Munson Report Tells the Stories of The Class of 1942

William T. Munson '42 remembers the hurricane of 1938 well--it almost caused him to be William T. Munson '43.

The storm blew through Cambridge the day before the College was scheduled to register. "My father and I zig-zagged through New York and Massachusetts [the day after the hurricane] to get to registration," Munson says.

Memorial Hall, where registration was held, had closed 10 minutes before Munson and his father arrived in Cambridge. "When we got there, a woman in University Hall told us we would have to wait until next fall to enroll [because we were late]."

In the end, Munson recounts, a "higher authority" permitted the almost 100 late arrivals at the College to matriculate in light of the circumstances, much to Munson and his father's relief.

For Munson it is memories of events like the hurricane of '38 that tell the most about his class--more than statistics about money earned and children raised.

So when Munson set out to prepare his own class survey, he tried to do something different than the usual compilation of charts and tables. The end product is a collection of his class' memories of their college years and the years since, compiled into a 135-page booklet.

"We've been studying class reunion questionnaires of prior years, and frankly we're bored by compilations of responses emphasizing statistics and percentages," Munson writes in the booklet.

Munson received a 20 percent response to the questionnaire he mailed out to classmates last year. The questionnaire consists of 20 items, a blank answer form and a reply envelope. Members of the class of 1942 were asked to write about important events that had affected their lives.

The essays written in response to the questionnaire have been compiled in a booklet entitled "Project Major World Events," which will be distributed in the Houses during the Class of 1942 reunion. Munson will summarize the results in a speech during the festivities.

The hurricane of '38 generated some of the most vivid memories and emphatic responses, Munson says.

But scores of other events impressed the members of the class of '42 over the years, from Pearl Harbor to the Vietnam War.

Munson says he was surprised to find that his classmates focused their most detailed responses on pre-1950 events, answering questions on more recent events with much less depth.

The booklet deals very briefly with reactions to John F. Kennedy '40, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Persian Gulf War.

Questions about Vietnam War protests and the 1968 takeover of University Hall drew slightly stronger and more negative reactions. "I mean, we are still the Class of 1942 and all," says Munson.

Besides the hurricane, questions about the bombing of Hiroshima and the stock market crash of 1929 drew the most involved responses.

"I was in command of a ship off Saipan preparing for the invasion of Japan when a message came over the radio that a `powerful bomb' was dropped on Japan," says one of the essays in the booklet. "Even if they had said atomic bomb, none of us would have known what it was."

It was only after that day that the Class of 1942 understood what kind of destruction the atomic bomb had caused and what its implications would be, Munson says.

And some of the memories most vividly recalled by class members were not "Major World Events" at all, but those of day-to-day life around Cambridge.

The Old Howard

The "Old Howard," a shared movie theater/strip joint, was fondly remembered by both Munson and responding classmates.

"It was a ritual required before graduation to see the strip tease," says Munson.

Although he acknowledges that such an activity would be considered sexist today, he says for the Class of '42 things were different. Both women and men met at the Old Howard, Munson says.

"At that time it wasn't considered dirty," he says. "Women were not considered sex objects ... it was just a staple of Harvard life."