44 Years as College Janitor, Herbert Knew Lowell, Eliot

Back in the nineties, when Derby topped President Eliot roared around the Square in an open shay behind two snorting, black chargers for exercise, Harvard got its first candid of Frederick L. Herbert, who has now succeeded retired Billy Moser as the Longest-serving janitor in College.

When he started working here as a youngster back in 1898 in Roach Hall, at that time a mineralogy building, he didn't expect to stay around long, but lie's been here 44 years now and he's still as pompous as Snowball.

Known Three Presidents

Though he moved to University Hall too late to see much of then-President Eliot, he has been stationed for years in the same building with the late President Emeritus Lowell and President Conant, even moving to the latter's present office in Massachusetts Hall.

Of President Eliot, Herbert remembers little except his inevitable squashed hat and his bicycling around the Yard with his wife, but President Lowell was once the first to send flowers when a relative of Herbert's died. President Lowell never passed him without his proverbial "How do you do?" He thinks of him as a "very nice gentlemanly man."

Herbert remembers a great many things today that can't be seen around the Yard anymore, or anywhere about the college buildings. Where the law school building, Langdell Hall, and Pierce Hall are standing today, as though they had always been there, there was once a hockey rink and along track course. President Eliot's stable has how been replaced by the Music Building, and the old college hospital has been re-christened the 'Childrens Museum.'

One Change In Students

Although the College's veteran janitor believes that the students still consume their scotch and soda with the customary gusto, they have lost a tride of the barbarism which exposed itself thirty years ago. He used always to see lines of women's intimate belongings strung out along lines from Little Block to posts on the other side of the street.

Only the Square is almost completely unchanged. The old Square, with its Trust companies and barber shops, seems to Herbert to be reminiscent of 1900.

When Herbert was asked his opinion about whether the college would resume its former functions after the war, he said it hadn't been crippled in the last forty years and never would.

The immediate trouble is in Yard accommodations for military men, who come in, so it seems, in the thousands. Herbert told how in the last war most of them were quartered on Cambridge Common. A few were in the Yard then but "they didn't take up much room."