Editor’s note: Mark Hutchins ’70 visited campus and sent this piece via email to the Alumni Relations Office. It is reproduced here with his permission.

Five years ago I visited for a few days in the summer. It was a very strange experience. I wandered over the campus in search of my youth. Everywhere I looked, most of it was the same as I remembered. But all my friends were long gone. Only the memories still fresh. Everywhere I looked, ghosts materialized. Events materialized. I drank it in as only an older middle-aged man can. Here had taken place the best years of my life. I grew up here. My mind roared here. Some of the best friendships I have ever known were initiated and cultivated here. Some remain today.

But reality and time intruded. The snack bar at the union did not have vanilla Cokes. Nunzi’s, the Warehouse, Buckland’s … all gone. The town looked a little depressed and worn. A number of buildings gone.

Finally I went into Seneca Hall and up to my old room on the seventh floor. Forty years ago! I lived in Seneca for three years. It was new when I moved in. So was I. Now it is weather-worn … blasted from forty years of storms. So am I. My room, 703 North, was exactly the same, however. Even the same furniture had survived, in good condition, for those forty years.

I sat down on a bed and conversations whispered that I had forgotten. Important discussions on the meaning of life, future plans, goals, and nonsense. I was there for an hour, just lost in the idea of this place in time. I think for a moment or two I could have opened that door and walked right back out into my life then. A mirror hanging above the bureau jolted me back to reality.

I stuck a newly bought Moody Blues CD in my rental car’s stereo and parked along the lake front with a beer and a sunset for company. Lost in remorse at paths not taken and opportunities not recognized. Joy at the threads I’ve kept up to this place. And grateful for all those people, in this place, who contributed to who I am now.

Mark Hutchins ’70 is an architect in Pasadena, Calif.

The sight of the sun dropping just below the shimmering horizon has captivated most who cast their eyes upon it. Sunsets are perhaps Oswego’s most universally loved features.

“I will never forget it until the day I die,” Deb Roe ’73 told the late historian and Professor Emerita Dorothy Rogers. “We were all on the west campus on the bluff watching this particularly beautiful sunset.

“When the last bit of sun had sunk below the horizon, one person — God knows who — began to clap and the whole group, a couple of hundred people, stood up and applauded the sunset,” she recalled.

John Gerard ’79 was equally enamored with the sunsets as a meteorology major at the college.

“We’d plan our Friday nights around it,” the chief meteorologist for News 4 WOAI-TV in San Antonio, Texas, said. After spending his 30-plus-year career in such places as Chicago, Toronto and Miami, he counts the Oswego sunsets among the most beautiful.

“My scientific explanation is simply: ‘Gee. Wow,” Gerard said with a laugh. In reality, “it’s a combination of western exposure, the clouds and the fact that you’re far enough north to get away from the haze.”

Jet streaks — bursts of stronger winds in the jet stream that cause high, thin clouds — intensify the array of oranges, reds and purples. Add that to the unobstructed view provided by Lake Ontario, and you’ve got an applause-worthy phenomenon that has captivated generations.