25th Reunion Group Recalls Harvard Variety

John Spooner '59, a writer and investment banker, recalls a deal he made with his six freshman roommates a quarter of a century ago. "Everyone in that room wanted to write a novel," he says. "We had one title that would belong to the first published writer among us: 12 Minutes to Park Street." The title now belongs to Spooner, who says he is still toying with possible storylines.

When many of Spooner's classmates look back at their Harvard years, they come up with phrases that sound like flashy book titles.

To Kenneth Auchincloss, now the managing editor of Newsweek, Harvard infused its students with "a fierce independence." Guido Goldman, the director of Harvard's Center for European Studies, recalls "the pluralism of the experience." Peter Brooks, a professor of French and comparative literature at Yale, remembers "that certain elegance." Robert Watkins III, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., recalls alliteratively, "the supreme sense of self-confidence." And Missouri-born Perry Smith, then the president of the Lampoon and now an Episcopal priest, sums up his college experiences as if they were part of a fable: "Little midwestern boy came and made good."

To playwright Arthur Kopit, whose works include Wings, Nine, and the current End of the World, four years at Harvard defies encapsulations. What would he title a play about his undergraduate career? "I don't like nostalgia," he says. "I find

It's a dangerous emotion. It's not productive" Besides, he adds, "Harvard's a rarefied place" He pauses.

"It's like," he says finally, "a magic mountain."

The Class of '59's recollections traffic freely from one unlikely coordinate to the next; from Joan Baez to Fidel Castro, from Santa Claus to bubble baths to fierce religious controversy. "You could do whatever you wanted," recalls the playwright David Rintels.

These men were part of the generation too young for Korea and "just too old for Viet Nam." Spooner says. "We were never threatened the feeling then was 'we are immune to everything and everything wonderful was going to happen to us.' That's what my first novel was about," he continues. He reflects for a moment, "Actually, that's what most first novels are about."

"The first freedom ride was just around the corner. Goldman recalls "People were just beginning to think that ideals and political action were not so separate."

The Class of '59's years here began with one fiery event--the tower of Memorial Hall burned down after their freshman exams--and ended with another: Fidel Castro's speech outside the Harvard Stadium in the spring of their senior year. "His speech was demagogic." Hawkins says of the Cuban leader's appearance shortly after his rise to power. "Afterwards, when the series of executions in Cuba became known, attitudes changed radically. But then he was simply a visiting celebrity."

Within this time frame, the Class of '59 welcomed the opportunity to be "opened up like a sardine can," as Spooner says to listen to Joan Baez, who sang regularly at Tullah's a coffee house on Mt. Auburn Street.

Kopit's history with Harvard undergraduate theater indicates the unlimited opportunities of those days. "There was so much original theater," he says of a time when three or four new productions went up each weekend. "We felt very fortunate that there was no official drama department. With the Loeb came an institutionalization of theater," he adds.

While Kopit says he recognizes the advantages of the Loeb, and welcomes its presence, he remains grateful that, 25 years ago, "we had to do it all. There was freedom to fail. The sheer pleasure of working in Harvard theater has rarely been matched."

Students staged several of Kopits's plays, including On the Runway of Life. You Never Know What's Coming Off Next, and Oh, Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad, which went on to become one of his first critical successes.

Kopit also recalls a tradition of Christmas plays, performed just before the winter break. He wrote one, entitled Don Juan in Texas. "It had to do with getting some Radcliffe girls in a bubble bath," he says.

Harvard students had less contact with Radcliffe women in those days, due in part to the strictly enforced parietal rules, which allowed women in men's dorms only during certain hours.

"They were a very profound concern of the College's administration." Goldman recalls of the rules. "I don't think they were broken too frivolously."

Rintels remembers one Lowell House classmate "whose girlfriend lived with him--if you didn't flaunt it, it was okay."

But, says Auchincloss, "There weren't hell of a lot of women crawling through windows "Hawkins agrees. "It was much more special to call up a Radcliffe woman for a date then than it must be now."

Perry Smith also spent a lot of time writing, but he too found time for non-literary events at the Lampoon Spooner, also a Lampoon alumnus, recalls that during Phool's Week, the organization's initiation period. Smith "dressed a Phool up as Santa Claus and had other Phools attack him in downtown Boston."

Passersby were so distressed by the sight that they soon came to Santa's aid and joined an increasingly unwieldy melee. "We were quickly bailed out of jail." Spooner says.

In addition, the Lampoon, as Smith remembers, was the only organization at that time that had an open, free bar "I dare say," he adds, "that a lot of destroyed livers can be traced to that."

