Brooks House Bridges Town-Gown Gap

Paradoxically, Harvard students have earned a nation-wide reputa-for their indifference to one another and to the world in general while at the same time they have built up in Phillips Brooks House a voluntary student organization unrivalled in size and activity by any similar organization at other American colleges.

Fostering social service work is for PBH much more than popularizing another hobby, Harvard may some day have to appeal for financial assistance from the state. Whether or not some politician will then win a campaign on the slogan "bread by bleeding Harvard" will be in part determinded by the success or failure of the PBH philosophy of student-sponsored community service. If the masses of the ordinary working people in Greater Boston feel that the University's work among them is indispensable, they can be trusted never to use their enormous voting power for taxing the wealth of Harvard, and thus despoiling its cultural and intellectual riches.

An indication that the idea of social responsibility is gaining against the traditional class aloofness of Harvard undergraduates is the number of students who contributed their time and energy in some form or other last year to the numerous PBH projects. The total reached 425, a solid 100% increase over corresponding figures in the pre-depression years.

Surrounded by Slums

South End House, founded at the turn of the century in a melting pot of immigrant Syrians, Armenians, Canadians, French Canucks, Italians, Germans, and Scandinavians, is representative of the 38 settlement houses and other agencies to which PBH sends most of it's social service workers. Reputedly the largest boarding house area in the world, the South End district produces hundreds of kids whose only haven from the littered streets is a scanty number of recreational and instructional centers similar to the South End House.

Last year only two undergraduates--the average is six or seven-- worked steadily at the South End House. Once a week Daniel R. Pinkham '44, whose hobby is musical instruments of any vintage, laid aside his books and commuted by subway to the settlement house, where he tutored the Jamacia Negro Mothers' Club in music. During the beginning of the year he spent most of his time playing records to his dusky, matronly pupils, then inviting their comment and criticism. When they had gained some acquaintance of strange instruments, he brought a clavicord, fore-runner of the grand piano, and played music appropriate to the tinkly, 19th-century instrument. By the time the year was out. Pinkham had built up a choral group from his Jamaica Negroes and conducted them in numerous performances before audiences invited to the House.

Coached Pugilists

Charles D. Frey, Jr. '40 worked throughout the year with a boys' boxing class of kids from 13 to 16 years. While the pugilists went at one another with their overstuffed mits, Charley gave them pointers in the art and refereed.

One of the liveliest of the 10 committees and sub-committees that carry on the work of PBH is the Speakers' Committee which sponsored several talks in the West End House last year, along with some 150 others in high schools and settlement houses on subjects ranging from public health (by Med School students) to life in the Orient (by an undergraduate from Japan). Magicians, clowns, musicians, and other entertainers recruited by the Speakers' Committee filled the entertainment side of the ledger.

Slum kids have an animal instinct for sizing up a leader, but few Harvard students have difficulty in establishing their authority over the groups they work with, providing they aren't provoked easily by youthful antics, and are quick to enforce the rules of the House. Good clothes and a college education are strong elements in prestige. Photography, dramatics, radio, boxing and wrestling, and mechanics are but a few of the many hobbies and fields of instruction taught at the settlement houses by undergraduate social service workers.

Supplementary to the settlement house work is that done by the Undergraduate Faculty, a group of students who volunteer to tutor Boston's high school glads in subjects which will either fit them better for a career or for future college work. Each student professor is responsible for a tutee and instructs his one-man class in his own rooms one night a week. Twelve per cent of the men given instruction by the growing Undergraduate Faculty eventually end up in college, a high figure considering the unfavorable financial position of most.

Not all PBH activities aim at assisting Boston's underprivileged young. For several years members of Lampy's literary staff, including W. Russell Bowie '41 and Elliot Richardson '42, have been carrying on the polite tradition of playing whist and cribbage with the greybeards of the Old Man's Club in the Ellis Memorial. Anyone three-score years and five on up is eligible.

Graduates as well as undergraduates have been organized. The Dental School Committee, composed of fourth-year dental students, last year overhauled an estimated 1800 sets of teeth belonging to children whose parents were either too ill-informed or poverty-stricken to send them to a dentist. A similar function was performed by the Medical School Committee, which has established a program of physical exams in the settlement houses and will set up a clinic in Dorcester House this year.

Experimental Laboratory

As a laboratory for projects and reforms which for one reason or another the University refuses to sponsor, PBH has often proved its value to the University. Three years ago Brooks House set up the post of Student Councillor to assist these numerous students who had difficulty in adjusting themselves to College life and yet can neither be sent to the Dean's Office as "flunks" or to the Hygiene Department psychologists as "nuts". Hardly coincidental is the fact that five months later the Dean's office completely revised the Freshman advisory system and created a Bureau of Supervision under Stanley Salmen '36.

Before 1935 one of the thorniest problems facing PBH and the University was what to do with the commuters. Brooks House had taken pity on them and supplied an eating hall and meeting place in the basement, where the draft board now sits. The University was satisfied; the commuters were content with the best they thought they could get; but work around PBH came to a standstill. Commuters were everywhere and the social service work specified by the deed of trust under which the House was given slowed down to low gear and threatened to stop altogether, during the very post-depression years when it was most needed.

As the school year 1934-35 neared its close, PBH sent the Corporation an ultimatum; the commuters were to be ejected at the end of the year. With the threat of a lockout hanging over their heads, the Corporation officials gave in $35,000 was discovered somewhere despite previous pleas that no such funds existed, and next year the commuters moved into Dudley Hall.