It was a bone-cold December night. Gusts of wind up to 20 mph whipped snow about the campus, coating side walks and roads, while temperatures - hovered somewhere in the tundra range of zero to 5-below. The University of Dayton was open.
“The night we delivered the pizzas, we had a huge snow storm,” Roger Glass '67 remembered. “Our other locations closed at 9, but we stayed open to 11 o'clock because we promised. We did a little business while we were open, believe it or not."
Three weeks before that 2010 snowstorm, Class had received a mass e-mail informing him that Students Today, Alumni Tomorrow, an organization dedicated to bridging the gap between students and alumni, was soliciting $5 donations for pizzas to feed students during finals week.
Pizza? Glass could do better than a $5 donation; he's co-owner of seven Marion's Piazza stores. His father was the Marion Class who opened the company's first store in 1965, the Marion's location at Shroyer and Patterson, two miles from the UD campus.
Class called the number listed in the e-mail and asked just how much money they had and just how much pizza they needed — turned out they needed quite a lot.
When it came time for the delivery, the weather was so nasty Glass doubted anyone would be there to eat the 60 large one-topping pizzas he promised. But there were – around 600 of them; it was finals week and students were camped out at Roesch Library studying.
In two hours they devoured the 2,160 pieces of pizza that Class sold for the $400 raised for STAT by alumni like Matt McNamara '09 and 16 friends of his and former roommates.
“There's so much more to college than just going to class,” McNamara said. “Students need to build positive memories. As alumni we took it upon ourselves to make that happen.”
Pizzas in a snowstorm — further evidence of just how far out of their way alumni will go to help current students. And that’s what STAT is all about.