The Life and Times of Stephen Potter

Editor's Note--What follows is the true story of some elusive happenings recent but fading Harvard members. To protect the guilty, names of all but the hero remain shrouded.

The birth of Stephen Potter '61, '62 was one of those rare accidents of story: Some people are obviously born to fill a definite place in society, but it is given only to the very few to born to fill a place on a door.

In the fall of 1960, three roommates and themselves for some reason occupying a four-man suite in the brand-new Leverett Towers. Their three names, which each contained the same number of letters, were aligned with aesthetic precision in space on the door which had been designed for four names. They were physicists, and the solution to their spacial problem was apparent at once. From this inauspicious beginning emerged a unique Harvard career. Stephen Potter never became a Harvard legend, for his creators never sought or received the fame of the Princeton undergraduates who got a non-existent student admitted to college. Most people who saw--and are still seeing--Stephen's name never had any idea that he had no body. Stephen's physical person consisted of the three minds of his creators and a stylized signature that any of them could duplicate.

Potter Described

Two of the roommates are still Harvard graduate students, and the third has disappeared. Talking to the two gives you almost no idea that Potter was not their real roommate. He was, both agree, about 6 ft. 1 in.; 180 lbs.; light brown hair; from Newton, Iowa; and "extremely intelligent"--he graduated summa. He was also "eccentric, egotistical and shy." "Now when did he write that letter?" one asks the other. "Didn't he write it around November?" he answers.

Stephen Potter's career first received public notice for what was to be his most far-reaching exploit. In November, 1960, a three-column story appeared in the CRIMSON that began: "The University's most modern Houses are draining exorbitant sums of money from the University's pockets, but nobody seems to know what to do about it." This news was attributed to "anonymous students," but in fact its source was a letter Stephen Potter had written to the CRIMSON the week before. In the letter he explained that students living in Leverett Towers never bothered to turn off the three 150-watt spotlights with which the rooms were equipped because they didn't have to pay the electric bill. On the basis of a three-week personal survey of Leverett lighting habits, Potter wrote, he had calculated that wasted electricity cost the University $10,000 a year, "enough for full tuition scholarships for eight needy students."

The CRIMSON threw in Quincy House and jacked the wasted electric bill--Potter and friends never knew how--to $65,000 a year, concluding the story by noting that "the ultimate solution will be putting smaller light bulbs in the sockets."

The Result

Weeks later, Buildings and Grounds replaced all the 150-watt bulbs with 75-watt lights, which is the way they have stayed ever since. (President Pusey, speaking at Leverett soon after the change, reportedly told his audience, "You can ask me about anything--except the lighting situation.") "We never intended anything like it," Potter's creators say now. They think that the loss of bright lighting on the curtained windows "spoiled the look of the Towers."

Stephen wrote many other letters to the CRIMSON. Only one, a protest about the inadequate supply of tickets to a swimming meet, was published. "The Yale swim tickets were distributed with exceptional inefficiency ...," the letter said. "As a personal protest, I intend to boycott the meet. In fact, I'm considering going on a three weeks' hunger strike."

Fame brings embarrassing problems to someone in Potter's position, and one of the trickiest was a letter he wrote that was published in Sports Illustrated, the Boston Herald, the Globe, and the New York Herald-Tribune. Potter had discovered that Roger Maris had indeed broken Babe Ruth's record of 60 homeruns in 154 games, since he had hit none at all in the first nine games of the 163-game season, and 61 in the last 154 games, a season no longer than Ruth's. A Maris fan wrote to Potter and invited him to dinner in appreciation of the service he had rendered to baseball history. His creators, not knowing what to do, ignored the letter. A second came, and finally Potter wrote back to tell the disillusioned fan that really he didn't care about Roger Maris and was too busy to come to dinner.

Not all of his letters got results. In the spring of '61 there were rumors that Weld Hall, the one-time freshman residence of both Potter's friends and John Kennedy, might be remodeled. Potter sent a third carbon plea, carefully typed to look like a form letter with a "Save Weld Committee" letterhead, to President Kennedy. The letter explained that Weld should be preserved in its original state as an historic monument because "a President of the United States slept there." Unlike almost every piece of mail the White House receives, the letter never received any acknowledgement.

Potter must have suspected at times that the guilty secret of his non-existence was out. His name was in the CRIMSON telephone book, and one day a girl called and invited him to a mixer in Holmes. His friends said that Stephen was at the library, and when he tried to call her back later he was told that she was at the library. That was the closest he was able to come to a normal social life.

One of Potter's creators' friends, an alumnus of Eng Sci 110, decided to join him on his adventures and started turning in problem sets with Potter's name to Eng Sci 110. The solutions were always perfect, and the professor almost always referred to them in class and posted them as models, sometimes saying hopefully "If Stephen Potter is here, will he please come forward?" One of the lab assistants called him to ask why he never came to lab, and Potter had to admit that he wasn't registered for the course.

Potter's Picks

He was addicted to the radio, especially to one program on WHDH. Every week the announcer quoted from "Potter's Picks of the Week" sent to him by Stephen. One day he played a song called "Velvet Nights." Potter's friends knew someone who had been a delegate to the 1957 World Communist Youth Meeting, where "Velvet Nights" had been called "Midnight in Moscow" and had been the meeting's theme song.

Potter wrote the station a fiery letter denouncing the subterfuge involved in changing the name and not letting listeners know it was a Communist song. A while later, when the station played the song on a different label, which in fact did use the name "Midnight in Moscow," Potter wrote to the announcer that the song would be extremely popular now that it had an honest title. It was, because his friends sent one or two postcards a day, with different handwritings, requesting the song. By the end of the week, the announcer reported that "Midnight in Moscow" was the most requested instrumental in Boston.

WHDH offered a prize for the funniest saying sent in. Potter wrote, "In the Heisenberg representation of quantum electrodynamics, the radiative corrections to the scattering matri are best evaluated using the anti-commutater of the renormalized Green's function with its irreducible Spinner invariant." It didn't win, but the announcer read it on the air because "it sounded profound."

Potter, who was originally slated to graduate in '62, had his class changed to '61 so he could graduate and move into Child Hall with his friends. There, for two football seasons, he posted "Potter's Prognostications" outside his first-floor room. People got in the habit of walking by the room every week, because his system proved accurate about 75 per cent of the time (professional sportswriters average about 66 per cent accuracy).

But in graduate school Potter, like so many others, began to feel old and jaded. He sent an engagement notice to the New York Times, which did not print it; thus the engagement was broken. His name stopped appearing on letters. One of his creators got married and moved out of Child.

But Potter, in retirement, has achieved the highest form of immortality--he is now part of a computer program. His Eng Sci 110 friend, now a programmer for a California company, wrote a computer program so that, after the user had made an absurdly simple mistake in working the machine, the computer would print out, "Congratulations! You have just committed the impossible error. Please notify Stephen Potter immediately at this address..." The program got world-wide distribution and a few weeks ago Stephen received a letter from a very embarrassed French Army Minister.

With a little judicious blackmail, Potter could bring an end to the terrible waste of electricity in the City of Light