School for servers: Walton briefs wait staff on fine points of feeding 2,000 Photo:Les Todd

The kind of nightmare that wracks the sleep of reunion organizers actually happened to Lisa Dilts. A few years ago, the tent for the 25th-reunion class was set up on a lawn that held an underground watering system. As is routine, the department in charge of sprinklers was asked to make certain that the system was turned off, so that no unexpected showers would break out on the day of the event.

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"They said not to worry," recalls Dilts '83, who is the director of the reunions program for the Office of Alumni Affairs. "The water meter wasn't working, and the sprinklers hadn't been on for three months."

On Friday morning, the day the reunions weekend began, the plumber showed up unannounced, fixed the water meter, and set the timer. It worked perfectly. Precisely at ten o'clock that evening, just as the reunion-goers were in the middle of the dessert course, it began to rain. At least, it seemed like rain. Only it was happening inside the tent.

"I still remember the call I got from one of the student volunteers staffing the party," Dilts says. Her voice shrinks and grows tremulous: "The sprinklers have come on, and everybody is getting wet."

Dilts' audience--veteran planners who have gathered on a sunny day in early April 2004 to review attendance projections and determine final tent locations--chuckle appreciatively. Swapping stories like this one helps them blow off steam as another reunions weekend looms. Jim Slaughter, manager of special-events services--George Burns to Dilts' Gracie Allen--picks up the tale. "Water was squirting up through the tent floor in some areas, and it came out the sides and ran down the hill. It was real slippery. They started mud sliding. They had so much fun, they said when they had their next reunion, they were going to request the sprinklers be turned on again."

Of course, not all potential catastrophes have such happy endings. With a combined forty-three years of experience between them, Dilts and Slaughter have a lot of war stories they can tell that would chill the blood of any event planner: the alumna who spent her time at a Saturday-evening party talking to a tent pole, then, as she left, screamed that the caterer had stolen her purse; the alumnus who tried to pick up a security guard and burst into tears when the guard politely but firmly declined his advances; the alumna who had too much to drink and was seen dancing with the janitor; the fourteen alumni who hijacked a shuttle bus to the International House of Pancakes; the mini tornado that picked up one tent and hurled it into another, gouging a huge hole in the top. War stories, Dilts points out, are fun--in retrospect.

Reunions weekend, like any large event, is rife with potential for crises. It's the nature of the beast. No matter how well the event is organized and managed, an endless variety of things can go wrong. "It used to bother me," says DeDe Olson, a reunions staff member. "It seemed you worked and you worked, and all you would hear were the complaints. And it was so easy to say to yourself, 'Well, this is a disaster.' "

"But as I grew into it, I realized that crisis management is what we do. And we make fun of it, 'Oh, the crisis of the day is..., ' and just keep repeating our reunions mantra: 'Not a problem.' "

Reunions are held in mid-April. With a short break for graduation, planning for the next reunions weekend begins a few weeks after the last one is over. By June, reunions staff members are already deep in logistics. If it takes a village to raise a child, one could argue that it takes the equivalent of a small city to put on a Duke reunion: police officers, fire fighters, and EMTs; parking experts, planners, builders, and techies; chefs, bus drivers, electricians, musicians, teachers, and florists. They provide food, drink, housing, education, entertainment, transportation, and safety. Reunions weekend is the largest event Duke puts on, save for presidential inaugurations, and those tend to occur only once a decade. A single reunions weekend requires a year-plus of planning, thousands of volunteer hours, the cooperation and coordination of some thirty-five university departments and programs, and a subsidy of more than a half-million dollars from the Office of Alumni Affairs.

Typically, twelve classes--alumni from Trinity, the Woman's College, engineering, and nursing--return for the weekend, which is held in the middle of April. Last year, it was April 16-18; this year, it's slated for April 15-17. Although all alumni are welcome to attend, generally, the weekend is a time to gather what planners call the five- and ten-year classes--5th through 60th reunions--with special emphasis on the banner years, the 25th and 50th reunions.

"The overarching goal is to get as many people back to reunions as possible and ensure that they have a good time when they get here," says Dilts. She has an easy-going manner and a ready laugh. Her office, in the renovated carriage house behind Alumni House, is decorated with hothouse plants and Chinese prints. Dilts has agreed to allow a reporter to follow her and the rest of the reunions staff over the course of the year's planning for the 2004 weekend. It will be a kind of Reunions 101, a behind-the-scenes look at just what it takes to put on a Duke reunion.

Lesson One is the importance of recruiting alumni volunteers for each class. These are the people whose leadership, connections, and enthusiasm will get their classmates excited about attending. The volunteer chairs are chosen first; each then helps put together planning committees of eighteen to twenty people for his or her class. Typically, the class throws a party on Friday night of reunions weekend, and the committee tailors the details to reflect the history, personality, and culture of their year. So, while one 5th-reunion class opted for pizza, dancing, and a deejay, a 50th had skits throughout dinner, threw glitter, and staged a faux panty raid.

