My Old House: 57 Woodland Ave.

Sometimes it seems like UD has an  acronym for everything. It was no different for the group of six guys of 57 Woodland Ave., a Marianist Student Community house. They created their own — IMMs.

Otherwise known as “intimate man moments,” laughed Father Nathaniel “Peter” Szidik, O.S.B. ’11.

The pale yellow house just a block down from Woodland Cemetery served as a hub for weekly IMMs — sharing spaghetti dinners, games of euchre and Risk, sleeves of Oreos, raw cookie dough and Cousin Vinny’s Pizza and lounging for hours on the second-floor balcony. And it was during one of these IMMs that a pretty brilliant idea was born.

To serve the UD community in line with the Marianists, Szidik and housemates Brandon Meyer, Kyle Rodden, Grant Turek, Ryan Fitzpatrick and Karl Eckberg — all Class of 2011 — came up with an idea that was just quirky enough to work. The group made highlighter-yellow shirts with three simple words: Free Hug Friday.

“We had tried a couple attempts of community engagement, but nothing really stuck quite like Free Hug Friday.”

“We had tried a couple attempts of community engagement, but nothing really stuck quite like Free Hug Friday,” Eckberg said. “It was a simple idea, but having these neon yellow shirts that metaphorically shouted out ‘you matter to me!’ in a fun and goofy way embodied our own household charism.”

The whole house wore the shirts every Friday throughout their junior year as they went about their day giving hugs around campus. 

The shirts were also a main feature of the house’s pierogi party. So many pierogies were made that day that they lost count, they said, but they do remember their “neon shirts ablaze” on the corner of Woodland Avenue and Alberta Street.

“Free Hug Friday was so well-received that we continued the idea into our senior year, expanding it to include the other Marianist Student Community houses on campus,” Meyer said. 

After the men graduated, the Office for Mission and Rector worked with the Marianist Student Communities to continue Free Hug Fridays, and eventually the tradition — and the blinding shirts — spread to the rest of campus. 

Through their IMMs and too many Free Hug Fridays to count, the men forged what they called a “lifetime of brotherhood.” The alumni — two priests, a pediatric neurologist, an engineer, a pediatrician and a Catholic school admissions director — still gather for family vacations nearly every year. A lifetime of brotherhood, indeed. 

Illustration by Kevin Johnson.