Six times a year, I serve my M.I.T. alumni class, by compiling notes from any of the 900 or so living classmates and writing a column summarizing such news as job promotions and, as is more the case here with us in our 60s, retirements, grandchildren and, sadly, the loss of a classmate here and there.
So it was with compelling sadness that my email blast to the class last week for contributions for the next issue was met with the jarring response from the widow of one who had passed away two weeks earlier. And this one was exceptionally painful on many levels.
Randy Vereen was my very first roommate as a freshman in college; we shared a four-man room on the fourth floor of the Phi Delta Theta house on Bay State Road in Boston. Back then, freshmen pledged fraternities before fall classes and moved into the house to alleviate the shortage of dorm rooms. We certainly got to know each other in the relatively close quarters.
Randy was from Marion, South Carolina, and brought a lot of Marion with him to Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'll remember a lot about that first year because of him -- he had an outsized personality and a happy approach to life that I know, from late conversations, masked some insecurity about whether he belonged at M.I.T. We shared that insecurity; I had come from a small, very rural area high school near a military complex, and felt extremely unprepared academically that first year. Randy's small-town high school experience was pretty comparable and, in its own way, comforting.
I'd like to hope we helped each other a little that year, but I'm sure he was more support to me than the immature guy that I was, could be to him. He would tell stories of home, the high school girlfriend, the close friend then at Harvard up the road a bit, and what were typical small town southern high school stories. I think they were comforting to a nervous freshman to know we were more normal than we might otherwise have felt.
I remember he hated the word "Gnurd", as we spelled it back at M.I.T. in the fall of 1969 as freshmen -- and the word was ubiquitous on campus then when we arrived (before the "nerd" spelling took over). We regularly referred to one of our fellow freshmen as "Gnorman Gnurd", and Randy would start good-naturely yelling at us for our horrible insensitivity.
Come Christmastime, we all found what made Randy who he was, and that was when he put on the red suit, the beard and the boots and became Santa Claus -- at every possible opportunity. On the weekends in December he'd get that suit on and maybe a dozen of us would walk down to Boston Common and sing carols to anyone who would listen, Santa at the fore. There were always kids around, and they just loved Santa Randy.
My favorite memory of that time was that, no matter what, when he was done talking to a group of kids and we would move on to another part of the Common, he'd motion to me to start us singing "Here Comes Santa Claus". I would reply "We don't know all the words", but Randy would invariably make me start it anyway.
There would be Randy, beard, boots, cap and red suit, bopping on down the path from one group of kids to another, while a bunch of fraternity guys would follow after him, singing "Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus, right down Santa Claus Lane ... la la, la la, rumble mumble grumble don't know the words why are we singing this ..." Maybe you had to be there; I'm laughing out loud writing this.
Insecurities aside, Randy went on to graduate from M.I.T. with degrees in Management and in Urban Studies and Planning, and eventually arrived in Springfield, Illinois, becoming the Director of Finance and Administration for the Illinois Department of Transportation. He retired a few years back after suffering an aortic aneurysm, but was still, 40-something years later, playing Santa and entertaining kids at Christmastime in his 60s.
I never saw Randy again after graduation. I had hoped to cross paths at our 40th Reunion in 2013, the first one I ever was able to attend despite my being a class officer, but he did not make it. So it was very upsetting to receive an email from Nancy, the sweetheart he wrote letters to from college, and to whom he was married 42 years when a second aneurysm took his life while on a vacation trip in South Carolina.
Randy was the first member of my pledge class to go home to the Lord, and to say that he was the most loved of the twelve of us would not be a stretch. The rest of us might be people you hung out with, or admired, or respected, or tolerated. Randy was someone you loved. Whatever flipped the Santa Claus switch in him was there the rest of the year, a guy who would do anything for you.
The other eleven of us have been sending around some remembrance emails about him, something we had never done before -- we maybe weren't the closest bunch back in the day; a lot of us were closer to Phi Delt brothers in different classes than we were to our classmates. I think that Randy would be pretty happy if he thought that he might be bringing us closer together in our sixties. I know that his passing has made me want to reach out especially to guys I wasn't particularly close to back then.
Life is just too dang short for a lot of things. Santa taught me that.
Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton