Veteran Tinge Invades Harvard Yard

One night in September 1946, I climbed out of the subway at Mass.

Ave. and Holyoke Street carrying on my shoulder my thick, white Navy sea bag.

In the other hand, I carried a scuffed, family grip that opened at the top like a big doctor's satchel, as well as--and I can't remember how--an upright Underwood typewriter.

I put everything down in front of a gate that said something such as: "Enter To Grow in Wisdom." A fellow approached and smiled. He wore dark-gray trousers, a tweed jacket, a button-down shirt and a striped tie.

"You a freshman?" he asked, and when I nodded, he said, "You look like you need help. Where are you going?"

He picked up the typewriter and the grip and started through the gate. I had expected Harvard kids to be unfriendly, or, let's say, not entirely egalitarian. In fact, I was there that night, because my high school English teacher kept me after classes so that I would write away for the application to Harvard, and kept me again until I filled it out.

"Holworthy," I said, hoisting the sea bag. "Thanks a lot."

Pointing with his head as we walked, he said: "This is Wigglesworth and Boylston and Grays and Weld. This is John Harvard. Can't see him very well at night."

He opened the unlocked ground-floor door to Holworthy, and we carried everything to the top landing. A brass plaque on my door listed former residents. I recognized only Robert Benchley.

"Well, thanks a lot," I said. "Thanks." I was panting, and so was he.

Should I offer a tip to a Harvard Man?

"As a matter of fact," he said, pulling some papers out of his pocket, "I work for the Gold Coast Valeteria. Across from The Lampoon. We do laundry, dry cleaning. Very good on rep ties. Would you like to sign up right now? Get it out of the way?" He offered a contract for nine months' service.

"Gee, I'm sorry. Let me look at it. Tomorrow, okay? Thanks a lot." In fact, I planned to mail my laundry home to my mother.

Trial By Fire

He left, and I knocked on the door with the plaque. I turned out to be the youngest roommate, and the one who had spent only 13 months in the service. Two roommates had served long tours in Europe and another in the Pacific. Last to arrive, I drew a top bunk.

"What's that?" I asked, pointing to a coil of black, braided rope with a harness that was hanging from a big brass hook near the bedroom window.

The following week, we had to go to a class at the Indoor Athletic Building where we learned how to fit the harness under our arms and let ourselves down in case of a fire. One guy panicked.

In the largest class in the history of Harvard, more than half the class was veterans. Army khakis became very popular. Professor Sam Beer always wore a green Army trench coat. A lot of students, including professors, carried their books in green bags slung over the shoulder.

Professor Samuel Eliot Morison, who had replicated the voyage of Columbus, occasionally walked the length of the Widener Reading Room in leather-heeled riding boots.

You had to wear a jacket and a tie to eat beneath the moose and elk mounted on the paneled walls of the Harvard Union. One day at lunch, I chatted with a decent fellow, who later that day in the Yard, did not acknowledge my greeting. People didn't do that in Elizabeth, N.J.

The next week, I walked utterly undone out of the examination for exemption from English A, and I met a fellow who incredibly announced that he had already finished. He was smoking on the steps of the New Lecture Hall.

When I commented about one impenetrable question, he said:

"Yeah, that was the Grand Inquisitor. You didn't remember?"

"The Grand Inquisitor," I said. "Of course."

Sanders Theatre to Soldiers Field

It was the first year of General Education in a Free Society. In

Nat Sci 5, a verbal type such as myself learned about Mendel and the fruit flies. Sunday nights some of us gathered to prepare the maps of Europe to be handed in every Monday for History 1. Professor Percy Bridgman won the Nobel Prize in physics that year.

From freshman football, I remember banging repeatedly against a tall, immovable tackle with a modest demeanor who made the varsity and played in 1947, 1948 and 1949. He had a red crew cut and had been captain at some school called St. Marks. His name was Doug Bradlee.

At those grinding practice sessions in the late afternoon behind the stadium at Soldiers Field, I also met Oscar dePriest and Frank Jones, two of the four Negroes--as some said then--out of a class of 1,645.

