Sticking Together

“I’m trying to remember when we started the birthday kidnappings,” says Kate Goddard ’06. Nearly 25 years after they first met, Swarthmore best friends Goddard, Lisa Nelson ’06, Julia Zummo ’06, and Laila Muller ’07 say that ahead of the 20-year reunion, memories are flooding back.

In the fall of 2002, then-Associate Dean Myrt Westphal assigned Nelson and Zummo, and Goddard and Muller, as roommates in side-by-side rooms. The four clicked right away — not that they were going in cold.

Nelson had already tracked down Zummo, calling the self-described “socially inept” teenager on her father’s business line from Minnesota to introduce herself before move-in. Zummo wasn’t quite sure what to make of the bold gesture.

“I was trying to decide,” she says. “Friendly? Scary? Friendly-scary?” Within days, the four were discovering a campus of strangers as a tight unit. “Our need was to stick together,” says Zummo. “Have someone to go to lunch with. Have shared jokes.”

For spring break, they decided to drive to the shore. They found a room in an off-season hotel for a steal in a still-frozen Atlantic City. Too young to gamble, all four squeezed into the undersized hot tub and told each other their secrets.

“Except we probably already knew them,” Muller laughs.

Back on campus, they wore their origami pirate hats to the Crum Regatta and celebrated holidays of their own creation. And then there was that birthday tradition: Lurk outside Sharples and strike without warning. Blindfold the victim with a scarf and whisk them off somewhere mysterious, such as Ruby Tuesday in the Springfield Mall.

“I continued to be blindfolded as we waited for a table,” says Goddard. “It was hilarious.”

After graduation — and before life would scatter them across the country — Nelson, Zummo, and Muller lived together in New York.

These days, Nelson is back in Minnesota, where she runs a neighborhood nonprofit and raises two sons with her husband, Anthony Manfredi ’07. Zummo lives in Columbus, Ohio; Goddard’s a couple of hours down the road in Cleveland. Muller lives on her family’s land in Southern California, where she teaches preschool.

They all try to meet up at least once a year. But they’re also ready to drop everything when needed.

In May, the friends returned to Swarthmore for their 20-year reunion. For Goddard, it’s a deep bond that demonstrates Westphal’s skill at pairing like-minded first-year students. But it also shows what can happen when you open yourself up to possibility.

“You’re not going to click with everyone,” she says. “But in our case, saying ‘this person seems friendly’ and running with it has created decades-long, immensely profound friendships that are filled with fun and joy. And I think that that’s a beautiful thing to know that you can find.”