Rochester Review
May-June 2010
Vol. 72, No. 5
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CRUISE CLASS: Constance Redman Spande ’59,
Sylvia Bienenstock Ettinger ’59, Suzanne Jagel O’Brien ’59, and Roberta Kirsch Thomas
’58 set sail for Europe in 1957, a year abroad that O’Brien (above) chronicled in a collection
of letters she donated to the University’s Archives. (Photo: Adam Fenster)
Every few days, from September through June of the academic year 1957–58, Suzanne Jagel O’Brien ’59 wrote detailed letters to her parents in Queens, N.Y., describing her travels in Paris.
“I would catch them up on everything I had done—or almost everything I had done,” says O’Brien from her office in Lattimore Hall, where she is now an associate dean of the College.
Travel Guides
For years, her parents kept the letters, before eventually handing them back to their daughter.
“The ink was fading,” O’Brien says. So she typed them up. And last fall, she handed the stack of letters and postcards, and a transcription of over 100 pages, to Rush Rhees Library’s Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation.
Nancy Ehrich Martin ’65, ’94 (MA), the John M. and Barbara Keil University Archivist, calls the letters “extraordinary.”
“We have nothing like this in the University archives,” she says.
The collection offers a striking portrait of what has changed. There was no formal study abroad program. Very few students went abroad, and those who did, like O’Brien and six other Rochester students that year, planned their years on their own.
“In those days, we didn’t just fly abroad,” O’Brien says. “We got on ocean liners and sailed for days. So you really knew you were going someplace far away and different.”
Sharing that voyage and almost every other adventure that year was Roberta (Bobbie) Kirsch Thomas ’58.
“There wasn’t a day that went by that we didn’t realize we were having a fantastic experience,” says Thomas. “We had such a sense that this was a miracle year.”
The women enjoyed a remarkable degree of freedom, roaming not only Paris, but cities across Europe, including London, Vienna, Florence, Munich, and Brussels—to which they hitchhiked in November, on Armstice Day.
“After much talking and discussion with French and Americans alike, we decided to hitchhike to Brussels,” O’Brien wrote home a week later. “Calm down—it’s quite accepted in Europe. So many wonderful people helped us (and we saved money besides) that we think it was really a marvelous experience.”
“We went far and wide,” O’Brien recalls. “Everything there was to see, we saw. I don’t know how we knew how to do all of that because we didn’t have anyone telling us the way. We ran into people. We met people. They gave us the benefit of their lives and experience. And we just ate it all up.”
