Bear Hugs How Hundreds of Letters Home Connect a Cornellian Family A student chronicled her life in the ’50s and ’60s—then shared those memories with her daughter and granddaughter “Bear Hugs” celebrates heartwarming stories of Cornellians on the Hill and around the world. Have an idea? Email us at cornellians@cornell.edu! By Joe Wilensky “Dear Folks, It is now 12:05 a.m. … I’m sure that I’ll be up ’til three talking to my roommates,” the Cornell freshman wrote in September 1956. “They’re great … we really have a swell room.” Human Ecology student Linda Jarschauer Johnson ’60, MS ’63, had just moved into Dickson Hall, and this was her first letter home to her parents in New Rochelle, NY. In the three-page letter, written in longhand, she gently chides her mother—“Listen, Mom, let’s have no more of this talk about weeping. Do you want to make me homesick?” She also complains about the food at the three-day Freshman Camp, a precursor to Orientation. (“Just awful. Real mush. Ugh!”) Linda found it easy to write at length, and she sent letters home several times a week during all her undergrad and graduate years—detailing her classes, her social life, campus gossip, and other happenings. Linda’s photo in the Freshman Register. Fast-forward more than three decades. It was fall 1988, and Linda’s daughter, Suzannah Johnson Creedon ’92, had matriculated into the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Linda’s parents had kept all her letters (and at some point had given them back to her); now, she thought it would be fun to send them, one at a time, to Suzannah, who was navigating her first weeks on the Hill. Linda sent letters home several times a week, detailing her classes, her social life, campus gossip, and other happenings. Linda typed them up from the handwritten originals and added an intro or postscript to each, reflecting on her experience. “I remember telling my friends that the language was so lovely,” Suzannah recalls. “Her first letter is so idealistic and grateful and starry-eyed.” Suzannah as a newly accepted Cornellian. In recent years, mother and daughter have each had occasion to revisit those hundreds of letters. For Linda, it was when she began taking a memoir-writing class—and for Suzannah, it was as she watched her own daughter attend Cornell. For both, it sparked new conversations, storytelling, and reminiscences. “My mom would talk about dating, and it was very prim—while 1988 was the height of safe sex on campuses,” Suzannah recalls of getting her mom’s ’50s-era missives when she was an undergrad in the ’80s. “She was writing about how girls could only be in a room with a boy if one foot was on the floor,” Suzannah says of the era’s strict rules. “And meanwhile, we were getting safe-sex brochures in our mailboxes in Balch.” An early letter from Linda includes an update on her room (“we bought drapes and cut them down to size, and used the scraps for other things”) as well as on her adventures in dating. My mom would talk about dating, and it was very prim—while 1988 was the height of safe sex on campuses. Suzannah Johnson Creedon ’92 “Sunday night I went to dinner with Bob,” she wrote. “I had a very good time, and is he ever a nut. He’s from West Virginia and tries to act like a hick.” Three decades later, Linda added in her commentary to Suzannah that she recalled “necking in the freezing cold” with Bob on a covered bench then located on the current site of Helen Newman Hall. Suzannah and Linda in the 1990s. Later, a different Bob “turned out to be a guy who dated several of my friends … all of us at the same time,” Linda wrote in the updated note, adding that he didn’t know that the women all knew each other. “We used to get together on Thursday night and ask, ‘Who’s got Bob on Friday? Saturday?’” Linda’s letters even included mention of a fellow undergrad who’d go on to become a world-famous musician: Peter Yarrow ’59 of Peter, Paul, and Mary. “I was talking to Pete Yarrow and I’ve had a crush on him since the beginning of the term,” she wrote in April 1959, adding: “We all sat around chewing the fat and then decided that we had to go and study.” Linda’s undergrad experience was shaped by the conservative ’50s—with student life governed by curfews, dress codes, and dorm rules steeped in the era of “gracious living,” which prioritized formal dining, manners, and decorum. But she also had a front-row seat to some early stirrings of the student activism that would be fully realized, on the Hill and nationwide, a decade later. Most memorably, the “apartment riot” of 1958 was a dramatic confrontation over the University’s claim of in loco parentis that regulated students’ social lives. Suzannah and Linda in recent years. Several thousand took part in protests that spring, demonstrating against a proposed tightening of rules that would have banned female students from attending unchaperoned parties in off-campus apartments. Many women—Linda included—purposely stayed out past curfew. The men, she recalled, carried signs and torches, threw eggs, and burned an effigy of Cornell president Deane Waldo Malott. Linda’s undergrad experience was shaped by the conservative ’50s—with student life governed by curfews, dress codes, and dorm rules steeped in the era of ‘gracious living.’ The demonstration made national news—and led to several suspensions. “Boy, has there been a lot of excitement around this place! I’ve enclosed some articles from our own paper so that you can have an idea of the background of the whole mess,” Linda wrote in a lengthy letter home. “The faculty is mostly on our side. The whole thing is very exciting and it’s the best thing that ever happened here.” Suzannah remembers sharing some of the letters, and her mom’s added notes, with her friends when she received them in the ’80s—but says she appreciates them even more today. Three generations at Eleanor’s Commencement. Re-reading the letters “prompted some funny conversations with my mom,” she says. “I can see now that they are really a treasure.” And Linda’s stories ultimately reached a third generation—though via phone rather than snail mail. Suzannah’s daughter, Eleanor Creedon ’24, had matriculated into Arts & Sciences in fall 2020, in the midst of the pandemic that so altered the student experience. “I would tell my grandmother about doing Orientation, attending classes, and taking part in other traditions via Zoom—a stark contrast to her tenure at Cornell,” Eleanor recalls. “But because of the stories I heard over the years from my mother and grandmother, I was able to visualize what life at Cornell would look like in a non-pandemic world.” Top: Photo illustration by Ashley Osburn / Cornell University. (All images provided.) Published November 3, 2025 Comments Kathy Menton Flaxman, Class of 1971 3 Nov, 2025 My parents saved the weekly letters I wrote them—I have them now. Reply Leave a Comment Cancel replyOnce your comment is approved, your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *Comment * Name * Class Year Email * Save my name, email, and class year in this browser for the next time I comment. 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