Margery (Lecrone) Gregg has a simple answer to the question of what keeps bringing her back to the Bluffton campus where she graduated from college in 1940.
“It’s home,” says the Amsterdam, Ohio, resident, 96, who returned again with her daughter and son-in-law, Carol (Gregg ’66) and Jan ’69 Benroth, for Bluffton University’s annual May Day events on May 2.
Mrs. Gregg, a retired teacher and school librarian, remembers Bluffton in the late ‘30s as a place where she and fellow female students living in Ropp Hall had assigned seats for meals. “We ate together at noon; we ate together at night,” she says, also recalling tables with white tablecloths and servers wearing white coats. “We were family.”
Among the other students she met during those years were Phyllis Driver, a transfer from a Chicago music school who later gained fame as comedian and actress Phyllis Diller, and future TV newsman Hugh Downs.
The Crawford County, Ohio, native also met her future husband, John Gregg, a 1939 Bluffton graduate who went on to become a school superintendent. They were married by Bluffton President Lloyd Ramseyer in 1941 in Ramseyer Chapel, and she was later an English teacher and librarian in the Jefferson County, Ohio, school district—now Edison Local Schools—where John was superintendent.
As she tells it, her husband came home one Labor Day and said he needed an English teacher for the start of classes the next day. “Thirty years later, I graduated,” smiles Mrs. Gregg, who retired in 1980.
The Greggs were among several couples who had met at Bluffton and continued to do things together, including vacations, after college. “All their best friends in the world came from Bluffton,” says Carol Benroth, whose father died in 2004.
Her mother’s interest in education hasn’t waned since her retirement. Mrs. Gregg still attends classes for six weeks in the fall and spring at the Academy of Lifelong Learning, an affiliate of the Franciscan University of Steubenville. (She remains the choir director and accompanist at her United Methodist church in Amsterdam as well.)
And she was also back in Bluffton with her daughter in mid-April for the annual women’s conference sponsored by the Bluffton University Women’s Council. That was just two weeks before May Day, when Mrs. Gregg was recognized at the traditional campus ceremony for having graduated 75 years ago.
Bluffton, says her daughter, “is a big part of her life.”
