Dunster St. Favorite Son

Those were golden years when the high-caste "Goat's Nest" ruled loosely over an ultra-social Claverly Hall. Old Jim Cronin had put white marble-topped tables in his restaurant on Bow-Street, and on occasion those tables were moved together to seat about 60 Harvard professors and student cosmopolites for a high-life dinner. There were no singing waiters, certainly, but table was served by quite a few musical Divinity School students who, as Jim puts it, "have since become reverend doctors."

The Goat's Nest and the other groups which divided their time between Cronin's and the basement of Claverly were carried-over hell-raisers from another era which Jim remembers: the years of prohibition. Jim Seniors place was up on the Hill between Concord and Huron Avenues, doing a brisk food business near the then-buzzing Harvard Observatory. Old Cronin kept his hands off the local moonshine trade, and Cambridge presented him with its first liquor license when the dry years ended. The old man was a fiery red-head whose work in Ireland had netted him the title of "Rectifier of Liquors." He ran a chain of pubs in Cork and Queenstown, and "rectified" scotch and Irish whiskey to its correct proof after it was collected--much like milk from the farms--from the county's pot stills.

The younger Jim was born in Cambridge and has left here only twice: to go across the world with the Army Finance Corporation and to follow the B.C. football team to the Sugar Bowl game. "Cambridge," he claims, "is a fine town. People mind their own business, yet they have pretty good I.Q's: when I talk to someone here, I get more than a 'yup' or a 'nope' out of him. And half of the dishwashers are in town to study characters for their novels."

At the time when Cronin graduated from B.C., the U.S.S.R. was claiming that "Ali Baba and his forty thieves were still at work in the Mid-East," and that about half of its Lend-Lease allotments were being carried off by stealthy Arabs. Cronin went to work for the Documentation Branch of the Persian Gulf Command in Teheran, where he dealt extensively with the Russians. He had been educated at Catholic schools, and found that the Russian's actions "were the antithesis of everything I had ever been taught." At a time when most of the people with whom he worked thought that Russians "were the next best things to God," Cronin's written opinions on the Soviets set a horde of censors on his mail and made him feel, at one point, that a trial for treason might be around the corner. "We Americans tend to like everyone, and once upon a time I used to take Russia lightly. That ended the day I found Klaus Fuchs and the boys had sold them the bomb."

Cronin, who is now 38, says he takes things more seriously than he used to, and that the same is true of students who have been bending their elbows at Jim's Place in recent years. "These days, when glasses get broken, it's usually because of a waitress' miscue."

The menu at Cronin's has also reflected changes at the University. Straight Yankee cookery, solid meat and potatoes, have given way to "reversion to oddities": food of an "international tinge," as Cronin somewhat equivocally puts it. When oddities are brought from the kitchen, Cronin does not always know about them. Neat tenderloins of whale steak are lovingly brought in from the ocean, but Jim waxes unfelicitous when black-listed "oysters of turkey" find their way to the platters.

Food sales account for 70 percent of Cronin's gross, liquor the other 30 percent. About 1,120 gallons of beer come out of the tap each week. Cronin tends bar occasionally, and voices wise words for other bartenders: "Remain aloof yet attentive. Listen, but never give advice."

When the Health Center is built on Dunster Street and Cronin opens a new pub, it is sure to have one thing in common with the old one: the proprietor will be a candidate-in-good-standing for membership in the Men's Auxiliary of the W.C.T.U. Jim Cronin has never touched a drop, and probably never will. "When I was a boy they told me something in Latin about moderation. And I haven't been weaned from milk yet."

It was probably Omne nimium veritur in vitium.