Read All About it: Faithful Class Agent Delivers the News

As the elected historian of her graduating class, Edna Gooch Trudeau ’59 dutifully compiled her classmates’ activities and achievements throughout their four years at Mary Washington and presented her summary during graduation weekend. Only later did she learn that the historian had a post-commencement assignment: “Oh, you’re also our Class Agent,” someone mentioned.

By now, Trudeau has retired from a long teaching career. Her classmates, too, have distinguished themselves in their professions, families, and communities. And 48 years after graduation, Trudeau still meets deadline after deadline, collecting and submitting her classmates’ news to the University’s alumni magazine.

She has never let up. While other Class Agents have come and gone, and some classes have no representatives at all, Trudeau has remained faithful to her fellow fifty-niners.

“I try really, really hard not to miss an issue,” she said. “We had a very closeknit class, and they want to hear about one another … because of the type of friendships we formed at Mary Washington.”

From news about careers in law and television to tidbits about volunteer work for Meals on Wheels and women’s clubs, Trudeau, who now lives in New Kent, Va., finds the information she receives to be interesting and noteworthy.

Some classmates were on campus for just one or two years, but if a woman attended Mary Washington even briefly, “somebody will remember her,” Trudeau said. So, while there were 250 or so members of her graduating class, Trudeau meticulously maintains 318 index cards, one for each contact, in a wooden box that her father once brought home for her from his office.

“I carry it everywhere I go,” she said. As the cards fill, Trudeau edits them to keep the information current – and to make room for grandchildren.

Theirs is not an electronic generation, and most classmates call or write newsy letters. Trudeau sifts through the happenings, both good and bad, with a gentle hand, gauging when to be the town crier or the soul of discretion.

 Then, having made a slight advance into the world of technology, Trudeau sits down at her computer keyboard, synthesizes the penned notations, and hits SEND.

Even after nearly half a century, she doesn’t take the job she loves for granted. If someone else stepped up, she would relinquish it.

“But every time we have a reunion, they just look at me and say, ‘Guess what?’” she said with a laugh.

The best part of being a Class Agent, she said, is hearing from someone after 30 years of silence.

“Out of the blue, I’ll have somebody pick up the phone and call me. Just something will make them do it,” she said. “That always makes me happy. It means they’ve never forgotten Mary Washington.”

–  Nancy Alexander