NIU Golden Huskies Class of 1973 to reunite for 50th at homecoming

Editor’s note: This feature on Northern Illinois University’s Class of 1973 written by Tony Scott initially appeared in Northern Now and is being reprinted with permission. Read the full version here.

DeKALB – If you were a student preparing to graduate from NIU in 1973, you had already experienced one of the most politically and socially tumultuous times in U.S. history, along with witnessing a cultural revolution in music, film and art.

Movie theaters in the Chicago area were featuring films such as “Soylent Green,” “The Long Goodbye,” “Deliverance” and “The Poseidon Adventure.” The hottest songs on the music charts included “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon, “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder, “Crocodile Rock” by Elton John and “Killing Me Softly With his Song” by Roberta Flack.

President Richard Nixon handily beat Democratic Party challenger George McGovern in the fall 1972 election, all while the burgeoning Watergate situation was becoming a full-blown scandal.

This year, the generation of NIU graduates who experienced all of that and more will be celebrating 50 years since they crossed the commencement stage.

Mark Lamb, chairman of the organizing committee, said he still keeps in contact with many of his friends who he met while a freshman at NIU.

“We all lived together in the dorms at Northern,” Lamb said. “When we get together, we say things like, ‘Hey, I wonder what so-and-so is doing.’ We were thinking about doing a little reunion on our own actually, before the pandemic hit.”

Lamb said the Golden Huskie reunion will be the perfect opportunity to see friends and network with fellow alumni.

“I’m hoping that we get to renew some friendships with people we knew back in the day,” he said.

Lamb and others on the Golden Huskies reunion committee recently reminisced about their time on the NIU campus a half-century ago and their excitement about the reunion.

“Most everybody is retired,” Lamb said. “It will be cool to see the families, how your kids are doing now, how many grandkids you have, that kind of thing. You’ve moved on from your own personal goals to your family.”

Lamb recalled that he and most of his friends had parents who hadn’t attended college, and they bonded over this new, unknown experience. He said that bond made those friendships endure.

“I think we were all first-generation college kids. Our parents never went to college, and we really had no clue what we were doing in college, to be honest, and I think that was probably the bond,” Lamb said. “We were all in this together, and we were helping each other.”

Linda Grandolfo still maintains friendships with a group of women she met while they were sorority sisters in Alpha Omicron Pi. While many of her high school classmates went off together to a different university, she took advantage of receiving a scholarship at NIU and met a lot of new friends.

“I was very happy to be away from home and meet some new friends,” Grandolfo said.

Grandolfo said that much of the campus feels similar despite some changes over the years. She remembers she and her sorority sisters spending a lot of time at what is now the Holmes Student Center. The center was named for former University President Leslie A. Holmes in 1974.

She lived in Neptune Hall freshman year.

“The nice part about living in Neptune is you could get up about 7:30 and be in your class at 8 a.m.,” Grandolfo said. “It was a nice dorm. It was all women at the time. You couldn’t even have men visit you in your rooms when I was a freshman.”

Like Grandolfo and Lamb, Ann (Lesniewski) Pienkos still has friends from her years at NIU.

“It was nice to get away and go to college with my friends during those years, and some of us have kept in touch with each other,” Pienkos said.

While at NIU, she married her high school sweetheart, Mark Pienkos, Class of 1972 and 1973. They celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in August 2022.

“Fifty years, to us, is a huge milestone, so to celebrate the 50th anniversary of my graduation, that’s something to be proud of,” Pienkos said. “We’ve set a good example for our kids. We live in Florida now, but whenever we get a chance we visit DeKalb and the campus to reminisce. We had really good times there, and we can’t believe it’s been 50 years.”

Pienkos has plenty of memories from her years at NIU – from witnessing political unrest and demonstrations to walking around campus and enjoying the sights such as Altgeld Hall and the lagoon, to enjoying midnight French fries in the New Orleans Room, where she and her husband lived in Stevenson North.

She and Mark also saw plenty of concerts, most of them at the Chick Evans Field House, from Neil Diamond to the band the Vogues, who had hits such as “Five O’Clock World.” Elton John, Blood Sweat and Tears, and Don McLean all visited campus to perform in 1972 and 1973.

“We got to see fantastic concerts,” Pienkos said. “We saw Neil Diamond in the field house. We also had good seats for a group called the Vogues. It was so romantic, and the university really had some good shows for the kids to attend besides sports.”

Lamb said his experience at NIU gave him many opportunities, including those outside of the classroom. While at NIU, he was a technical director at TV8 News; editor of the Norther, the magazine-style yearbook at the time; and had a campus radio talk show. He was paid for all those positions and joked that during his senior year he was “the highest-paid student on campus.”

Lamb said that leading the Norther staff helped him in his later role as a CEO.

“You had a disparate group of people: You had journalists, photographers, artists, business people,” Lamb said. “There was a wide range of interests there. I learned this faster than I think, most people, that all of these people who work with you are different, they have difference backgrounds and different interests; you can’t manage an artist like you would an accountant, for instance.”

Pienkos remembers taking business classes and writing a computer language program, working with the predecessors of technology that is much more common today.

“I remember taking these cards over to this big computer room to run and see if the code was written properly,” Pienkos said. “I grew to like that. I enjoyed that, and I enjoy technology still today.”

Grandolfo retired in 2014 after teaching for those who are deaf for 41 years. She said she is thankful to NIU for her experience.

“It’s because of NIU that I received that education,” Grandolfo said. “I try to give back still, and I’m very grateful for the opportunities NIU afforded me.”

For all Golden Huskies reunion information, visit www.myniu.com/goldenhuskies.