Among the nearly 5,000 parents who came to the campus on the weekend of September 30-October 2 to celebrate Boston College’s annual Parents’ Weekend was John O’Connell ’79, who visited his sophomore daughter Kate in Roncalli Hall Room 306, the same room he had occupied as a BC sophomore in 1976. O’Connell, an executive in the leather goods industry from Westwood, Massachusetts, said, “When we learned over the summer that she was assigned the same room, it was bizarre, a little spooky even. Roncalli was an all-male dorm when I lived there, all concrete and tile. Now there’s carpeting and new windows, but it pretty much looks the same. I told Kate that it’s the best room to be in on Upper Campus because it looks over a grassy area that we used to call ‘Roncalli Beach.’ We would put out chairs and couches on a Friday afternoon and drink beer and watch all the students go back-and-forth. It was a real student stomping ground.”