Alumni

• Celebrating 150 Years

Forester Flashback
As the College prepares to celebrate 150 years, an alumna recalls her favorite memory. We'd like yours too.

By Jill Van Newenhizen ’81

I was a commuter, initially by car from Des Plaines and later by train from Highwood. My first friend at Lake Forest was also a commuter, Lori Nerheim ’82. Lori majored in art history, and I was a mathematics major. Those days it was not unusual for art and math folk to mix because the two departments shared the second and third floors of what was then College Hall, and is now Young Hall.

The fourth and fifth floors were vacant, abandoned, forsaken, derelict, and dilapidated. And of course, OFF LIMITS! I do not remember the first time Lori and I ventured illegally into that forbidden place. We discovered the shells of what had once been dorm rooms, and on the fifth floor we found our penthouse—a room overlooking Sheridan Road.

We moved two large tables into our space and scrubbed from them what I imagine were pigeon droppings and countless years of grime. We had to “relocate” a few chairs from the classrooms below. Eventually we had our own private, cozy, secret study space. We even decorated the walls. I wrote formulas and theorems. Lori drew sketches and pictures. We would sneak up almost every afternoon after classes and study for hours. In heaven on the fifth floor, we were commuters-in-residence.

Late one October afternoon we heard someone coming up the stairs. A security guard burst into our room. Who was more surprised would be hard to say. Lori and I, surprised because our top-secret space had been breeched? Or the officer who clearly expected to find dope-smoking, beer-drinking losers, but instead found two future members of Phi Beta Kappa, each with at least five books open in front of her, sitting in a dingy room with walls covered by equations and drawings.

“You can’t study up here,” he said. “It is too dangerous. The President called extremely upset. He saw lights on up here tonight while riding home on his bike.”

Gene Hotchkiss missed almost nothing around here, in my day. The darn lights! Clocks had just been moved back an hour. Distracted, we had turned on the lights when it grew dark early because we were still hard at work.

We gathered our armloads of books and left with the officer. He warned us to “stay off the fifth and fourth floors!”

The truth is Lori and I continued to study in our penthouse until I graduated, but we never, ever again turned on the lights. Twenty-five plus years later I am a member of the mathematics faculty with a legitimate office in “College Hall.” I am on the garden level; the history department occupies my former penthouse. My office has a couch across from the chalkboard, and my laptop computer sits on a coffee table. The habits I developed during my wonderful years as a student remain today. Lori’s art is on the wall of my cozy office, equations cover the board. When I don’t want to be disturbed, I turn out the lights.

I was a commuter student. Now I reside at the College. I have become a commuter, in residence. 

Jill Van Newenhizen ’81 is an associate professor of mathematics and computer science at Lake Forest College.

Top photo by Chip Williams.
Bottom photo courtesy of College archives.