Thomas Crooks

Crooks is a man who seems the tiniest fraction of a beat out of synch with Harvard, a man who describes himself as "sort of on the edge" of things here, as "not quite in the main stream."

"I waited patiently for the Lord," Priscilla Cushman was standing at the lectern in Appleton Chapel, wearing a solemn black robe and leading Morning Prayers: "and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry."

Thomas Crooks had just edged into a pew, carefully placed a small brown paper bag on the seat beside him, and opened his hymn book to the morning's responsive reading. "He brought me up also out of an horrible pit." Crooks mumbled along with the dozen other people in the dark, cool chapel, "out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings."

For fifteen minutes Crooks, the director of the Harvard Summer School, affirmed his faith in and debt to the Lord; as the services ended he stood and sang: "Guide me O thou great Jehorah. Pilgrim through this barren land: I am weak but thou art mighty: Hold me with thy powerful hand." The sentiments were noble ones, but of course one hardly takes that kind of thing literally any more: Morning Prayers is simply the sort of ritual Crooks enjoys about Harvard.

Mason Hammond, a retired Latin professor, enjoys Morning Prayers too--a great deal, more than Crooks himself. But the pleasure Hammond gets out of Morning Prayers seems to grow when other people are there, and he was clearly glad that morning to see Crooks, who sometimes goes to prayers and sometimes does not. "Good morning, Tomasso." Hammond told Crooks as the services ended. "How are you?"

Crooks swept up his paper bag, smiled, and said he was fine, perhaps thinking as he did that if it were not for Hammond there might not even have been Morning Prayers that morning. Last summer Crooks cancelled the prayers because so few people attended, but Hammond and others for whom the prayers had been a way of life for years protested gently and Crooks reinstated them. It was probably all for the better. Crooks enjoys the prayers himself, after all; one morning each summer he leads them himself.

After leaving Hammond, Crooks walked across the Yard to Matthews Hall, where he dropped off his paper bag, which contained two zucchini squash from his garden, at the office of the coordinator of the Health Careers Summer Program. Then he stopped in at Lehman Hall for a minute to borrow a morning Globe from Eddie Burke, the superintendent of Dudley House, where Crooks used to be master. He took the Globe into the Dudley Senior Common Room and quickly scanned it for a review of the previous night's Summer School concert; no dice. Walking out, Crooks called to Burke. "Oh Eddie, I forgot the Globe. I left it in the common room."

Burke smiled and waved him on and said, "That's okay master. I'll take care of it," so Crooks went on to work.

This is the slow time of year for Thomas Crooks: the director of the Summer School does the great bulk of his work during the regular academic year and doesn't have much to do during the summer. So he keeps a loose eye on things, stays in touch with the directors of his various subdivisions, and performs ceremonial functions--attending openings, representing the Summer School at official functions, and so on. After 20 years as a Harvard administrator and 15 as director of the Summer School it all begins to come easily, to develop into a series of comfortable routines whose pleasures lie in their repetition as much as in their content. In bringing him here, the Lord has with some assurance set Thomas Crooks's feet upon a rock, and established his goings.

But it is not all quite so perfect. Crooks is a man who seems the tiniest fraction of a beat out of synch with Harvard, a man who describes himself as "sort of on the edge" of things here, as "not quite in the main stream." He is director of a substantial fiefdom--but one very much apart from the rest of Harvard in time and in its basic assumptions and standards. He was a House master--but of the non-resident, catch all House. He graduated from Harvard, gaining a bona fide Ivy League background--but at the age of 31. And the particular patch of miry clay from which the Lord drew Crooks--a poor Appalachian coal-mining town in western Pennsylvania--seems, years later, more and more lovely, not the horrible pit Crooks once saw it as.

But here is Leonard Holmberg, with a problem. Holmberg, a silver-haired man with long sideburns who is the Summer School's registrar, has come into Crook's Holyoke Center office just after Crooks himself has gotten there: Crooks has barely had time to glance approvingly at the rave review in the morning Herald of the previous night's concert.

"Hi, Tom," Holmberg says. "The kids in Canaday are complaining about how it's too hot in there." Like most administrative problems, this one involves money. Canaday Hall is the only air-conditioned dorm in the Yard, but the air-conditioning is turned off because the students living there wouldn't pay extra for it. But since the dorm is air-conditioned it has few windows and, in short, the students have changed their minds. The problem is that it costs money, money the students didn't pay, to turn the air-conditioning on now.

