To the Editor:

On spring afternoons at Mercersburg, I gathered four-leafed clovers in the chapel garden—maybe where, in the early years after the chapel’s completion in 1926, Camille Hart Irvine collected the tokens of good luck she gave seniors at Commencement. There’s still a four-leaf clover in the onion-thin pages of the Pelican Shakespeare we used in Brit Lit Survey with Wirt Winebrenner Jr. ’54, faculty emeritus. Another token of my time at Mercersburg, my 1981 class ring, is on my finger. It came from a gumball machine.

This spring my husband and I attended a Yale mini-reunion in Charlottesville ahead of my 40th college reunion in New Haven. Classmates led an extraordinary, timely program on the complex/problematic history of Monticello, the University of Virginia, and Jeffersonian democracy in advance of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026. And while presenters included leaders of some of those same institutions, attendees included public figures working to uphold democratic principles. We were literally “in the room where it happens.”

The long drive to and from the mini-reunion took us past the Greencastle exit of Interstate 81, the first time I’d been so close to Mercersburg in decades. When I received a phone call with a 717 area code the day after we returned to Massachusetts, I figured it must be a geolocation-based phishing scam. But no. It was the Mercersburg Alumni Office calling to say a member of the public had found a 1981 Mercersburg class ring with my initials “in a large bag of costume jewelry, inside a gumball machine,” that was purchased several years ago at a thrift shop in Dorchester Lower Mills, MA.

I’d lost the ring about 40 years ago, yet it was the day after I passed the turnoff to Mercersburg for the first time in almost as many years, on a history-themed pilgrimage, that I learned it had been found. A painstakingly wrapped time capsule arrived soon after, and I once again clocked the words “virilitas” (tee hee) and “via crucis” in the inscription. The paradox of paragons.

Thanks for the luck, Mrs. Irvine. Thanks for the kindness, proactive member of the public. And thanks for the paragons, founders, and sustainers of education and democracy alike. 

Johanna Schlegel ’81, Cape Cod, MA