Homecoming Weekend is a time of reconnection. Alumni return to campus and the familiar haunts of their college days. They catch up with old friends and classmates, their favorite professors, and explore the campus anew. In preparation for their return, some alumni dust off photo albums and scrapbooks to jog their memories.

Last Homecoming Weekend two Colorado College alumni, Melinda Eager Poole '78 and David L. Ford '72, donated historic materials to Special Collections and Archives at CC's Charles L. Tutt Library.

Poole gave the college a Sigma Chi Fraternity memory book that her grandfather, Leonard Prentice Eager, had made during his freshman and sophomore years at CC, 1912-14. In it, Eager had included photographs that depicted CC students, many of them Sigma Chi members, enjoying the outdoors in and around Colorado Springs. One shows a group on a railroad bridge, possibly what is now known as the Manitou and Pikes Peak Cog Railway.

"My decision to attend CC was very much influenced by my paternal grandfather. He took me on a trip to Colorado my junior year of high school so I could see the campus," Poole recalls.

Being from a small midwestern high school, her counselor hadn't heard of CC.

"I thought the campus was beautiful, and my Grandpa's enthusiasm for the place affected me. I am forever grateful to Grandpa for showing me Colorado College," she says.

Ford came to CC from St. Joseph, Missouri.

"I had applied to only two colleges and was very excited that CC had accepted me as CC was my preferred school to attend," he says.

He got a camera in his junior year and was a photographer for The Nugget in late winter/spring 1972.

"It was all black and white film. We did all our own developing, and then we made prints of the pictures we thought would be good for the yearbook," Ford says. "It was an intensive short-term project, almost as an afterthought, to produce the 1972 Nugget yearbook. I thought it was important to have a yearbook that year and was glad to help, even though it was all last minute."

About a quarter of the photographs in the yearbook were Ford's. He remembers taking every one of them.

"It brings back memories of a much younger me that was looking at the world through fairly new eyes back then, and a lot of it was brand new discoveries and new explorations," he says.

Other than a brief stint shooting weekend weddings for a friend who had a photography business, his lifelong love of photography has remained a hobby. He donated approximately 100 photographs to CC.

Poole and Ford are both happy to know that their in-kind donations to the college will provide students and researchers with materials they otherwise wouldn't have.


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