Crooks begins to take care of it, weaving his way through the Harvard bureaucracy. It has to be done carefully; Crooks knows that certain administrators, the ones who will have to pay for the air-conditioning, will be harder to persuade than others. So he begins with the Buildings and Grounds Department and makes little headway. "This is Thomas Crooks," he tells one man's secretary. "Director of the Summer School, C-R-O-O-K-S. Yes. It's about the air-conditioning in Canaday Hall. It's 495-2921." They don't know him over there.

Forced to officials of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Crooks ends up with Bruce Collier, assistant dean of the College for housing. "Hi, Bruce," he says. "This is Tom Crooks. The bathrooms over in Canaday are starting to get muggy, and I think we should push the button over there."

"The key word," Crooks says after hanging up, "is bathrooms. You've just got to keep hitting bathrooms."

The problems have always been the same, but things used to be different for administrators like Crooks; everyone else in the University has been touched by the recession and the way President Bok's administration has dealt with it. "It's hard for us in administrative positions to deal with," he says. "Before, we used to know everybody. We knew how to deal with them. Our pain threshold is very low on economic matters. We hurt quickly. After thirteen years of benign neglect there's some positive, detailed interference in ways there wasn't before."

The particular import of all this for Crooks is the way it affects the Summer School, which, being like Crooks on the edge of things here, is less than sacred to financially pinched administrators. So Crooks is worried--worried that in pulling back to essentials Harvard will leave the Summer School behind, that it will "exploit" summer students for high fees, that the nature of the Summer School will change substantially. "The central concern of the Faculty," says Crooks, who has just learned that Summer School enrollment had dropped nearly one quarter from last year, "is to pull into itself. That leads to excessive tuition and the kind of excessive control that makes it undesirable to run a summer school."

He is thinking, therefore, of changing the Summer School a little himself, of making it a little less dependent upon the Faculty. Now the Summer School is straightforward and traditional in much of what it offers, mostly as a concession to Harvard students who want to get credit for summer work. The Summer School course catalog even has to get the Faculty's approval every year, something that's routine but nevertheless says something about the way things stand. So Crooks thinks about making summer courses shorter or more innovative, perhaps emphasizing more and more the arts-related courses that have become so popular and successful lately. It's a delicate situation--at bottom Crooks needs Harvard, but he's straining at his reins a little at the same time.

Very little of this--not even the fact that Crooks is worried--will get through to John Dwinell, the director of the Harvard Graduate Society, an alumni organization for people who studied for their doctorates here. Dwinell, a large and florid man, has a proposition for Crooks this morning--or, more bluntly, he needs a favor. Dwinell's constituency now gets half-price on Summer School tuition, but he's trying to put together a special package to increase their loyalty to Harvard.

"I don't know John," Crooks tells him. "I'm under pressure to produce no deficit, possibly even a surplus. I have to be careful about freebies."

"So you couldn't have a reduction from half-fare?"

"I don't think so."

"The best way is just to inform them of the opportunity." Dwinell stops and thinks a while. "What can I do to make them come? They've already got Ph.D.s. Why come?"

"Nostalgia. Continuing research."

Dwinell is puzzled; he shakes his head and says. "But Tom, many of them have unpleasant memories of Harvard."

The last think Crooks wants to be is brusque, so he offers a suggestion: a deal with Widener Library. "But John," he says gently before Dwinell leaves, "nobody is going to cooperate unless it means some dough. You know that."

Dwinell, who is trying to start a scholarship fund for graduate students, nods.

* * * * *

Dwinell was Crooks's last appointment of the day, so now he has a chance to think, and he leans back and looks around. His office is big enough to embarass him; it has a desk, two tables with chairs around them, and views in two directions, and it is not especially homey or cluttered. Crooks is a big, leathery-faced man, and when he stalks around the office he looks the slightest bit uncomfortable.

He wanders over to a wall, where there are a set of photographs of Seminole, the town in Pennsylvania where he was born in 1917, a town he has only recently developed enough affection for to want to hang pictures of it on his wall. It's a dead town, a coal-mining town, and Crooks had nine sisters and brothers and a poor miner for a father. Crooks was the youngest son, and his mother decided he would never go into the mines like his brothers; so she hired a man named Mr. Henry who smelled like vanilla extract to give Crooks piano lessons, and she hoped.

