At a recent Chi O gathering: (back row, left to right) Sally Eastwood, Chris Millar, Anne Thomson, Ellie Swazey, Priscilla Burtt, Kathy Zagara, Mary Jayne Haas. Front row, left to right: Diane Philbrook, Marcia McNeil, Linda Wentzel, Frannie Batchelder. Not pictured are Kathy de la Pena, Rae Emmett and Jay Burghaus.

Annual ad hoc reunion of close 1960s friends continues

Imagine having a college reunion with your very best friends as often as once a year … every year for nearly 60 years in a row.

That’s the record that a group of more than a dozen Chi Omega sisters, all now in their 80s, have held since graduating from UNH. In fact, the only officially canceled get-together was in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I can’t think of a group of women I love more than these gals; it shows in every picture we take every time we get together. UNH was indeed a wonderful place to start this, we all agree,” says Marcia J. McNeil ’64, one of the Chi O sisters in the group.

It all started in Randall Hall in the early 1960s, when five of the young women were living there. They all decided to rush Chi Omega, and ended up living in the house together.

“We seemed to all find something that connected us,” says McNeil. “First of all, we all loved being at UNH, and several of us had the same classes together. We just seemed to find each other and find such camaraderie.”

Now these many decades later, they come from all over the country to gather each year, rotating around the group, whose numbers have grown from an original five to as many as 19 over the years. They have a reading club, plan travel together, but mostly spend time catching up — and, of course, reminiscing about their years in Durham in the 1960s. When their kids were young, the children were included, and sometimes husbands and partners make an appearance and have their own “retreat,” McNeil notes.

For McNeil, that connection was especially important in 2013, when she became seriously ill with cancer and had to have surgery.

“I remember how lovingly they all reached out to me, and I look at the things they sent that I put together in a scrapbook,” McNeil recalls, her emotion cracking her voice. It’s a support network that the group regularly provides through sickness and in health.

So what keeps the group so connected?

“We bring laughter, we bring honesty, we bring love and we bring sharing,” says McNeil. “It’s spread into something like a whole new family for us.”