Baby, You Can Drive My Van

A solid six inches separate the back bumper of the hulking 12-person van and a cement support beam in the impossibly-configured parking lot. This situation makes Katherine E. Tierney ’02, who is behind the wheel of the van, a tiny bit nervous. It is not helping matters that Steve Griffin, the man the Harvard Insurance Office trusts to teach her how to park, is outside the van telling the funniest jokes he has ever heard. He shouts that he is “bad at” estimating distances and that she should keep coming because she has three feet to spare and “three feet never shrinks.” Tierney has just taken this vehicle—one of eight in the Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) fleet—for a two-hour spin out to Concord.

The sun is shining and the wind less biting than usual for late January, so it’s perfect weather to stroll across the Old North Bridge and ogle Hawthorne’s Old Manse. But Tierney has both an exam and a paper due in less than 24 hours and her interest in Revolutionary War trivia fades fast. She is sacrificing study time because Griffin has a packed schedule and Tierney needs to fit her certification drive in before Griffin takes off for Australia. (At press time, Griffin is visiting Sydney, Melbourne and Tanzania courtesy of his fans—namely, the PBHA program leaders who spend time with Griffin behind the wheel of a PBHA van.)

Despite his vacation, Griffin was able to make a special trans-continental appearance for PBHA cabinet members this past weekend at their annual retreat, held this year at a hostel in Harvard, Mass. As part of “skits and giggles night” at the retreat, a bold Griffin fan donned a creative interpretation of his signature ample head of wavy white hair and hammed it up as Steve. This happens at most retreats, says PBHA President Laura E. Clancy ’02-’03. “Steve is one point of reference for everyone.”

Griffin estimates he’s been involved with the campus’s public service umbrella organization for a decade but, he equivocates, “I’m bad at dates.” In any case, it’s been a while. It’s been long enough, in fact, that Clancy and her predecessor Trevor S. Cox ’01-’02 decided in the fall to solicit PBHA cabinet members for a gift of appreciation to present to Griffin.

“He seemed especially stressed. There’s usually stuff that he puts up with, organizing his schedule around students. People don’t appreciate him enough in general. Steve is such a lovable character that we felt like we should do something to show our appreciation,” Cox says. “We started thinking about how we could thank him. We were going to get him a stripper but we struck on the idea of him going on vacation.”

Cox and Clancy originally planned to raise money to send Griffin, an avid collector and expert on Irish books and Celtic literature, to Ireland. But the weather there is lousy, according to Griffin, so he decided to head Down Under for a few weeks. Which was fine with the student benefactors.

“It wasn’t that tough to raise the money,” Cox says. “Steve is really wonderful about listening to students,” Clancy says. “He works so many more hours than he gets paid for. He’s the one adult that I’ve met at Harvard who is like that. I think everyone else should be like that.”

There is saccharine adoration and generosity all around. Clancy says Griffin sometimes leaves books he thinks she will like in her mailbox at PBH. According to Griffin (who calls all the volunteers “kids”), “They are all kids I could be happy to have as children.” This is why Griffin has stuck around for so long: “I like the kids so much. Virtually everyone is really wonderful. I don’t know about the rest of the Harvard community, but PBH kids are great. I suppose it is a filter: they’re altruistic and idealistic. They just do it because they feel they have to do it. They don’t look for rewards. It’s very nice. I can only think of about one or two kids who are boring.”

Griffin began working for PBH as a custodian about 10 years ago, left briefly and then was asked to come back seven years ago after the public service overhaul at the College—when a more rigorous driver-training program was implemented. “I was supposed to work four hours a week giving the kids a driving test,” he says. “But they need to know so much more than you can teach them in a five-minute intro before the test.” The Harvard insurance office, which sees that PBHA is covered, also realized this difficulty and—although Griffin is vague on chronology—arranged for a strict regimen of Griffin-run training for insured van drivers.

“My approach is totally different than [that of] the insurance program. I wanted to teach technical skills. I emphasize mechanical things, especially brakes,” he says. He also discusses defensive driving: “I’m more concerned with how kids respond to aggressive males and accidents. How to handle it if somebody’s giving you a hard time.”

But the lessons are more complex than Griffin lets on. “He has this ritual,” Clancy explains. “First he gives you this spiel. Whenever you get attacked, like if someone is approaching the van, the first priority is to throw the keys in the bushes and run. Protect the van.” According to the Hartford insurance company, which oversees the van training, Griffin should take his charges on a six-hour spin in Cambridge. But Griffin mixes it up with other routes. “The [Harvard] insurance office wants me to do what Hartford tells me. But I don’t do what anybody tells me,” Griffin says.

This rogue spirit is especially true when he’s in the passenger’s seat directing the driving. Tierney asks politely which way to turn when it is unclear. She is often ignored in favor of comments on the relative merits of the Revolutionary War (“boring”) versus the Civil War (“I’m interested in the Civil War,” Griffin says. “I mean, who isn’t?”). But he does watch the road and sporadically cautions Tierney to “follow the yellow line.” Approaching an intersection, Griffin warns that the “left lane must turn left. You don’t know that. I do.” So does the road sign.

He is brash, but also somewhat reticent. At first Griffin wants only to gush about the upstanding young van drivers he teaches at PBHA but eventually opens up about his other interests. He is a book collector and former engineer who has taught at Al-Hikma University in Baghdad. Griffin collects Celtic-language books and books on the Irish in America. Two years ago he donated 3,800 volumes on the Irish in America to the National Library in Ireland and was honored at a ceremony in Dublin.

But Griffin’s duties at PBHA limit the time he spends on book collecting and his other interests. He oversees the eight vans in use during the school year and the 28 vans PBHA rents in the summer. “This job has taken over all my time. But I like it.”

Griffin volunteers his own time as well. Wednesdays he spends at the Children’s Hospital in Boston. “We work as an escort service. