Golden Girls of Cathcart

By Teresa Castleman, Director of Abundant Living and Alumni and Friends Travel

Move-in day at Harding has always been exciting and nerve-wracking, and the fall of 1960 was no different. Six young women arrived at Harding College and moved into East Dorm: Sandy Childers, Janice McClurg, Linda Lee, Carol Albritton, Carol Whatley and Anne Bentley. They were young, far from home and, as Sandy remembers with a laugh, “extremely naïve,” but they quickly became friends. Mary Lou Yarborough soon joined the friend group as well. 

For these ladies, many of the experiences that college offered were completely new. Lee kept a scrapbook filled with Harding memories – programs, ticket stubs and other reminders of those years. Looking through it years later reminded the friends just how much their world expanded during their time on campus.

“It kept coming up that the cultural events here were all new to us,” McClurg said. 

Chapel became an important part of their time at Harding for this group of friends. “We appreciated chapel so much, and the exposure it gave us to missions and new thinking,” McClurg said. Childers and McClurg reflected on President George S. Benson speaking with conviction about faith, service and a world much larger than the one many of them had known growing up. “He was always impressive,” McClurg said. “He always talked about going to Zambia.”

Sundays were also special as they joined the stream of students walking together to College Church. “The parade of students headed over there was always impressive,” McClurg remembered.

“In high heels,” Childers quickly added with a laugh.

The young ladies experienced four years at Harding together and then graduated and went their separate ways. Careers, marriages, children and the responsibilities of adulthood filled the decades that followed. There were Christmas calls and occasional phone conversations, but the close-knit group of friends from East Dorm gradually scattered across the country and lost touch.

“We did lose contact,” Childers said. “We had to find each other again.”

Reconnecting took some work, and Childers was the one willing to make it happen. As their 50th class reunion approached in 2014, she began tracking down her old friends and convincing them to return to Searcy for Homecoming. McClurg describes it simply: One person made the decision to look for everyone. Childers became, and remains, the group’s unofficial ringleader.

When the friends came back to Searcy for Homecoming, they stayed together at the same hotel. Fifty years after graduating, women who had once shared the everyday rhythms of college life suddenly had time together again. The reunion could have been the end of the story, a wonderful weekend of reminiscing followed by everyone returning home. Instead, it became a new beginning.

The friends decided to get together again the following year.

And then the next.

And the next.

These Harding friends have gathered nearly every year since.

Their first trip took them to Charleston, South Carolina, where they rented a house near the beach, though not everyone could make it. In fact, there has been only one gathering when all seven were able to attend, a trip to Nashville in 2018. The group stayed at Lee’s house, visited the Grand Ole Opry and took a comedy tour.

But the most important part of each trip doesn’t require tickets or an itinerary. It’s the conversation. “We talk a lot about our lives, what things we encountered, the good things, the bad things,” Childers said. “And mainly we all talk about what Harding meant to us.”

The conversations have changed as the women have changed, McClurg said. “We share about our health and families and things, but we don’t dwell on those things. We just enjoy a commonality that grew very deep here at Harding.” That commonality includes something deeper than memories of dorm rooms, chapel programs and Sunday walks to church. “We have a common faith and common values,” Childers said.

Over the years, their annual gatherings have carried them through some of life's most difficult seasons. They have watched one another experience health problems and personal losses. Five of the seven have lost their husbands. But these friendships have also helped them rediscover fun and fellowship, and have become a source of support.

“It’s been a joy to be able to get together,” Childers said. “Every time we get together, I’m totally selfish! I love being with them.”

As travel has become difficult for some members of the group, Childers continues to find ways to keep everyone connected, including traveling to see friends who can no longer make the annual trips.

“Sandy doesn’t give up on us!” Janice said.

And their circle has widened. Mary Ann Harper Phillips of Tulsa, who was a freshman with them, has joined their gatherings. Rita Murphy Johnson, who lives at Harding Place, found the group after reconnecting through the Harding Alumni Facebook page.

 At the heart of it all remains a lesson these friends didn't recognize when they were 18-year-olds hauling pillows and clothes into East Dorm: friendships need someone willing to keep reaching out. “We have a really close relationship because of Sandy,” Janice said. “It takes a lot of energy to make a new friend.”

Perhaps that is why rediscovering an old one can be such a gift.

For Janice, their experience offers a message to the rest of us: don't wait for friendship to happen on its own. “The encouragement I have, especially for young retirees, is to travel and get together,” she said.

Make the call. Plan the trip. Find your old roommate. Look up the friend whose Christmas card still arrives every December but whose voice you haven't heard in years. Sometimes a friendship isn't really gone. It is simply waiting for someone to decide that enough years have passed.

More than 50 years after leaving campus, they found one another again. And more than a decade after that Homecoming reunion, they are still finding ways to gather, laugh, remember and encourage one another.

The young women of East Dorm could never have known where their lives would take them. But somehow, after all those years, the road led them back to each other.

Note from the author: Old friendships are worth rediscovering, and sometimes a trip is the perfect way to reconnect. If this story has you thinking about Harding friends that you haven’t seen in a while, consider inviting them to join you on a Harding Alumni and Friends tour. Whether you graduated together five years ago or 50, traveling together offers time to catch up, make new memories and strengthen the friendships that began at Harding. And who knows? One trip together might just become an annual tradition. For a list of our upcoming tours, visit harding.edu/travel.