At first it didn't work: Crooks steered clear of the mines, but after high school he went instead into the brickyards, which were even worse. After a while a new foreman came on the job, the son of the owner. "He was a fancy son of a bitch," Crooks says. "He used a cigarette holder, and it turned out he had been to Harvard grad school. I was really resentful of him at first, but we got to be friends. He introduced me to books."

Thanks to his new friend. Crooks got a softer job as a shipping agent in a neighboring brickyard, a job he held until World War II broke out and he jumped at the chance to get out of Pennsylvania. He became an Army officer, serving combat duty in Italy until at daybreak one morning he walked over a hill where some of his men were setting up a new position to find a lot of Germans pointing machine guns at him. He was captured; they took him to a prison camp in Poland for a year.

"I was constantly afraid," he says. "Once you surrender in combat you really give up. The one thing you decide to do is survive. The first thing the Germans said to me was, `for you, the war is over.' And it was. You become a survivor."

So Thomas Crooks survived, and the war ended, and he went back to Pennsylvania and decided to go to Harvard. He applied here and they rejected him, so he went to Carnage Tech. got good grades, applied to Harvard again, got in, and joined the Class of '49, never to return to Pennsylvania for any length of time again.

By the time Crooks graduated he was 31, married with a baby boy, naive and idealistic. He got a job as assistant dean of freshmen here and joined the reserves and thought about peace until the Korean War broke out and he was called up. He served at West Point, teaching, and came back in 1954, job hunting.

One day Crooks was walking by University Hall, and Dean John U. Munro leaned out the window. "Hey Tom," he said, "you want a job?"

"With who?" Crooks yelled back.

"Ford Motor."

"No way."

Thinking it over, perhaps becoming master of Dudley House was what did it, what committed Crooks to a life at Harvard.

But after some talking Crooks went to work for Ford Motor, in Somerville. He says he enjoyed it, but when Harvard called two years later he jumped at the chance to come back and has been here ever since. He was director of student placement, assistant director of the Summer School, dean of special students, master of Dudley House and director of the Summer School, a career on the edge of the University but a long way from Seminole all the same. Thinking it over, perhaps becoming master of Dudley House was what did it, what committed Crooks to a life at Harvard; he remembers spending a long time deciding whether to take that job.

All this talking about himself makes Crooks a little uncomfortable. As a man gets older he has more license to do that sort of thing but it still doesn't seem quite right. So Crooks is glad to see Martha Armstrong Gray, the director of the Summer School's dance program, come in to chat, it gives him a chance to think about something else.

Gray is an enthusiastic woman. "It's been a wonderful summer," she says. "Just great."

Crooks decides to say something that has been on his mind: he couldn't really understand the last Summer School dance program.

Gray seems a little taken absent "Do you make sense out of surrealist painting?" she says.

"I just didn't know what was going on."

"Some people said it was the best dance they had ever seen."

"Well, I just don't know about dance."

"Dance," Gray says, "is not accessible to people. It always bothers me, when people feel inadequate at a dance concert. I found it very moving. It was very minimal but I find great humanity and sadness in it."

Crooks nods absently. He is surviving and not thinking a great deal about humanity and sadness, although the two work their way through his life constantly, without his having to call them forth. He has a new wife and child to think about--she was the Dudley House Senior Tutor's secretary, and he married her one day four years ago during lunch hour--and the Summer School to look after. When he comes right down to it perhaps the thing Crooks likes best about the Summer School is its open admissions policy, the way it lets anyone who wants to (and, Crooks admits, has the money) sample Harvard. Running a program like that is like holding on to the good parts of Harvard and letting the other parts of it go, even if it does mean feeling peripheral sometimes.

That morning's mail had brought a nice note from Rodney Peterson, the young minister at, Memorial Church who runs Morning Prayers during the summer. Peterson had written Crooks in impeccable handwriting to thank him for leading the prayers a few weeks before.

"Dear Mr. Crooks," the letter had said. "You are part of one of the oldest continuing traditions at this University--and one not without significance, particularly in these troubled times."CrimsonMary B. Ridge