The first time I went to this place — 2 years ago
My grandparents lived there in the 1950s and we went to visit them from our home in Sunnyvale. I was so impressed by Stanford University, I decided at the age of six that I would someday go to college there.
Even though we moved away from California to Indiana in 1958, I held onto my dream. I applied to Stanford when I was a high school senior and was accepted, but I didn’t receive enough financial aid to afford the out-of-state tuition. Instead, I did my undergraduate work at DePauw.
Then, in 1998, I had an opportunity to attend a graduate course in professional publishing at Stanford. I jumped at the chance. We lived in a dorm, ate in the cafeteria, studied in the classrooms and library, and shopped in the bookstore. I even got to walk on the turf of the old football stadium, swim in the outdoor pool and bicycle the streets of Palo Alto, so different from four decades earlier.
There will always be a special place in my heart for Stanford and Palo Alto, a location very much worth visiting.
