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Homecoming 1974
This is one of my husband’s favorite pictures. It’s a picture of me, kissing a school mascot, Bucky Badger. He’s dressed in his traditional red and white striped sweater. There’s a cheerleader behind me, wearing a striped red and white sweater. Behind her is the University of Wisconsin Marching Band, standing at attention in their red and white jackets over black trousers. An older gentleman stands on the left, in a red suit jacket. He wears a red ribbon that says PRESIDENT on it in gold letters. I’m wearing a green suit with a big white chrysanthemum corsage. I’m holding a silver trophy. A grandstand filled with thousands of fans in red and white gear is in the background. It is half time for the University of Wisconsin 1974 Homecoming game against Michigan State.
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That picture is now almost 35 years old. It is filled with so many stories, so many lessons that have nothing to do with that silver trophy. I’m grateful for that moment, for what it meant to me then and what it says to me now. It reminds me to be humble. I was confident I knew what I was doing then and I can tell you confidently now that I was oblivious to things that were obvious to others. At the time, none of it seemed very important and while people have tried to make it important, it still is just what it was, a girl in a green suit standing on the 50 yard line at half time during a football game when everyone else was in red and white.
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I don’t care much for football. I rarely went to the games as a student. The Wisconsin team wasn’t much during those years. Students spent most of the game drinking, a past time I didn’t support. During a game, the campus was quiet and peaceful and I used the time to study. Eventually though, I joined a sorority and dated a cheerleader, had a crush on one of the football players, and was recommended as a candidate for the homecoming court the fall of my senior year.
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The University of Wisconsin-Madison is a big school, 40, 000 students. It’s described as a square mile of liberalism in the middle of reality. It’s a school of free spirits, free thinkers, ‘Wisconsin nice’ kids from small towns, rich in a tradition of cheese and beer. Students find resources to learn about anything they want to learn. Agriculture is big, engineering, medicine, nursing, journalism, education, chemistry, history, art history, whatever you want to study, is possible there. Whatever you are interested in, somebody else interested in the very same thing.
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Homecoming, however, was a pretty small deal, officially. The business of selecting a homecoming court and a queen was interesting to a very few students. One of the fraternities, Alpha Gamma Rho, (AGR) ran the whole thing, mostly because nobody else cared about the official festivities. The AGRs loved the tradition of homecoming, they loved being in control and it was a good way to meet women. So they filled up the committee of five with themselves and a few ‘independents’ and ran the event every year.
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Fraternities and student organizations recommended women to be on the homecoming court. A friend, Terry Bush, recommended me to his fraternity, SAE, as a candidate. His ‘brothers’ were not impressed with his recommendation and asked someone else. The AGRS nominated me. I knew everybody at the AGR fraternity. I was a “little sister” there; I was there for dinner once a week with several other young women from other sororities, so these young men could practice civil behavior around women. I was flattered and thought they were very sweet. Eventually, five young women were chosen for the Homecoming Court by the committee and I was one of them. The plan was for us to attend several city and alumni functions with committee members. After two weeks of that, the committee would vote and announce the queen at the concert the night before the homecoming game.
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My wardrobe of blue jeans and corduroys was not suitable for that schedule of events. I called my mother and asked to buy a few things to wear. I walked down State St., the retail district nearest the campus and bought a pair of cranberry plaid trousers with a turtleneck sweater, a cranberry knit sweater and skirt and a green pantsuit with a peach flowered blouse. For the concert, the big event when the queen was announced, I decided to wear the bridesmaid dress from a wedding I’d been in 6 months earlier. Unusual, it was a brilliant purple blue and magenta with long sleeves, a high collar and a full bias skirt. It was, in my mind, just the thing. It fit me and it was ready to go. I even had the shoes.
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I did not however have a date. I didn’t have a boyfriend and although Terry repeatedly recommended himself for the role, I decided to ask someone else I knew, Michael Minahan. He’d done this before, escorting my friend, Tracy Bush Arndt, when she was on the homecoming court two years earlier. They were a beautiful romantic couple but she broke his heart and married someone else (my dress was from being in her wedding). Michael was older, out of school, working and I could count on him to get me where I needed to be that weekend. When I asked him, there was a pause and then he said, ‘You know, I took Tracy to homecoming the year she was on the court.” I said, ‘That’s why I’m asking you. You’ll know exactly what to do because you’ve done this all before.’ There was another pause and then he said yes and then we figured out all the times and dates for everything and I was greatly relieved.
Events ramped up. There were luncheons and cocktail receptions, the Rotary Club, the Kiwanis Club, alumni gatherings. The previous summer, I’d worked as an intern for a lobbying organization. I’d learned to ‘work a room,’ talking to every person there for just long enough to make them feel included and recognized. I was good at this. The Thursday night before the game, a couple thousand students came to the pep rally. We stood on the library steps with the band, Bucky Badger, klieg lights blazing, cheering with students as they headed toward the regular Thursday night agenda, the bars.
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Michael was an engineer, working for a firm some distance from campus. The logistics for him to get home from work, change, borrow a car, and pick me up, were tight. He asked his boss for permission to leave work early and I can now imagine the smirks in the office as he left. With my parents, we quickly visited hospitality suites the other girls’ parents were hosting. Mom and Dad joined friends for dinner and arrived at the fieldhouse just as the chairman of the homecoming committee called out my name and handed me a bouquet of roses. Standing in the aisle, they watched me take the microphone and welcome the crowd.
