Lincoln College Bridges an International Friendship

I am Fred Cutlip, LC '55, now a retired professor of mathematics. This is an account of a Lincoln College acquaintanceship of fifty years ago that lay dormant during four decades, then began to turn into a friendship.

In the winter of 1995 my wife Jean (Goodrich) Cutlip and I began planning a trip to Germany.Our son, Phil, is an opera singer and was to be performing in Weimar, formerly in the Russian zone, the following summer.

Jean reminded me that I have numerous relatives, whom I had never met, in Schweringen, a small town near Bremen. I was able to get some addresses from other relatives in Illinois, wrote to Germany, and soon heard from Dietrich and Wilhelmine Harms. We hatched a plan to visit with him and his family.

About that time, my Lincoln Log arrived. In it was an item noting that Wim deRegt, a 1953-55 Fulbright Exchange student from Holland, had recently visited Lincoln, and had expressed interest in hearing from classmates. Wim and I had a few classes together, skated with classmates on the frozen ponds near the old power generating plant, and were casual acquaintances but not friends.

This note about Wim caught Jean's eye, and she urged me to write to him. I scoffed at the notion, figuring that Wim would not remember me, or at least would be disinclined to welcome a visitor based upon such a flimsy connection. I was slightly correct on the first point, and totally wrong on the second: Wim did remember my car, a 1947 Buick Roadmaster convertible, which compared favorably with his huge Packard.

In an exchange of letters, we soon added a visit with Wim, then living near Schoonhoven, The Netherlands, to our itinerary. (Following his two years in Lincoln, Wim had attended the University of Chicago, taught history for a time in Canada, worked for IBM, and was an independent computer consultant - but that is his story, not mine, to tell.) As departure time drew near, Jean had to cancel out of the trip because of back problems. We all - Jean and I, son Philip, Wim, and our German relatives, were counting so strongly on the visits that Jean urged me to go on with the trip.

Cut now to the huge train station serving Schiphol Airport. Imagine two men whose appearances had slightly altered during forty-one years, one of whom had taken a wrong train in Germany and was five or six hours late reaching Schiphol, trying to find each other. Wim spotted me first, because I looked so lost!

Wim took me to his small home near a canal (not an unusual location in Holland), and we began to sort through our history, remembering bits of common ground - classes from both Balofs, for example, and classmates we both remembered. From such polite, mildly curious beginnings a fine friendship has grown: Jean and I have visited Wim in his new home, a canal boat moored near Leyden, on which we enjoyed fine tours of the Dutch countryside; Wim has visited us twice in our Ellensburg,Washington home; we rendezvoused in 2002 in Barcelona, where we were visiting our singer son and his family; and last fall we met in New York City. We are already planning our next encounter, again in New York City.

Jean and I count Wim as a dear friend. We could not have anticipated such a fine consequence of that long-ago time at Lincoln College.