REMEMBERING 1947: LOOKING BACK ON HARVARD AND RADCLIFFE

The memory remains painfully vivid that it was a very hot and steamy day in July 1943 when what turned out to be the first what turned out to be the first wave of the Class of 1947 assembled in Cambridge.

Even now I see myself lugging my overstuffed suitcase through South Station, wearing a canvas hat and a double-breasted brown suit (bought by mail form Montgomery Ward) and feeling fairly ridiculous. My stepfather had said everyone in Cambridge wore hats, and it may have been true when he was at the Business School in the late '20s. I wore it in the rain occasionally. The suit I can only believe was born of some movie-influenced fantasy and I never wore it again.

The great majority of us were 17, hoping to taste at least a few months of college before we went into service. More than the July start was different for us. The freshman dormitories in the Yard were full of servicemen taking special courses, so we went right to the houses, a privilege traditionally reserved to second-year men.

In Lowell House, the realization that this was a special place and a special time hit you very quickly. There, trudging along the walks in deep preoccupation, was the antifascist scholar in exile, Gaetano Salvemini, and there was the elegant figure of Heinrich Bruning, the former chancellor of Germany, forced to leave in 1934 and on the Harvard faculty since 1936. We weren't in Kansas anymore, Toto, nor in Oswego County, N.Y., which was more to the point.

We all took the dreaded English A anticipatory Exam and I flunked it, a dubious start for a would-be writer. But it was a well-disguised blessing, and the strict standards of my English A section man (his face remains, his name is gone) imposed a discipline on my thought as well as my prose that I realized was overdue.

There were women in all the big lecture classes, but having come from a co-ed high school, this was not a culture shock, but a pleasant confirmation of the way things should be. I didn't realize what a change of tradition the women represented.

The war was felt in the news, in the number of uniforms on campus and by the Navy men marching to class at ungodly early hours singing "Wait Till the Sun Shines Nellie" in cadence. I once accused Jack Lemmon '47, who was in a Navy program, of disturbing my slumbers, but he has denied this. And although uncertainties most of us would face at 18-plus were with us all the time, there were still pleasures to be explored. There were wonderful stage productions at the Brattle Theatre, of which Engene O'Neill's "the Hairy Ape" still rings vivid in memory. And at the Kenmore cinema I saw my first films with subtitles. (The foreign films at home tended to be made by Frank Buck or Martin and Osa Johnson and to feature gorillas and large snakes.)

The Crimson was The Service News for the duration, thin but useful. The Lampoon flourished, however, with my house mate and classmate Len Bregman as principal cartoonist and cover artist. The other literary forms of the time included richly inventive graffiti ("Henry VII Is Insatiable") and the bulletin-board memos of Elliot Perkins, the with master of Lowell House, who wrote with a graceful elegance that suggested The New Yorker and the Book of Common Prayer rolled into one.

High Table at Lowell was another distinctly non-Kansas event, and the night I attended the guests included Cardinal Cushing, the archbishop of Boston, and the chemistry professor who synthesized quinine. The emulations of Oxbridge seemed some-what self-conscious, but the sherry was smooth and His Eminence was grand company, relaxed rather than ecclesiastical.

I Suppose it's surprising that there wasn't more of an "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow..." spirit abroad among us. But for me, and I suspect for most of us, there was contrary push to make the most of our limited time academically. (There was the incident of the water-filled milk bottles dropped down the entry way, which evoked one of Mr. Perkins' best memos, urbanely testy, but on the whole for-giving. But that was the anomalous prank.) The pre-war dictum of "There C's and a D and keep pit of the papers" was I think in abeyance, and my prevailing memory is of long-night struggles at my roommate's portable typewriter, which was quieter than my own.

The war would not go away, of course, and my roommate, Jack Adikes, and I and perhaps a dozen others constituted the ROTC unit, commanded by a Connecticut insurance man called back to service. We had blue-labeled uniforms and marched up and down in a semblance of close-order drill. Then, late in the year, several of is went off to Commonwealth Avenue to sign up, joining something called the Enlisted Reserve Corps. It gave us a one to start our serial numbers (draftees got a three) and let us volunteer for induction as soon as practical in terms of course work after we turned 18. What it really provided was a spurious sense that we were in charge of our own destinies.

There was a large exodus at the end of our freshman year. Jack went off to Officers Candidate School at Fort Benning, Ga., and was killed in Luxembourg as an Infantry Second Lieutenant at 19. I stayed on into my sophomore year, trained as an infantry replacement and was wounded in Germany in March 1945.

We reassembled in Cambridge in the fall of 1946, a little older, a little wiser and certainly more experienced (whether usefully experienced is a question). I was feverishly impatient to finish and get on with my life; most of us were.

Harvard decided that my wartime experience entitled me to return as a junior, so that I had barely three college years in residence. Having felt myself an outsider when I arrived, I felt felling not so much an outsider as a visitor who had not enjoyed the full Harvard experience and was not qualified to think of myself as a Harvard person (whatever that means). My sense of the Harvard I missed is embodied in George Weller's lovely but little-remembered novel from the mid-30s Not to Eat, Not for Love. It was only at reunions 25,40,45 and now 50 years later that I came to see that we were all outsiders one way and another. In some part, I suppose, it was because we were a wartime class ('45 and '46 might well feel the same), with our time either truncated or interrupted. Yet for me, and I think for all of us, Harvard remained a life-changing experience as it surely always is.

