Not What Had Been Expected

My undergraduate years at Harvard were an unconventional five years. And they were, in large part, spent far from the Harvard Yard.

As a third-generation Harvard man, I might have expected to share the same sort of fraternal activities my grandfather, father and countless cousins and uncles had enjoyed. I might have hoped to emulate brother John '29, who lived in a Gold Coast dorm, piloted the dramatic club through a couple of plays that were frowned on by Boston's censors, and "made Porcellian."

But that was before The Crash and the Great Depression that followed--and bore me in its wake. For me, Harvard was classes in the hallowed halls, chances to sample the well-honed observations of Kittredge, Lowes, Whitehead and Copeland. But it was also mile-long walks from my family home in North Cambridge, meals at a cafeteria in the Square, and long subway rides three times a week to my uncle's drugstore in South Boston, where I waited on customers two nights a week and all day on Sunday.

One bright aspect of that toil behind the drugstore counter was that, promptly at 9:15 every Sunday night. George Frazier '33 would stop in for a double-rich chocolate frappe. At first George, who later became a popular Boston columnist and Esquire magazine's jazz critic, would rave about the Guy Lombardo band he heard every Sunday night sponsored by Robert Burns panatella cigars. I soon changed Frazier's musical tastes permanently--and, I'm sure, for the better, by lending him some records by Louis Armstrong, Red Nichols and Bessie Smith.

My social life, such as it was, equally unconventional. A highlight of my freshman year was going, with three of my brothers, to a dance at Paul Revere Hall in the Mechanics Building around New Years. What made this very different from the tea dances my classmates might attend at the Copley Plaza was that my brothers and I and a trumpet player named Max Eaminsky were the only white people in the crowd welcoming Louis Armstrong for his first Boston appearance.

After my freshman year I met the man who, of all the Harvard faculty, made the greatest impression on me and my later career. He was my tutor, Francis Wayne MacVeagh. Although he never gained the fame of such contemporaries as Robert Hillyer and Theodore Spencer, he guided me to a true and lasting love of fine writing and he did it by the casual and then unconventional method of simply spreading a dozen or more books in front of me, saying. "Take them along, read any that interest you and ignore the rest. "From Francis learned to love oddities like Tristram Shandy's My Uncle Toby and to enjoy the wit and wisdom of Henry Fowler's Modern English Usage.

A dramatic change in fortunes (as Tristram Shandy's creator would say) awaited me in the fall of 1933. Just when my classmates were coming back to the Yard and the Houses for the last battle through the divisionals and on to Commencement, my money ran out. My scholarship and bursar's loans were not enough to cover expenses. So I became a college drop-out. 30 years before the expression was invented.

Drawing on my "expertise" acquired at my uncle's drugstore I quickly got a job at Liggett's North Station store--behind the soda fountain. It was a 56-hour week on rotating shifts for $15 a week. Not bad especially when you consider that females were paid $12 for the same gruelling schedule.

My only embarrassment came on night when a group of my older brother's classmates rejoicing in a win for the Bruins in the Boston Garden, landed at my counter. As I took their order, I kept expecting someone to ask, "Aren't you Johnny Morris's brother? What are you doing here?" But no one did, and I learned that night that a uniform cap and jacket make you invisible.

In the spring of 1934 I was fortunate to be chosen by Christina Hopkinson Baker, one-time presidential dean of Radcliffe, to be chauffeur-companion for her husband. George Pierce Baker, creator of Harvard's legendary 47 Workshop where O'Neill, Behrman, Woffe. Barry and other dramatists students, and founder of the Yale Department of the Drama Mr. Baker (he loathed being called "doctor") had had a mild stroke and needed someone to putter in the garden with him and take him on occasional drives through the mountains from his country home in Silver Lake New Hampshire.

Baker had been consultant to the Merriam Webster dictionaries for drama terms. In mid-summer his copy of the great Second Edition arrived and he had the massive twenty-pound volume placed on a side-board in the dining room. Mr. and Mrs. Baker, three very bright teenage grandchildren and I ate our meals together Scarcely a meal passed but some unusual word would come up for discussion. Then I would go to the dictionary, read the relevant definition, and the etymology, and we would bandy the word about. That's how I learned the riches that he hidden in most dictionaries (excepting, of course, my original American Heritage Dictionary).

One weekend Mr. Baker had me drive him to Dorset, Vt., where he was to judge a play competition between one-acters written by former pupils of his. The other judges were poet Alfred Kreyin borg and critic, wit and, in Baker's opinion, arch-poseur, Alexander Woollcott. Just as Mr. Baker had told me he would, Woollcott--even out in the sticks--insisted on holding the curtain 15 minutes, so he could make a dramatic appearance, swooping down the center aisle, complete with opera cloak and gold-topped walking stick.

As he entered the row of seats where Kreyne borg, Baker and I were seated, he gushed: "Doctor Baker, thrilled to see you again! May I introduce my secretary, Joseph Sweeney?" To which Mr. Baker replied: "And may I introduce my amanuensis, William Morris?"

No accolade was ever less deserved or more warmly welcomed.

After that summer with the Bakers, college was a bit of a let-down. A "B" student in my earlier years, I suddenly began to sprout "A's" on my blue books. My only outside job was chauffeuring Harvard's then-new president, James Bryant Conant '14, and his family--which entailed meeting many corporate executives at Back Bay Station en route to meetings of the Overseers. They all chatted amiably with their student chauffeur but the only advice I remember was from Charles Townsend Copeland when I drove him to what must have been one of his very last "Christmas readings."

"Remember, young man," he told me, as I am sure he had told hundreds of aspiring writers before me, "Writing is an excellent cane--but a very poor crutch!"

And here am I, fifty years later, finally writing for The Crimson.

William Morris is a writer and editor of the American Heritage Dictionary.