Four Men, One Room

The secret formula that matched four freshman from the class of ‘76 in a corner suite of Wigglesworth Hall produced a very wiggy experience. On paper, the match was perfectly balanced: two midwesterners and two east coasters, although one roommate’s mother swore that one of the midwesterner’s had an east coast accent. We all rolled our eyes, not realizing that mom’s intuition proved to be a good sign. Each of us had an element of adaptability that made the year’s living experience a blast.

The four of us rallied early on to deal with the ridiculous Harvard Band march down Mass. Ave. during football season. One of the guys knew a med student who provided us with surgical tubing. This tubing was essential to launching water balloons from our third-floor window.

Too bad all of us missed the final draft induction for Vietnam because we had a wicked aim. The tuba dude didn’t have a chance.

Our barrage of water balloons scattered the band all over Mass. Ave. “That’ll learn them to wake us up on Saturday mornings.” No sooner were we reveling in our victory than we had to scram from University police knocking at our door. Thank goodness Depression-era architects saw the wisdom of putting fire-doors between suites which could serve as escapes from one entry to another for whatever reason.

Our spat with authority didn’t stop after that. One Saturday morning the four of us decided to catch a Harvard football game. We didn’t have our raccoon coats, but one of us had a military knapsack to hide the half-gallon of Mogan David during the game. Given a collective IQ of over 500 you would think we would know how to strap the knapsack tight. But no, we loaded our vino only to have it tumble out of the sack in the middle of the Wigglesworth entry onto Mass. Ave. and at the feet of President Bok.

Quick to respond, President Bok smiled and said, “bad luck.”

Spirits undaunted, we found other opportunities to find blotto-ville.

Periodically we’d make a field trip to library cubicles at Radcliffe on Friday nights and sip on Southern Comfort. If we didn’t see a streaker traipse through the book stacks, we’d wrap it up and head for Casablanca or some other watering hole in Harvard Square.

Perhaps the most telling experience was a night of munchies that descended upon the Wigglesworth suite while watching Saturday Night Live. One of the roommates mistook a candle shaped as a hamburger for something eatable. The next day we were trying to match dental records with teeth imprints on the wax hamburger while stumbling over a half dozen spent pizza boxes.

Sometimes, higher intellectual pursuits crept into the Wiggleworth suite. One night, an amorous interlude in one of the bedrooms was interrupted by a voice from outside. Jon, the aspiring creative writer, had climbed up a tree next to our Wigglesworth suite and in the midst of a full moon, three stories high, he recited lines from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Clearly, Harvard Yard had pearls of wisdom beyond the classroom.

Several of our freshmen encounters had prophetic attributes. Our roommate with creative writing aspirations decided to set his alarm at 3 a.m. everyday. When asked by his bunkmate why he was waking up at this time, he responded by saying that he wanted to record his dreams. After a few episodes of these nightly roosts and reading the creative writing, the bunkmate suggested that his roommate bag the alarm clock and forego creative writing for non-fiction. The advice was prophetic, because a Pulitzer Prize was realized many years later for non-fiction writing.

In another instance of uncanny foreboding, one of the roommates came back to Wigglesworth livid and reported that his freshman expository writing teacher slipped his final grade into an envelope with his girlfriend’s grade. Furthermore, the expos instructor asked when the two were getting married. What seemed like a preposterous question after barely completing the first semester at Harvard College turned out to be a reality seven years later.

Despite our wacky camaraderie, each of us elected to go our own way after freshman year. One took a year off while the other three either found new roommates or single suites. Too bad the Dean’s office didn’t apply that secret formula for matching classmates sophomore year. Who knows what a second year of roommate matching would have produced?