Your post brought back a flood of memories. My parents, too, had brought me to Syracuse at beginning of freshman year ... and had not returned until commencement weekend. Commencement weekend was not as organized back then as it became. As I recall, the ONLY organized event was commencement itself, followed by a luncheon for a select few graduates, their families, and various university officials, and the commencement speakers. (We had two; more about that later).
The night before commencement, my parents took me, my boyfriend and a couple with whom we were friendly, out to dinner at a funky place called Walter White's .. which has long since disappeared. I stayed in my sorority house that night (for the first time ever without a curfew). Commencement was held on a beautiful sunny day, Sunday June 2, 1963, outdoors in Archbold Stadium, featuring TWO commencement speakers. The university had engaged CP Snow (a British intellectual that we had never heard of) as the speaker. But my class, which was politically active, rejected that idea ... and independently we invited Adlai Stevenson (a recent two-time Democratic candidate for president) to be the speaker. So we had two, and both spoke again briefly at the subsequent luncheon (to which I and my parents were invited because I was on the senior class executive council).
My parents left that afternoon to return to Armonk, but I stayed around another day with some friends. One of them, a very close friend for four years named Milt Joffe, said to me as we said good-bye, "Have a nice rest of your life." I was like ... "What do you mean?" He replied, "We may never see each other again." I told him that was not possible. Sadly, he turned out to be right, and he died recently after a distinquished career at the Buffalo Evening News.
The next day, I sadly packed four years worth of belongings and set out for Armonk in my 13-year-old battered Dodge. Along the way, I kept switching radio stations trying to find some rock and roll, but all I found were news bulletins about the death of Pope Pius XXIII. Oddly, that is one of the clearest memories of my graduation weekend.