DUFFY REYNOLDS was one of the LINFIELD OLD LADIES
In the Fall 2007 Linfield Magazine was a class note about Duffy Reynolds, Linfield Class of 1951, "Charlotte Filer ’54, Margaret (Hopkins) Macaulay ’82 and Phyllis Smith ’83 along with former staff members Norma Cochran, Vera Sullivan, Henrietta Cox, Lois Welton, Judy Johnson, Sherie Dulaney and Dorothy Pullen call themselves the Linfield Old Ladies and meet for breakfast monthly in McMinnville."
The Linfield Magazine item was based on a story by Linfielder Starla Pointer in a 2007 edition of the McMinnville N-R / News-Register. That story text follows:
Lots of laughs for Linfield Old Ladies
By Starla Pointer, McMinnville N-R/News-Register, Sept. 15, 2007
These women laugh out loud a lot. That's not why they call their group LOL, though.
The name refers to the connection that brought them together in the first place - working at Linfield College. It stands for Linfield Old Ladies.
All spent much of their careers at the college, collectively racking up about 234 years. They watched the school grow from fewer than 900 students to more than 2,600 at two sites, and the McMinnville campus grow and change and modernize.
Now retirees, they applaud the new facilities and fondly remember the old - especially Norma Cochran, who spent the first eight of her 37 Linfield years working in the Riley Hall snack bar and checking out shoes at the two-lane bowling alley.
The LOLs are ladies who've sent children and grandchildren to the school. All five of Lois Welton's kids are Wildcats, in fact.
They've taken classes and degrees there themselves. Margaret Macaulay, Phyllis Smith, Edith "Duffy" Reynolds and Charlotte Filer all are Linfield graduates.
Along the way, they've cheered on students and co-workers. And they still cheer on one another.
As for the middle word ... well, they are proud to be seniors. They're still taken aback, a bit, though, when they think about how old their children have grown.
Dorothy Pullen has a son coming to McMinnville for his 40-year reunion this fall, for instance. Imagine!
One woman did try to alter the name a bit once. "Ladies of Linfield," she suggested.
Others thought that sounded a little risqué, though, so LOL remained Linfield Old Ladies.
"I think it's a terrific name," said Macaulay, who is retired from the education department.
Smith, who worked in the registrar's office, started LOL back in 2000 with switchboard operator Welton and cashier Henrietta Cox.
Smith even knitted scarves for each member: LOL in purple on a red field. Wildcat colors.
Each woman knows her own scarf, because it also has her initial knitted in it. That's "V" for Vera Sullivan, who spent 35 years with Upward Bound and the education department; "S" for Sherry Dulaney, who put in 32 years in the print shop; "J" for Judy Johnson, who ran the bookstore.
They tried letting a man into the group once, even attaching his name to "LOL" like a caboose.
He was likable and all, they said, but he pushed for lunch meetings instead of breakfast. Forced to choose between him and scrambled eggs with whole wheat toast, the Linfield Old Ladies told him good-bye.
Once a month, they spend a morning together catching up and sharing news of other former Linfield folk they've seen lately, such as retired professors Craig Singletary and Wes Caspers. They talk tenderly about lost friends, such as longtime controller Arnold Mills, who died in October 2006.
"Arnold was a big tease, one of those characters on campus," Macaulay said.
With equal fondness, Reynolds recalled her freshman English professor, Avard Whitman. He later became a co-worker when she was a home economics professor and he was the registrar.
"He was a witty, very clever man," she said.
Reynolds recalled enrolling in his course in 1947, when Linfield was filled with veterans who had just returned from World War II. "Professor Whitman and all those vets, and me, just a teenager ... the comments were flying over my head," she said.
Filer attended Linfield not long after Reynolds did. After graduating, she went to work for the News-Register, which then was a daily.
Soon after that, she was contacted by one of her professors, Jim Milligan, who ran the Linfield news bureau as well as teaching journalism. He asked her to take over writing news releases so he could teach full-time.
Later, Filer also taught.
After 19 years with Linfield, she transferred to Pacific University. She taught there for 16 years.
"Charlotte had a boyfriend there," Cochran kidded, joking about why Filer would be so disloyal as to run off to a different college.
Actually, Filer said, she just planned to be at the Forest Grove school for a year. Besides, she's still loyal to old Linfield.
So loyal, in fact, that she even can recall the first class she ever had as a student there: a one-credit health course taught by Roy Helser in Cozine Hall.
Some of the other LOLs took classes after they already had started working at the college.
Macaulay, for instance, was nearing retirement age when she signed up for a biology course taught by John Hare.
"I had to miss class one day, and it was the same day a nurse was coming in to talk about birth control," Macaulay recalled. "I was 61. I figured I could miss that day."
Staff members weren't treated any differently than students, Smith noted.
During the eight years she took classes before receiving her degree, classmates sometimes assumed Smith would be the teacher's pet. When they realized she wasn't getting perks, they accepted her as one of the crowd.
At their monthly breakfasts, the LOLs discuss current events and current diets.
"On this one, I have to eat five times a day," one LOL said. That prompted another to sigh, "Oh, I'd love that!"
And they talk about their kids, of course - where they are and what they're doing, information shared with great pride.
For many of the women, working at Linfield had a huge benefit: their children received free tuition. But not everyone took advantage of that.
"My three dumb kids all went to Oregon State, not Linfield," Macaulay grumbled, joking. "Now I tell them they owe us money."
The LOLs discuss what's happening at Linfield these days, marveling at how the campus has expanded and admiring the new library, music building and other facilities. They often have breakfast at Jake's Deli, on the edge of the campus. They also attend some events - Smith just got tickets for the home football season, for instance.
But they limit the time they spend at Linfield.
"Good memories, but we don't go back much," Cochran said.
Reynolds explained, "We have to let the new people do their thing."
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