"They helped me think about the big life decisions, the kinds of things you talk about as an undergraduate," she says.

While Carty wanted to get out into the real world, Tewksbury says she felt compelled to go to law school, an arena just opening up to women.

"Going to professional school was just big," she says. "There was this incredible push to take advantage of that--somehow going to law school seemed [to mean] you could be more of an activist."

While working on her sociology senior thesis, Tewksbury watched a public defender working in a juvenile courtroom and was immediately inspired to enter the law.

"She handled the case like it was the most important case she had," Tewksbury recalls. "I thought, 'Jeepers, she really made a difference in the way justice was carried out."

Tewksbury joined the staff of former Massachusetts Attorney General L. Scott Harshbarger '64, then a district attorney; she remained in his office until his run for governor last year. Today she is a vice president and general counsel with the Justice Resource Institute in Boston.

Her volunteer position with the RCAA has at times seemed like a second job, where she has worked on and off since her 1984 reunion. But Tewksbury says working with her classmates and other Radcliffe women has been a pleasure.

"They are the reason that I've given 11 of the last 15 years to this institution," she says.

Bundles also returned to the Radcliffe fold at a class reunion, her fifth, when she became secretary of the class.

"I was living in Houston, feeling pretty isolated from lots of friends," she remembers. "Getting back to Cambridge...was a very pleasant experience for me."

She says Radcliffe was an essential resource for her as a young professional woman in the television news business.

"When we graduated everything seemed possible", she says. "We were supposed to go work in corporate America or be journalists and lawyers and doctors...but five or 10 years after school, we realized that the old-boys network hadn't fully opened up."

Bundles became a network news producer at NBC and later at ABC. During the mid-'80s she worked for "World News Tonight With Peter Jennings," and in 1996 she became deputy bureau chief of ABC News in Washington, D.C.

This February she stepped down from her job to work full-time on a biography of her great-great-grandmother, Madam C.J. Walker, a civil rights activist and pioneer in the hair care industry. An expert on Walker, Bundles successfully lobbied the U.S. Postal Service to feature her ancestor on a stamp last year.

Bundles says she enjoyed her time as a trustee of Radcliffe College in the late 1980s. So when Tewksbury and Carty approached her in 1997 to serve as first vice president of RCAA, she thought it sounded like a pleasant way to spend time in Cambridge.