The social life of Harvard in the late '50s receives mixed reports from these former classmates. Yale's Professor Brooks, a member of the Fly Club, recalls that there was a "tremendous amount of drinking. Not to get drunk, but it seemed that there was a cocktail party every night of the week during the Spring, somewhat reminiscent of Brideshead Revisited." Yale, he says, is, "on the whole grubbier and lacking in that certain elegance and anglophilia that Harvard's always maintained."

Members of Harvard's exclusive final clubs probably experienced such elegance more frequently than non-members. But both alike say the final clubs exerted, at most, a minimal force on campus. Auchincloss, a member of the Spee, says the clubs were set off from the rest of campus life "because people who weren't in them didn't give a shit. The feeling was take them or leave them. I don't think they were hotbeds of racism of anti-Semitism. They were oases of preppiness.

Kopit says, "it was a bit harder for someone who was Jewish to get into the Pudding. I think there was some kind of bias, but not a strong one."

"I wasn't interested in, nor did I have the money to be in a final club," Watkins says. "As a Black, it was difficult for me in a number of ways, but not bad. I didn't have any terrible experiences. The world beyond Harvard was more conscious of my skin color than Harvard was," he concludes.

At least one member of the class of '59 recalls an unwelcome exclusivity. "I had no money and no car," says Frederick Davis, now a psychoanalyst in Washington. "It was quite intimidating. My House master was quite haughty."

One graduate notes the disturbing underside of the pervasive freedom on campus then. "Harvard assumed you were ready for freedom, whether or not you were," says Rintel, whose works include Clarence Darrow on Broadway, and the television screenplay of Gideon's Trumpet. "Harvard says, in effect, 'you do whatever you want while you're here.' And I did. I played poker every night and didn't go to class nearly enough. I drifted Advice was there only if you actively looked for it. It's easy to slip through the crack," he says. Finally after his freshman year. Rintels took time off.

"When I returned, I was a much better poker player," he says.

A handful of serious causes also inspired students in the 50s. In 1958, after a feature on religion ran in The Crimson, a controversy arose over who could and could not be married in Memorial Church. The church's minister, George Buttrick. The Crimson reported, wanted the church reserved for Christian ceremonies. As Nelson remembers, Crimson editors didn't realize the provocative nature of Buttrick's views, which were buried in the article. Soon afterwards, the Crimson published a letter objecting to Buttrick's views, and then one supporting the chaplain. The second letter came from then-President Nathan Pusey '28, who wrote. "Harvard's historic tradition has been a Christian tradition."

"We didn't understand what kind of deep emotions we had touched." Nelson now says, The president's letter ushered in "a very stormy period." Auchincloss recalls "fierce denunciation of the chaplain." Students protested, and 16 professors--including Arthur M Schlesinger '38 and John Kenneth Galbraith--expressed their objections to Pusey in a hand-delivered letter. Ultimately, Harvard's corporation reversed the church's policy.

Other issues were treated with less intense concern--for instance, whether Radcliffe diplomas should have Latin inscriptions.

On the eve of their 25th reunion, some alumni draw parallels between their Harvard and the College today. "What strikes one is the cyclical movement of history, towards the sociability that one knew back then in the late '50s," Brooks says.

Goldman also emphasizes cycles. A collegiate atmosphere is something "like the fashion industry," he says. "Skirts can go up only too high and can only go so low. It's got to be between those poles. That fact accounts for the similarities between today and those years." The intervening period--the eventful '60s--offered "too much emancipation and too few rules; you get tremendously open experiences. It's very easy to go berserk--to use drugs, to do your own thing. "We can't run society on that silly slogan," he says.

To be sure, Goldman sees changes as well. He remembers taking a course on the United States and world affairs. "I teach that course now, with Stanley Hoffmann. And it's a very hard course today," he says, "Back then, it was a gut."

If any of these graduates were to write a novel about Harvard today, they'd need to incorporate other changes, too. A favorite Cambridge haunt--Cronin's--no longer exists. In its place stands Holyoke Center. Hawkins, among others, isn't too impressed by the area's new modern architecture, and he bemoans what he calls the "Aspenization of Cambridge."

"Of course," he adds. "Harvard's so massive that it anchors the whole area."

Several graduates recognizes that Harvard has also anchored their lives. Watkins says he attributed "any accomplishments I've had, to a significant degree, to the fact I went to Harvard." And Davis says that though he felt intimidated and made few friends as a student. "I got what I wanted and I'm as proud of my Harvard diploma as anything in my life. No one in my family had gotten anything like that before.