The encouragement of that English A section man, and later from Kenneth Payson Kempton in his short story class and Carvel Collins, who gave a wonderful composition course and who steered my to my encounter with Life magazine and thus set my whole professional life in motion, I could hope to make my way as a writer, despite my dismal performance on the Anticipatory Exam.

Summing up my feelings a few years ago, I said, "Gradually the College came to seem challenging rather than intimidating, mind-stretching rather than soul-numbing, an intellectual carnival rather than a solemn observance of eternal truths." I add--and would be surprised if my classmates did not agree--that the Harvard experience became a way of seeing, a way of thinking, a way of feeling, that would somehow touch and shape almost everything we would do thereafter.

--Charles Champlin, after 17 years as a writer-correspondent for Time-Life, was arts editor and columnist at the Los Angeles Times for 26 years. He is the author of several books and lives in Los Angeles.

The war was felt in the news, in the number of uniforms on campus and by the Navy men marching to class at ungodly early hours singing "Wait Till the Sun Shines Nellie" in cadence. I once accused Jack Lemmon '47, who was in a Navy program, of disturbing my slumbers, but he has denied this. And although uncertainties most of us would face at 18-plus were with us all the time, there were still pleasures to be explored. There were wonderful stage productions at the Brattle Theatre, of which Engene O'Neill's "the Hairy Ape" still rings vivid in memory. And at the Kenmore cinema I saw my first films with subtitles. (The foreign films at home tended to be made by Frank Buck or Martin and Osa Johnson and to feature gorillas and large snakes.)

The Crimson was The Service News for the duration, thin but useful. The Lampoon flourished, however, with my house mate and classmate Len Bregman as principal cartoonist and cover artist. The other literary forms of the time included richly inventive graffiti ("Henry VII Is Insatiable") and the bulletin-board memos of Elliot Perkins, the with master of Lowell House, who wrote with a graceful elegance that suggested The New Yorker and the Book of Common Prayer rolled into one.

High Table at Lowell was another distinctly non-Kansas event, and the night I attended the guests included Cardinal Cushing, the archbishop of Boston, and the chemistry professor who synthesized quinine. The emulations of Oxbridge seemed some-what self-conscious, but the sherry was smooth and His Eminence was grand company, relaxed rather than ecclesiastical.

I Suppose it's surprising that there wasn't more of an "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow..." spirit abroad among us. But for me, and I suspect for most of us, there was contrary push to make the most of our limited time academically. (There was the incident of the water-filled milk bottles dropped down the entry way, which evoked one of Mr. Perkins' best memos, urbanely testy, but on the whole for-giving. But that was the anomalous prank.) The pre-war dictum of "There C's and a D and keep pit of the papers" was I think in abeyance, and my prevailing memory is of long-night struggles at my roommate's portable typewriter, which was quieter than my own.

The war would not go away, of course, and my roommate, Jack Adikes, and I and perhaps a dozen others constituted the ROTC unit, commanded by a Connecticut insurance man called back to service. We had blue-labeled uniforms and marched up and down in a semblance of close-order drill. Then, late in the year, several of is went off to Commonwealth Avenue to sign up, joining something called the Enlisted Reserve Corps. It gave us a one to start our serial numbers (draftees got a three) and let us volunteer for induction as soon as practical in terms of course work after we turned 18. What it really provided was a spurious sense that we were in charge of our own destinies.

There was a large exodus at the end of our freshman year. Jack went off to Officers Candidate School at Fort Benning, Ga., and was killed in Luxembourg as an Infantry Second Lieutenant at 19. I stayed on into my sophomore year, trained as an infantry replacement and was wounded in Germany in March 1945.

We reassembled in Cambridge in the fall of 1946, a little older, a little wiser and certainly more experienced (whether usefully experienced is a question). I was feverishly impatient to finish and get on with my life; most of us were.

Harvard decided that my wartime experience entitled me to return as a junior, so that I had barely three college years in residence. Having felt myself an outsider when I arrived, I felt felling not so much an outsider as a visitor who had not enjoyed the full Harvard experience and was not qualified to think of myself as a Harvard person (whatever that means). My sense of the Harvard I missed is embodied in George Weller's lovely but little-remembered novel from the mid-30s Not to Eat, Not for Love. It was only at reunions 25,40,45 and now 50 years later that I came to see that we were all outsiders one way and another. In some part, I suppose, it was because we were a wartime class ('45 and '46 might well feel the same), with our time either truncated or interrupted. Yet for me, and I think for all of us, Harvard remained a life-changing experience as it surely always is.

The encouragement of that English A section man, and later from Kenneth Payson Kempton in his short story class and Carvel Collins, who gave a wonderful composition course and who steered my to my encounter with Life magazine and thus set my whole professional life in motion, I could hope to make my way as a writer, despite my dismal performance on the Anticipatory Exam.

Summing up my feelings a few years ago, I said, "Gradually the College came to seem challenging rather than intimidating, mind-stretching rather than soul-numbing, an intellectual carnival rather than a solemn observance of eternal truths." I add--and would be surprised if my classmates did not agree--that the Harvard experience became a way of seeing, a way of thinking, a way of feeling, that would somehow touch and shape almost everything we would do thereafter.

--Charles Champlin, after 17 years as a writer-correspondent for Time-Life, was arts editor and columnist at the Los Angeles Times for 26 years. He is the author of several books and lives in Los Angeles.