Wine and swine

Wednesday evening the University’s new Alumni House welcomed more than 65 local alumni to an open house and wine tasting. The event attracted guests from the Class of ’03 through Alumni Emeriti, from the College to the Law School, frequent attendees to new faces. Tasting wine and cheese, mixing, mingling—it was just the sort of event to warm an alumni officer’s heart.

One upshot of all this intergenerational mingling was the handing down of campus lore. At the tasting (as with every other event held in the new House) alumni seemed magnetically drawn to the bookshelves containing those ubiquitous volumes of memory, the College class “portrait directories.” Recent graduates knew them as “pic books,” which they assumed to be a spontaneous abbreviation of the official name. More seasoned alumni, however, were quick to point out that when they were on campus in the ’60s and ’70s, the publications were fondly known as “pig books.”

Kyle Gorden, AB’00, Assistant Director, Class and Campus Programs, University of Chicago Alumni House

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February 6, 2004