A Tufts family reunion for the record books

TUFTS DAYS

Mother-Daughter Act

A 1934 yearbook entry reads: “Though demure she may be, there’s a twinkle in her eye.” Indeed, there’s a knowing arch to the brow of Gertrude Brown, J34, J64P. Eighty years after Tufts, Brown still remembers all the beaus and balls (“too many to count!”), winning the Goddard Rhetorical Prize (“right out from under the noses of the drama and religion boys”), and having her one and only golf lesson on the Tufts course, which has served her well (“I was once club champion and scored a hole-in-one”). She also recalls sharing her lunch with the other Jackson girls in Richardson Hall during tough times. “Sometimes we would eat in the cafeteria, but it was so expensive,” she says. “The boys would get two slices of bread and put some ketchup in between.” When she and her husband, Charlie, married, she says, “we were poor as church mice.” But every night after work, Charlie went to Northeastern Law School, which at that time occupied four rooms of the YMCA on Huntington Avenue. “One night in 1937, he walked home in the rain from Copley Square to our little apartment in Brookline—and neither of us realized it was a hurricane.”

Three decades later, their daughter, Claire Hirsch, J64, entered Tufts. Hirsch remembers being in microbiology when President Kennedy was assassinated (coincidentally, Gertrude and Charlie first met at Kennedy’s grandfather’s former home in Roxbury on a humid Easter Sunday for a tennis date), and much happier times. “We girls all learned the twist” in preparation for the Beatles’ squeal-inducing appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, she says. “A girl down the hall had a tiny black-and-white TV we all crowded around to scream and dance.” And though at first she hated climbing the Hill, “skipping down it became one of my favorite things.”

While their memories are different, one thing’s the same: “It was just wonderful,” Brown says. She and Hirsch celebrated their eightieth and fiftieth reunions in May during Alumni Weekend. At 101, Brown still regularly golfs nine holes at the local course. “I just get up and go!” she says.