Kennedy Letters Misplaced

Dorm crew members last June discovered three letters Robert F. Kennedy '44 wrote to his parents while he was a student in Winthrop House, dorm crew members said yesterday, but Harvard authorities have not received the letters and their whereabouts are unknown.

The letters, two of them or winthrop House stationery, and one with a military postmark, date from the early forties and mention Elsie's a clambake on Cape Cod, an intramural swim meet and a date with Ethel for the Yale basketball game. "School work was never discussed," said Henning P. Gutman '82 who found the letters on the topshelf of a closet in Winthrop "way in the back where you had to jump up to reach."

Gutman said yesterday he took the letters to the basement of I-entry, where the dorm crew brought "all worthwhile stuff" found in the rooms, and asked Marc Rotenberg '82, who was with him when he found the letters, to obtain an estimate of their value and turn them in to the proper authorities.

Rotenberg said dorm crew policy allows students to keep any untagged items they find, but he added he and Gutman were not sure who had rights to the letters. "The bottom line is that (the policy) is applicable, but in this case other factors were also involved."

Gutman said he "was never really concerned about great monetary gains," but "gladly would have made a claim on part of what the letters were worth," if Rotenberg had sold them.

Rotenberg, said yesterday, he gave the letters to Sheng-Bin Chiu '79, the dorm crew supervisor who graduated in June, and returned to Malaysia., "Maybe he took them back with him." Rotenberg added.

Todd C. Hennis '82, another crew member, said however he is "pretty sure" he remembers being with Chiu when he turned the letters in to the House superintendent.

Both the House superintendent and the House masters said yesterday no one told them the letters had been found. "I've never seen or heard about them. I'd like to know more about them myself," said Superintendent Ben S. Bartie. Bartie added, "No student has the right to touch anything until it's thrown out."

Virginia Q. Hutchison, co-master of the House last year, said she knew nothing about the letters even though she and her husband William lived at Winthrop for half the summer.

The letters have not been turned into the Houghton Library, the University Archives, the Massachusetts Historical Society, or the new Kennedy Memorial Library in Dorchester, curators at these institutions said yesterday.

In one of the letters, Kennedy told his parents to say hello to all his girlfriends back home, said Rotenberg

"They simply were filled with all the innocuous drivel one writes home to one's parents," Hennis said, adding, "It was great to touch a piece of history."

Rodney C. Dennis, curator of manuscripts at Houghton, said, "Even relatively unimportant scraps of Kennedy writing have fetched a good deal of money at auction."