A veteran-rookie class agent team are gearing up for a milestone 2026 reunion
October 15, 2025 — Dating back to the myths of old, one of the frequent archetypal stories that recur is the skilled veteran showing a rookie the ropes. When writer, historian, and stay-at-home dad Paul Herman ’87 took his first steps back on campus since graduation, as part of the Reunion 2026 Planning Weekend Aug. 1-3, he did not expect he would find himself in one of those stories, let alone as the rookie.
However, there wasn’t a doubt in veteran class agent Sarah Jolie’s mind that she’d found the right person to succeed longtime class agent Samantha Potter Bloom ’87.
And Jolie would know. The Oak Park, Illinois, resident has an intuitive sense about these things. A 1987 graduate, Jolie has been class agent for more than 30 years. She runs a mailing and fulfillment business that’s been in her family for generations and still finds time to volunteer and perform advocacy work in the Chicago area.
Members of the 1986 and 1987 Reunion Class Committees stood for a photo while back on campus for Reunion 2026 Planning Weekend. Sarah Jolie ’87 is pictured on the far left while Paul Herman ’87 is in the back row, third from right.
Herman, who serves on several nonprofit boards in the San Francisco Bay area, has gradually gotten more involved with Grinnell in recent years.
“I’m someone who is always searching for community and belonging,” he says. “I’m this person who transferred into Grinnell, felt tangentially connected to the College for many years, and I’m trying to represent that. I hope that people see themselves reflected in that.”
One of the reasons there’s been a connection, despite not returning to campus, is that Herman’s ties to Grinnell go back a century. His grandmother, Marjorie Dunton Herman 1921, attended Grinnell in the late 1910s and early 1920s. As part of honoring her legacy, Herman and his husband endowed an Alumni Recitation Hall (ARH) classroom inside the Humanities and Social Studies Center (HSSC) in Dunton Herman’s honor.
As Jolie and Herman got to talking at some point over the Reunion planning weekend, she popped the question: “Would you like to be co-class agent?”
Alums from the classes of 1986 and 1987 started to make plans for their 40th reunion next year while sitting in a Norris Hall lounge during the planning weekend in August.
Herman always envisioned that the class agent was a social butterfly or a person whose blood runs scarlet and black, but Jolie points out that the role is best suited to a “service driven” organizer.
“A really important part of being a class agent is understanding that there are more than 300 different Grinnell stories in our class,” Jolie says. “Paul reinvigorated the commitment to service in my head. He joined this [Reunion] committee because he wanted to be a voice for the core group of class members who have never written into the class letter or been back to campus since graduation.”
“That’s what so funny about this situation,” Herman says, “I’m a class agent who knows a handful of people in my class, but I represent this whole group of alumni, across class years, who are totally disengaged.”
Bringing Herman aboard now in some small ways mirrors the transition that many members of the class of 1987 are going through as they prepare for their 40th reunion next spring.
Jolie is joined for a photo with Daniel Backes ’87, who is one of the class of 1987 class fund directors, at the Humanities and Social Studies Center atrium.
“We’re either 60 already or in the process of turning 60,” Jolie says. “What I’m finding is it’s a time of transformation and a time of self-assessment. We are all sharing these big cultural shifts together. We can talk about these big touchstone moments amongst each other as long as we are respectful of the fact that people are all in very different places.”
Coming out of the Reunion planning weekend, Jolie has been tasked with writing what might be considered a non-traditional class letter. It’s going to include dispatches and updates from Herman (who is also a class fund director, abbreviated CFD), longtime CFDs Daniel Backes ’87 and Danielle Currier ’87, new CFDs Peggy Nelson ’87 and Doug Duvell ’87, and other classmates volunteering for the upcoming reunion. What they collectively hope to model is an open invitation to share slice of life updates.
“We’re interested in knowing where you are and what’s going on,” Herman says, a sentiment Jolie shares. “People are genuinely interested in each other. We’re not keeping score,” she says.
Although returning to campus this summer did bring back some of the butterflies associated with New Student Orientation for Herman, by the end of the weekend, all those feelings had dissipated because he found a group of alumni that was eager to reconnect.
“Some of us hadn’t seen each other in person in 40 years,” Jolie says, “but you’d never know it. It felt like no time had passed.”
—by Joe Engleman ’14