose life was profoundly changed by 9/11, Gallagher said the attacks served as a ‘maturity moment’ during a crossroads in his life. “On a macro level, all of a sudden I realized this world is a very serious place, terrible things can happen,” he said. “Evil people do exist, as much as I want to ironically laugh at the simplicity of that statement.

“Deciding to join the Army and deploy was part of his journey, one Gallagher suspects was a small tile in a much larger mosaic of life-changing choices. ‘On a bigger level, 9/11 was a crystallizing moment for my generation … the bubble popped. We were like, ‘Whoa, this is what the real world is like, it’s not all fun and games.’ ”

To mark the 9/11 anniversary, he said he would remember “my fallen friends, 1st Lt. Mark Daily and Capt. David Schultz, for their sacrifice, their humor and their service.”

Imagine sorting through 4,000 photographs to best tell the story of the genesis of a Winston-Salem landmark. That immersion in the archives set the course for Barbara Babcock Millhouse, who intended to write a “guided tour” of Reynolda House, decided to think bigger and published instead the new pictorial history “Reynolda: 1906-1924.” Her book chronicles the transformation of a “patchwork of eroded and worn-out farms” 3.5 miles from the city center to a model, productive country estate on 1,067 acres at its peak.

A public event Tuesday night revealed Millhouse’s task to document the achievement of this model experimental farm as an obvious labor of love. Reynolda was the creation of her grandmother, Katharine Smith Reynolds (1880-1924), wife of R.J. Reynolds (1850-1918), founder of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.

“I think it (Reynolda House) really just has good vibes,” Millhouse told Michele Gillespie, Kahle Family Associate Professor of History at Wake Forest. “It has a very positive presence….The house itself: I think the architecture of the house is very strong, very cheerful, very joyous, and I’m happy to say and surprised, I suppose, that I think the new wing really does have the same feeling of cheerfulness, sunshine and joy.” Gillespie called Reynolda House “an oasis, even mythical to us as members of the community who get to use it.”

Barbara Babcock Millhouse and Michele Gillespie (r)

She interviewed Millhouse on stage at Reynolda House Museum of American Art, whose collection Millhouse has championed from the beginning. A slide show behind them illuminated the faces of Reynolds’ family members, long-ago workers on the estate, including the dashing supervisor of the greenhouses, and even a visiting opera singer whose photo had been a mystery until Reynolda director of public programs Philip Archer solved the case. (For decades the mystery man had been suspected of being a banker, wrongly. He was Mario Chamlee, the Metropolitan Opera’s star tenor, who performed love songs for 500 guests inside the main house in 1921 after rain cancelled his outdoor performance.)

Millhouse complimented the Philadelphia architect Charles Barton Keen (1868-1931) on his ability to design a beautiful house that has “a sense of shelter and security.”

Reynolda House Museum of American Art

Millhouse never knew her grandmother, nor did she ever live at Reynolda full-time. She grew up in Greenwich, Conn. During the war years, her father was in the Army and her mother decided to move the family to Winston-Salem when Barbara was seven. “We lived in the electrician’s house,” she said. “We lived in a cottage for four years on the other side of Reynolda Road. And I remember that that was the happiest time of my childhood because we could roam anywhere around; it was very much a farm…We had a large menagerie, and we had a wonderful cat called Fluffy….I dug a foxhole in the backyard and sat in it during most of the war.” One day, “the worst thing that had ever happened to me at that point,” occurred. Her mother filled in the foxhole.

The conversation not only cast a spotlight on Millhouse’s digging, both for foxholes and archives, but also on her respected interviewer. Millhouse tipped her hat to Gillespie for her scholarship on the subject of Katharine Reynolds. (Gillespie’s book, “Partners of Fortune: Katharine and R.J. Reynolds,” is under contract with the University of Georgia Press and to be published in fall 2012.) For her research Gillespie brought back from Baltimore love letters between Katharine and J. Edward Johnston, Katharine’s second husband. Johnston’s son gave them to Gillespie before he died. “What she did to get those love letters, I don’t know,” Millhouse told a delighted audience.

Gillespie was quick to explain: “He was absolutely charming and just spoke so highly of the Reynolds family,” she said of J. Edward Johnston Jr. “And he said, ‘I have these letters. They should really be with the family.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll take them back!’”

For those of us who love history and Reynolda House, we can enjoy Millhouse’s book and look forward to another book sure to reveal even more historical details. Here’s to the next conversation about our local oasis.

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.