For Cantor, the idea of documenting the associations’ legacy began to form years ago during a time of crisis for the university, when she found herself drawn back to her alma mater. “PhD alums tend not to see the Alumni Association in the same way as a group of med students who spent four years together as a cohort,” Cantor explains. “We’re much more attuned to our laboratory or our departments.” To remedy that, the board had reached out to Cantor in 1997 to offer her an award and then invited her to join the board of the new combined Alumni Association of MCP Hahnemann University. At one of her first meetings, the news was announced: “The university has gone bankrupt.”

During the ensuing crisis years, leading up to Drexel’s eventual incorporation of the school, members of the Alumni Association went all-hands-on-deck to manage alumni affairs in the absence of internal staffing support or funding. “We were the lifeboats,” says Cantor. “You know when they have to cross a river in the military, and there’s no bridge, and they have to use those floating pontoons? That’s what we were. We all did everything. It was just a lot of hard-working people who cared.”

Today, Cantor says, that dedication to serving students and preserving experiences for future classes is still a foundational part of the board’s organizational culture, even as new members cycle in. “Over the years, we have told this story over and over again. Those of us who lived through the bankruptcy, the restructuring and the Drexel merger have worked very hard to keep this history alive.” It was a mission, she says, that Manzone shared.

Charter of the Hospital and Dispensary of the Alumnae of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1896. In 1905, the dispensary was renamed The Amy S. Barton Dispensary after its founder.

“Everyone who we discussed the proposed project with was extremely enthusiastic, which made us all think that we were on to something,” Plottel recalls. At its September 2021 meeting, the board voted to formally fund the AAHIP project, thanks to the Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead ’88 Fund. “The idea was to create a project that would explore and document the history and the reach of the Alumni Associations of the legacy schools at the College of Medicine. We thought that this would be a very novel initiative and that The Legacy Center would be the perfect partner for the project.”

THE PROJECT

To lead the project, The Legacy Center’s director, Margaret Graham, brought on Theana Noelle Kastens, an archivist teaching art history at George Mason University and Northern Virginia Community College. As it happens, Kastens is also something of a detective, a cornerstone quality when piecing together decades of never-told history.

Thanks to institutional records and donations from innumerable alums and their kin, The Legacy Center archives hold troves of documents, photographs, newspapers, rare books, textiles, audiovisual media, medical instruments, artwork, furniture and ephemera. Some boxes arrive neatly organized. Others are hastily packed by grieving family members with the countless little memories of their loved one’s life. The Legacy Center takes everything that fits within their collection policy², because everything tells a story.

Class of 1987 at Freshman Welcome in 1983, sponsored by the Alumni Association.

Exhortations to young women physicians abroad during the first World War. Efforts to preserve the study of homeopathic medicine in the United States. Powerful moments of collective action in the face of sexism throughout the decades. Summer retreats on Long Lake, Maine. “It became my mission to shed light on those voices and stories that hadn’t been shared for so long,” Kastens says.

The new exhibit creates paths to explore these narratives and plenty beyond, the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the history of the Alumni Associations. “Whenever I’d come across materials that weren’t directly related to activities, I had to pry myself away because I’d be so captivated,” Kastens says. “Off the top of my head, I see two screenplays that could be written based off these stories. I just get lost in it.”

Not all of the stories are complete, of course; the location of the White Pines summer camp in the ’50s, for instance, remains a mystery to Kastens. “There are gaps in the history,” she says, “but because of the survey we know what those gaps are.” The special thing about these mysteries is that they are all solvable. Every missing link lies in someone’s memory, in an old photo or a letter waiting, patiently, in an attic box beneath a blanket of dust. Perhaps you yourself have the missing end or forgotten beginning of an old story, though you might not know it until it finds its fellows. When the gang gets back together, all sorts of rusty tales turn up.

Time and again, the stories and historical records confirm what has long attracted alums like Cantor, Manzone and Plottel to the association: values of dedication, continuity and service driving graduates to give back to the school that helped shape their professional paths. In a way, looking back through the history of the Alumni Associations is like looking in a mirror. As Cantor says, “We’re standing on the shoulders of people whose legacy we can carry forward.”