"They give us their wish list," says Dilts. "It includes what, when, where, and how much. We do all the legwork, come up with options, and attach a price tag. If you want to have live music and a bar, it might be $45 a person. You want beer and wine and a deejay, we can get away with $28." Ultimately, the class decides, but the reunions staff provides gentle steering. Some classes are overly ambitious. One 25th-reunion class wanted to have an Earth Wind & Fire concert. (The staff talked them out of it).

Each class planning committee also publishes a class newsletter, sets up a class website for posting information, and encourages everyone to send in class notes, so that the site functions as a kind of "virtual yearbook" of the class' activities.

The idea at this early stage is to "engage people on a variety of levels," Dilts says. "What's meaningful to alumni is as varied as the alumni themselves. Why do they come back? To see friends, of course. But that's not always enough. We need to let them be able to explore Duke as it is now. So we have to tip the scale in myriad ways." To that end, reunions weekend offers not just parties, but also, like many universities, lectures, tours, and visual and performing arts programs.

"Some people come back for really fun social events," Dilts continues. "Some people come back because it's important to them to show their children what Duke is like. And we're finding increasingly that one thing that tips the scale toward their coming back is professional or career networking."

"I'd love to run into the problem of, 'Oh no! We have too many people coming back.'"

A banner reunion will bring back, on average, 325 people. A 40th or 45th will bring only 100. Some classes are more predictable than others. "The Class of '73, for example, had a huge 25th, and we predicted was going to be a good 30th, and it was. They broke the all-time attendance records for the 25th and 30th reunions."

However, predictability of this sort is not something the reunions planners can depend on. By the end of July, Dilts and her staff are beginning to practice what she calls "voodoo reunions"--estimating the size of a particular class' reunion, based on experience with the reunion year (the 25th draws many more than the 20th or 30th, for example), and on the individual class' past reunion attendance (some classes have consistently low attendance; some, like '73, consistently high).

Like any hostess, Dilts needs to make decisions, most of which depend on how many guests are coming--number of hotel rooms, food portions, plates, knives, forks, centerpieces, and party favors--plus many things that most hostesses never have to think about, including size and location of tents, number of shuttle buses and vans, and capacity of classrooms. She won't have anything approaching real numbers until a few days before the event starts. "We actually get about a third of our registrations the last week," she says, "and then we'll have as many as 300 people registering when they get here."

Although twelve caterers work on the various class parties, preparing everything from Bullock's barbecue to steak and salmon, for the Big Dance, held on Saturday night, only J.W. Walton '82 will do. One of the owners of what is known simply as The Catering Company, he's the Wizard of Oz and Perle Mesta wrapped into one. Walton has done the last five dances (the party includes dinner and dancing, actually, with fireworks and two bands--the Casablanca Orchestra, a big dance band to start things off, and then Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs to entertain partygoers into the wee hours.)

Dilts trusts Walton completely. "He's a genius," she says. The food, although delicious, is the least of what he does. They have a couple of early meetings, and then one or two to go over numbers and finalize things. Then, she basically gives him a budget and free rein. He takes an empty tent longer and wider than a football field (it completely covers the practice field that runs along Cameron Boulevard) and turns it into--well, every year it's different, but always elegant and sumptuous.

The tent goes up about two weeks in advance of the weekend. On a cold gray day, Walton takes time out to talk about his plans. This year, he says, the dècor will have a "more contemporary look" than in the past. In addition to Gothic elements like six-foot tall, papier-machè gargoyles and hanging lamps inspired by chandeliers in old cathedrals, he's designed awnings that echo the shape of high-tech metal and fabric structures on the top of the new West-Edens Link residence hall. Photo slideshows in continuous, half-hour loops will be projected on large cloth panels, and the ceiling will be washed in lights of amber and reds, "to give a warm glow."

"This thing always evolves," Walton says. "As we are wont to say, we'll know what we're doing when we get done." Still, he says, his guiding principle is that "it should be fun. I always feel people are much happier when they look around and are almost saturated with stuff. You don't see the vast, empty space. You fit into the environment: It feels good, it smells good, it tastes good."

As he talks, gusts of wind spurt through the tent, picking up the bottom edges and causing the walls to flap and flutter. The fretful weather is a reminder of a cruel but inexorable fact: The weather is a major character in the drama that is reunions weekend--arguably the single most important influence on whether people have a good time. If it decides to pull a Lear, cracking and raging with storms, the effects can be dire. "People who arrive in cold, wet weather have a lot more complaints than people who get here when it's sunny," says Dilts. It not only affects attitudes, it can sabotage the most careful preparations. In 2003, she recalls, "the weather was so bad on Thursday, we couldn't set up. The wind was so strong it blew over our tables."