The competition for The Crimson seemed to be an endless endeavor.

And even though the Committee on the Whole Man recommended Harvard students stop competing so fiercely and be Renaissance Men, we had our own personal competition to determine who grew the biggest bags under his eyes.

Before being elected, one of us who was experienced with initiation ceremonies drank mineral oil and avoided falling down drunk.

On the way to Lowell, I spent a term at the Claverly Senior House, into whose small courtyard on Saturday nights spilled revelers from the Pudding. They upset one roommate who used the dark space to watch the stars through a telescope whose lens he had ground himself. Another roommate invented and built a portable podium for the Glee Club.

The Apathy League was organized; nobody came to the meetings. Robert Frost "said" his poems in Sanders Theatre, and Mrs. Roosevelt told us about the United Nations. The Lowell House Musical Society produced Handel's opera, Acis and Galatea as well as Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell. A vigorous Brattle Theatre Company presented many plays.

The 'Other' College

Women could not participate in Harvard's extracurricular activities, nor use the new Lamont Library. Their access to Widener was restricted, but co-education prevailed in fact. We were occasionally invited to Radcliffe for social events called Jolly-Ups, which some 'Cliffies claimed stood for Jollier Upstairs, without men.

Many were pleased to attend classes at Harvard, but proud of Radcliffe's independence. In the Yard, you could invite a woman (a girl, they were called) to your room in the afternoon: one girl required two chaperones, two couples required one chaperone and three couples were on their own. Sergeant Toomey of the Yard Cops enforced these "parietal rules," picked up Bursar's Cards and was particularly active in November, 1949, when the visitors from Princeton raised a riot.

Joan McPartlin, who was appointed The Crimson's first Radcliffe correspondent, started the path to the eventual election of the first women editors.

Beyond the Yard

My G.I. Bill ran out during the junior year, and I worked for the Boston Herald as the Harvard stringer.

One busy day, I covered the appearance of Jane Russell at a demonstration by a student committee that the Leverett House Dining Hall was geometrically a trapezium. Miss (sic) Russell declined to have her measurements taken by student anthropologists and sociologists with a caliper that looked like ice tongs. I treasure her picture signed: "To Hoag, with love. Jane."

Later that night, I reported to the rewriteman at the Herald that some MIT guys had parked a steamroller in front of the President's house on Quincy Street. A smallish steamroller.

Popular restaurants, aside from Jim Cronin's beer hall, included the Wursthaus, The Armpit, The Oxford Grille and Hayes-Bickford. Some of the older students organized permanent seminars in Salzburg where the intellectuals of Europe could meet those of the U.S. Some married students, who made up about one percent of the class, lived in Quonset huts.

Father Feeney of St. Paul's Church was stripped of his priestly functions for doctrinal violations, but stayed in tumultuous charge for quite a while.

The Mark Calculator Series was in development in the Computation Laboratory. When, together with the Graduate Center, the World Tree was inaugurated in 1949, somebody wrote: "Of all the work of Walter Gropius, this cosmic hat rack is the dopius."

A World Encroaching

The Cold War was ubiquitous. We were testing our briefly-Communist exclusive atom bomb in Bikini. The Soviets took over Eastern Europe and Communists tried to take France, Greece and the Dardanelles. Containment began. Some of us heard the announcement of the Marshall Plan at Commencement in 1947. Supporters of an accommodation with Stalin collided with opponents in many student organizations.

The Government began to investigate security risks. Would my own career be threatened by having read the Communist Manifesto in Gov. 1? F.O. Matthiessen, an icon to those of us concentrating in American history and lit, spoke on behalf of Henry A. Wallace, the accommodationist third-party candidate at the Progressive Party Convention in 1948. Wallace had attracted many supporters at Harvard. In early 1950, widely attacked in the press, Matthiessen jumped to his death from a hotel window.

On June 25, 1950, shortly after Commencement, the North Koreans invaded the South. The next year, around Commencement time, on June 3, 1951, Lt. Douglas H.T. Bradlee, the big, red-haired lineman, died while fighting with the 1st Marine Division.