Come together

Marilyn Roos

Lanyards, activate! Yale Alumni Magazine editors Mark Alden Branch and Peggy Edersheim Kalb, both Class of 1986, at their 40th reunion this May. View full image

This spring, YAM senior editor Peggy Edersheim Kalb ’86 tackled the not-small task of cochairing her 40th reunion, enlisting executive editor Mark Alden Branch ’86 to give a tour. We digested over coffee.

Pippa Jack: What on earth made you take this on, Peggy?

Peggy Edersheim Kalb: Vince McCarthy ’86 asked me. But it’s basically because of the enduring power of someone that you became friends with in English 125. Vince was one of my first friends here, so when he called me on a Saturday night and asked, “Would you do this with me?” I couldn’t think of any reason to say no. 

PJ: Had you been involved in volunteering for class stuff before? 

PEK: Not only had I never done anything like that, I had never been to a full reunion. I would go for the day, and it would feel overwhelming—like, oh gosh, I cannot talk to all these people. And what I realized is that being there for the weekend, you start having something akin to the conversations you had in college. The best conversations I had were in the Branford common room. It felt weirdly like it did forty years ago—we weren’t in a hurry, we weren’t running anywhere. 

Mark Alden Branch: I hadn’t been to a reunion in 15 years, and I was struck by the thing I’d heard from older reunion goers, that the older we get—and this really came through—the more relaxed everyone is. No one has anything to prove, you know? We had this great one-minute-memoir session—I think the prompt was, tell us about a pivotal point in your life—and people had all kinds of stories, some funny, some really intense. Everyone was so supportive. It felt like a group of people who were determined to love and care for each other, which is, like, kind of wild.

PJ: How many people came for the weekend?

PEK: Around 500, 400 plus were classmates, out of a class of 1,300. We’ve lost about 60. A highlight for me was the memorial. It gave people a chance to talk and brought us together, this sense that we were thinking about the people who weren’t there. We also had an AI panel and a lot of people went into that one thinking, we’ve heard so much about AI, what else is there? And then we were fascinated listening to a current student among the three panelists. I was pleased it worked.

PJ: Mark, how did Peggy rope you into the architecture tour? 

PEK: That’s the power of friendship! 

MAB: Yeah, and you know, it’s the kind of thing that I love—ask me about architecture, and it’s, well, twist my arm. 

PEK: Next time Mark gets a mic, some amplification.

MAB: And fewer people! Maybe I should do three of them. . . .

PJ: Okay, so sounds like there might well be a next time! Any advice for people considering helping to organize their own reunion? 

PEK: Get a great attendance chair! George Niño ’86 really rallied everybody. Each residential college had an attendance chair, and he created a competition between the colleges to see who could bring in the most. We’d have charts on social media showing who was in the lead. Stiles won. 

MAB: Yes!

PEK: George presented a Mory’s cup to the Stiles people, who were all sitting together at our dinner—Mark finished the cup—and all that stuff was so . . . some of us are somewhat cynical, but George got people past that, and I think that’s part of why so many people came. You know, we talked about what we wanted from this reunion, and the first thing Vince and I discussed was having a theme—which already felt kind of hokey—but we landed on the song “Come Together.” George kind of took that and ran with it. We actually sang “Bright College Years,” which I’m not sure I’ve ever sung before. That was at the final dinner. Someone started it, and you could tell we were all like, are we going to sing this? Is this going to happen? And then everybody joined in. . . . I guess I’m a convert. I’ll go to the full reunion from now on.