GILL — Like any teen friendship, the one between Linda Hoff and Kathy Spencer had plenty of ups and downs — like the rolling hills in view from the Northfield Mount Hermon School campus where dozens of handwritten letters cover a library table, 50 years after being written.
“Hiya Gorgeous ….You wanted to know what we do on weekends? Fri. nites are free (only free time we have!!) Sat. morning 2 hour study haal!!! Ins’t that about the most damn lousy thing, finky thing you ever heard of? Grr. Don’t think we didn’t complain but as they say you can’t fight city hall !!”
The three-page letter, dated “Thurs,” is one of maybe 200 that Hoff sent between 1964 and 1967 from what was then Northfield School for Girls to Spencer back in Great Falls, Montana, where the two had bonded over their nine months of eighth grade.
Spencer, who saved the letters she’d received in Montana that were filled with complaints about teachers and school pressures, secrets about the boys across the river at the companion Mount Hermon School for Boys, and life at a New England prep school in the wild ’60s, delivered them one Sunday about five years ago to a neighbor, Peter Weis, in Montague Center, where she’s lived since 1976.
She’d run into Weis, who is today’s NMH School achivist, and mentioned a few times that she had a bunch of letters from a 1960s NMH friend that he might want for their historical value.
“I’d read a couple on top, but I didn’t go through them,” she recalls. “When we brought over the shoebox of letters, you could hardly close it, he was like, “Oh, my god!’ He was just stunned at what I’d saved.”
Spencer — who morphed from Kathy to Kate soon after arriving in Amherst immediately after college in the early 1970s — had met Hoff in Montana as the “new girl” who was up visiting from New York for a year at the start of eighth grade.
“Everyone walked to school in those days, and Linda had to walk by my house,” recalls Spencer, who’d been rebuffed by another girl the very first day. “She came by the house and we immediately bonded … We immediately became best friends.”
“We were connected at the heart,” says Hoff, who is now a psychotherapist in Evanston, Ill.
This week, the women — now in their mid-60s, were reunited with the letters that reflect a chronicle of adolescent angst, growing up in the ’60s and the different perspectives of two girls from what would today be described as “red state” and “blue state” cultures as they wrote about fads, teen worries and social issues of the time.
They also tap into what life was like at NMH, where Hoff would be punished for missing daily required chapel by hiding under her dorm bed, or breaking rules about the boys on the Mount Hermon campus.
And they chronicle the friendship of two teen girls that was about to come undone when they reunited for just a month as Boston University roommates.
In Great Falls, then Montana’s largest city and home to Malmstrom Air Force Base and the Strategic Air Command, Spencer says, “I grew up in a Republican household. We were taught that Democrats ate their babies. In a couple of letters, I was saying we shouldn’t integrate.”
Her father, who ran what’s now a third-generation paint and wallpaper store that also sells art supplies, offered to send her to NMH, where Hoff had invited her, but she says, “I didn’t want to leave home. I had two younger brothers, I had pets, we had a cabin in the mountains.” And Great Falls High School offered “a great education.”
Hoff, whose father worked in advertising, had grown up with more exposure to diversity, visiting Greenwich Village before high school, where she saw openly gay people, and blacks and Latinos as part of everyday life.
“I think the dialogue of letters reflects the culture of the times,” she says. “It reflects the civil rights movement and what was going on. We were saying things as teens that the larger culture was saying, without a doubt … ‘Should you date a black guy or shouldn’t you?’ ”
“You sound exactly like everyone around here, honestly. Except we all went through that same sorta stage you’re going through now about the middle of last year. Only about three kids I can think of don’t own guitars in the dorm and more than half of them have pierced ears.
“That’s one thing that really bugs me about this place: everyone is trying so hard not to conform that they end up looking exactly alike. And what are the big fads Out West now? Everyone here has long hair, streaked or lightened mostly…”
“That fiasco” is the way Hoff, who is now Hoff-Irvin, describes the month in September 1967 when the best friends reconnected as freshmen roommates, then split.
“It was a disaster. We had this beautiful dialogue. I was newly out of a girls’ school. I was in another zone. I thought the important thing was looking gorgeous and guys. I was a lunatic.”
Spencer recalls, that by then, “I wanted to get as far away from Great Falls, Montana, as I could.” She decided to go to BU. “I want to be with Linda.”
Though it was “fabulous” being in the city, the roommate thing “didn’t work out,” says Spencer. “The only thing I remember is she would set her hair in rollers every night, and every morning she would wake up at around 6:30 and take the rollers out one at time and throw them on the floor. I was sleeping in bed next to her, so like WONK. WONK. WONK.
“This went on for like 15 minutes, so I couldn’t sleep anymore. Then I asked her very nicely, ‘Could you not throw the rollers on floor?’
“Next morning: WONK. WONK.
“And then we split. That’s the only thing I remember, is the rollers,” to which Hoff adds, “Thank God!”
“And we never tried to get in touch after that first month.”
Hoff addds, “And we never re-bonded. It’s just tragic. I had like blond hair, I was into who knows what? And you were like an arty type. It was just a very important bond, sadly severed for all these decades She moved out, and then I dropped out. I wound up finishing BU. But those were really crazy times.”
The NMH letters, often responding to ones long since lost, that Spencer had written, glimpse moments when their lives wove together, like one in response to complaints about Spencer’s younger brother:
“You wanted some suggestions for revenge on Timmy. Why not set up a Chinese torture chamber? You get some pretty good results. Or you could tie wet leather around his wrists and that fat little head of his and toss him into the sun for a while.”
Or the powerful one Hoff typed on thin white paper:
“Dear Kathy: You have no idea how depressed I feel after talking to you. It’s really ridiculous. I’ve never felt so lonely or nostalgic for Great Falls and 8th grade and our friendship and everything that was.
“Does that sound too corny? I feel like being completely frank, so if you’re in the wrong mood please don’t think I’m being melodramatic. Because I really mean this. I was trying to explain to my roommate how you were my first friend. That was the first time in my life that I’ve been really happy. And I couldn’t help crying, because after talking to her, I realized I will never be the same. I can’t help it, but for some reason I feel that I’ve just grown up.”
With a matchmaker’s role played by archivist Weis at Hoff’s 50th reunion in June, Hoff finally visited a friend she assumed was still back in Montana, over letters she’d long forgotten.
Wearing a sleeveless black top, white skirt, beaded necklace, plastic-rimmed reading glasses and neatly styled blond hair off her shoulders, Hoff sat beside Spencer, who wore wire-rimmed glasses, jeans, a white button-down shirt, shoulder-length, wispy red hair and turquoise bracelet and rings on both hands.
For 2½ hours, they re-read the letters, laughed and reminisced, as Spencer’s daughter, Susannah, a 2004 NMH graduate, reflected on how fascinating it was to see things come “full circle,” with letters reflecting similarities and yet vast differences from her own experience at the school 40 years later.
“It’s an honest, from the heart history,” says her mom, who sold her Maple Leaf Music store in Brattleboro, Vt., five years ago and spends her time playing banjo, learning Spanish and trying her hand at writing a couple of children’s books.
“This is our redemptive reconnection,” adds Hoff, who hadn’t responded to Weis’s earlier notifications about the letters.
“I may not have been ready to get that magnitude of a reunion. I was clueless. … There’s a very deep affection; it’s just how much this friendship meant to me. … I’m just so grateful for any opportunity to revisit.”
Reach Richie Davis at
rdavis@recorder.com
or 413-772-0261, ext. 269