"Dear Folks, It is now 12:05 a.m. … I’m sure that I’ll be up ’til three talking to my roommates,” the Cornell freshman wrote in September 1956. “They’re great … we really have a swell room.”
Human Ecology student Linda Jarschauer Johnson ’60, MS ’63, had just moved into Dickson Hall, and this was her first letter home to her parents in New Rochelle, NY.
More than three decades, in fall 1988, Linda’s daughter, Suzannah Johnson Creedon ’92, matriculated into the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning.
Linda’s parents had kept all her letters (and at some point had given them back to her); now, she thought it would be fun to send them, one at a time, to Suzannah, who was navigating her first weeks on the Hill.
Linda’s stories ultimately reached a third generation—though via phone rather than snail mail. Suzannah’s daughter, Eleanor Creedon ’24, had matriculated into Arts & Sciences in fall 2020, in the midst of the pandemic that so altered the student experience.
“I would tell my grandmother about doing Orientation, attending classes, and taking part in other traditions via Zoom—a stark contrast to her tenure at Cornell,” Eleanor recalls.
