Northern Illinois University graduates from 1973 are invited to a Golden Huskies 50th reunion this year, including a variety of events around Homecoming festivities on Oct. 13-14. (NIU image)

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 United States 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.

Those who graduated from NIU in 1973 will be invited to a Golden Huskies 50th reunion this year, including a variety of events this Oct. 13-14, revolving around Homecoming. Right now there is a committee of 1973 alumni brainstorming the details on how best to recognize their fellow classmates.

The events follow the inaugural Golden Huskies reunion last fall that celebrated the class of 1972. That reunion was popular with alumni and included an evening reception, a Homecoming brunch, and a tailgate event at Mission’s Grove. Organizers are looking forward to another successful Golden Huskies reunion, this time celebrating the class of 1973.

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

“We all lived together in the dorms at Northern,” he 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,” he 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 there were sorority sisters at 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,” she said.

Grandolfo said that much of the campus feels similar to her, despite some changes over the years. She remembers her 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.,” she 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,” she said.

While at NIU, she married her high school sweetheart, Dr. Mark Pienkos, ‘72, M.S.Ed. ‘74. They celebrated their 50^th wedding anniversary in August, 2022.

“Fifty years , to us, is a huge milestone, so to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of my graduation, that’s something to be proud of,” she 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 like 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 like “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,” she 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 opportunities, including those outside of the classroom. While at NIU he was a technical director at TV8 News, the 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,” he 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.”

He continued, “I learned that through that experience at NIU and it’s carried me all the way through my career. I’m at the end of my business life now, but I think probably I was a fairly successful CEO mainly because of what I learned at Northern outside of the classroom.”

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,” she said. “I grew to like that, I enjoyed that, and I enjoy technology still today.”

Grandolfo retired in 2014 after teaching for the deaf for 41 years, and is thankful to NIU for her experience.

“It’s because of NIU that I received that education,” she 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.