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Nine of 10 living members of what's known as The Lunch Table Sorority of the Class of 1971 gathered after Mass in the College Main Chapel on December 13 for their monthly meeting. A buffet lunch followed in the College Dining Room for the group that has met monthly for 38 years. Pictured front row, l-r: Roseanne O'Hanlon Duzinski; Kathleen Hunt Mang; Ann Marie Smith Sielski; Christine O'Donnell Carroll; second row: Regina Ventresca Creedon; Ann O'Connor Levering; Betty Anne Marron Cooper; Blanche Goffredo Haughton, and Elaine Cody Hankins. Missing from photo: Clare Hamilton Bohnett.

This Sorority (we call ourselves Tau Lambda Tau for, you guessed it, The Lunch Table) is a constant in all our lives now; the group of students that began at those lunches at Chestnut Hill has grown through these many years into a sisterhood of strong, generous, accomplished women who truly appreciate the value of friendship.

We have been each other’s bridesmaids and godparents, counselors and advisors, sisters in every sense of the word. We have witnessed marriage and separation, rejoiced in new birth and individual accomplishment, and wept in pain over the loss of parents, children, and two of our own. The bond we have forged is stronger now than it was when we were all finding our way, and we always reflect on our beginnings at Chestnut Hill College and how far we’ve come since then.

We are a unique component, this Sorority. Our husbands relish being in each other’s company and, so, several coed events are planned each year.  However, it is at our monthly “meetings” (which we don’t miss unless absolutely necessary) where we laugh and talk and cry and talk and eat and talk and talk and talk. We are there for each other in all the happy times — the weddings, the christenings, the graduations — and the exquisitely sad — the break-ups, the funerals.

We have been the girls giggling in the Caf, starry-eyed young ladies in the frightening new workplace, wives and mothers reaching to each other for help and understanding, women confronting their worst fears about sickness and loss. Our lives have been changed for the better and for good and always because of the friendships made and still treasured. 

What is our journey now? What occupies our thoughts? Our businesses, our professions, our families, our community activities, just like everyone else.

Betty Anne, the direct mail honcho, is opening her own agency, Princeton Insights. She says she “has no kids, but 23 kids,” claiming all of ours as her own. She’s also committed to a foundation she founded to support the needs of the elderly. Roseanne is director of planning and contract education for the Philadelphia prisons system. She jokes that she’s gone ‘straight to jail’ every day for the last 37 years. She also volunteers in support of housing for disenfranchised people. Chris owns Crossing Vineyards Winery with Tom and their son, Tom, heading up its marketing and PR work, while helping many non-profit organizations with fundraising. Kathy is an art historian and consultant. Elaine has been a teaching assistant at Norwood-Fontbonne Academy for 22 years in its Montessori pre-school. Ann is retired from Catalytic, and also started the math honors program at Conshohocken Catholic High. Regina owns Ventresca Travel. Clare has been teaching at the College of New Jersey for 27 years. Blanche was with Drexel University as a lab manager and lecturer for years but is now the Advanced Placement biology teacher at the Mount, and I'm the honors math teacher at Presentation B.V.M School in Cheltenham, having taught English and math for more than 20 years in the Archdiocese.                 .

The two unmarrieds are perfectly comfortable with the rest. Betty Anne says “these husbands are finest gentlemen you could ever meet. I never feel out of place. In fact, one of the joys of the group is that the guys get along so well.”

All of us are voracious readers, exchanging books with one another. Elaine and Clare favor biographies. Others enjoy Patricia Cornwall, Lisa Scottoline, James Patterson.

How did we manage to last this long? “We just love one another,” Betty Anne says. “Each is completely different. We say anything we want. We can differ in our opinions on many subjects, and it’s definitely work sometimes to balance it all out, just as it is in a family. But we know we’re in a safe place when we’re with one another. One doesn’t make a move without bouncing it off the others.”

We laugh at the notion of ‘sorority,’ with Roseanne saying she’d never attend a college with a true Greek system. We think about our time at Chestnut Hill, as a college for women, and wonder if the same spirit can happen for today’s students now that it’s coed. Can there be the same kind of intimacy today, with Twitter, Facebook and the other ‘social’ networks carried out by tapping fingers on a keyboard?

“It’s about values. Education is about learning values,” Chris notes. “The values supported at Chestnut Hill — that’s what brought us together and keeps us together. It’s about our Catholic faith, in many ways,” she adds. “For example, the night that Linda died, I was at the theater seeing Wicked. My faith comforts me in recognizing that what I shared in life with Linda is what matters, not her final hours, but a relationship that will always be there. It’s about understanding, charity —  ideals proposed in our College motto.”

Roseanne reminds us of our Freshman Orientation, and the story we learned from Sister Gertrude Leonore about the College property more than a century ago. The Sisters built St. Joseph Hall, with its massive Rotunda, and saw it crumble to pieces before opening. They went right back to work and started over to produce the beautiful building that we all still treasure. What the Sisters experienced in the early 1900’s taught us about rebuilding when adversity strikes. “It says a lot about Chestnut Hill,” Roseanne comments. “We learned to change, to adapt, to rebuild. This is why the college is thriving today, because it had the ability to change and to adapt.” 

Chris observes that college is a process, a beginning, with the education part as the constant. “Learning is life’s work. You don’t have to be a finished product when you finish the product,” she says. “The importance in life is entirely the college motto: faith, charity, knowledge.”

It was Chestnut Hill College that brought us together. We hope, deeply and fervently, that the new students at ‘our loved Chestnut Hill’ find the same thing:  comfort, support and strength from one another and countless life events to be shared together in the years ahead. We wish this for all at Chestnut Hill who shared classes together, agonized over grades together, walked in graduation together: that relationships formed in those classrooms, corridors, and lunch tables continue forever.

Each of us has left “a handprint on [our] hearts” (a line from the musical Wicked, a story about strong, opinionated women like those in Sorority). We would not be Sorority at all if not for Chestnut Hill, and, despite the divergence of the paths that brought us here, we are and will always be Chestnut Hill College’s T.L.T. Sorority.