In the pictures from that night, I am on the stage, on the arm of one of the committee members, (who all look scruffy, in need of sleep, haircuts and decent suits) in my wild blue purple magenta dress. The other women are wearing lowcut black evening gowns. I look like I’m on fire with an electric flame, juggling the roses and gripping that microphone. I later learned that my speech about the ‘value of homecoming, the meeting of students and alums, the excitement of a football game and expectation of a good time,’ caught the homecoming committee and the evening’s master of ceremonies off guard. ‘We’ve never had anybody ever say anything before,’ Arlie Mucks, the executive director of the alumni association, remarked in amazement as we left the stage.
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I walked out into the audience to find Michael in the front row. A handsome young man, he stood as I approached and kissed me. My sorority sisters reportedly all swooned as they watched. They called back to the sorority house to announce I had won and the house, full of girls home on a Friday night without anything to do, went beserk. When I got back to the house that night, they had all waited up for me and had managed to wake up a florist and insist that something appropriate be created to welcome me home. Bucky Badger on a miniature football field with chrysanthemums was handed to me as I walked in the door. A red T-shirt that said ‘Homecoming Queen 1971’ (earned by Betsy Helminiak’s older sister, Nancy) had been altered with a piece of tape to say ‘1974.’ I still have it. My roommate, Nan, left a big sign on my bed, “Good job, Roomie!”
Very late that night, Tracy called. I told her about wearing the bridesmaid dress from her wedding, how perfectly Michael took care of me, how he reminded me he had been her escort two years before and how grateful I was to him. She said her husband remarked that Michael had all the luck. I don’t think Michael would agree. His homecoming date was wearing the bridesmaid dress from the wedding of the woman he loved. Maybe I was thoughtful enough not to tell him that.
On Saturday, for the game, I put on my one remaining outfit, the green pantsuit. A halftime, I was down on the 50 -yard line with the exhausted homecoming committee and the rest of the court. The president of the alumni association, the vice president of research for Campbell Soup, handed me the trophy and promised to send a box of Godiva Chocolates. There were lots of pictures. We all went back to the stands and the Badgers lost the game.
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It was the next day before I realized I should have been wearing red. On Sunday, after it was all over, Mrs. Helminak was at the sorority house for brunch. She smiled at me and remarked that she remembered shopping with her daughter Nancy for a red suit when Nancy was on homecoming court.
Red suit. In that moment, I understood how easy it is to be totally wrong about something and not have the slightest idea that you are in error. I thought of my mother graciously granting me funds to buy extra clothes and me picking that green suit because I thought it would work for job interviews I’d face in the spring. Badger Red had not entered my fashion que. Later I heard that radio announcers commented during the half time event that the University of Wisconsin homecoming queen was wearing green, the colors of Michigan State. I didn’t know Michigan State colors. It appeared I didn’t know Wisconsin colors either. The concept that anybody would notice what I was wearing had not been in my thoughts.
Love and affection from the people in my life washed over me and the green suit faded into the background. It was replaced with amazement that others thought this was a big deal. My brother said my high school history teacher announced to his classes that my being homecoming queen for the University of Wisconsin proved that exceptional and wonderful things could happen for kids who attended that high school. This is true, only my hope is that the things that happen to my fellow high school alumni are more amazing and exceptional than being a homecoming queen. My parents’ friends wrote to me with congratulations. Old boyfriends reappeared. Terry Bush, the young man who had been prescient in recommending me first, fell out of love with me and in love with my roommate, Nan, and eventually married her. ( They have four beautiful children and Terry has forgiven me for neglecting to ask him to be my date that weekend.)
The week after homecoming, I walked over to the alumni offices to pick up the trophy, now engraved with my name. Arlie Mucks again expressed his wonderment that I was beautiful AND could talk. I like to think his comments would be less acceptable today. My AGR friends told me the committee members voted for me because, simply, I was always there, helping. Whenever they looked around at the work to be done, I was doing it. For a bunch of young men who had gotten into this to meet women, this seemed a remarkably mature outcome.
Michael and I continued to see each other until he moved to Europe in the spring. After he left, I focused on getting a job after graduation, sending out hundreds of resumes to employers who were not the least bit impressed that I’d been the homecoming queen at a Big Ten school. Even the alumni association president politely accepted my resume but was not able to help. Two months after graduation, I started working for a technical school in my hometown, driving to work with my mom every day, producing radio shows about consumer issues.
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In 1976, I joined Oscar Mayer & Co. , moving back to Madison, and in 1978, the company transferred me to Cincinnati, OH. Arlie Mucks appeared in Cincinnati for a UW alumni event and introduced me to another young Badger, Signe Ostby, saying, “You’ll like her; she’s beautiful and she can talk, too!” We would have found each other anyway; we were the only alumni there less than 72 years old. Signe offered to introduce me to someone she worked with at Procter and Gamble, but the young man she thought I should meet was not interested. He didn’t need any blind dates, he said. But as the story goes, Signe then employed the exceptional marketing talent for which she is well known and mentioned that the woman she wanted him to meet had been the homecoming queen at the University of Wisconsin, Mark decided he was interested. “Hmmm, that’s a big school, isn’t it?” he reports saying whenever he tells this story of how we met.
Eventually, when Mark saw the picture, he was puzzled by the green suit, too. He knew, just looking at the picture, I should have been wearing red. But we were already married by then. This is why we are good together. He understands and notices all that stuff that slips by me when I’m thinking about something else. Today, he has that picture on his iPhone. He thinks it’s the story of a girl chosen from thousands. I know it’s a picture of a girl who was learning life’s lessons; show up, do the work, and pay attention to the dress code.
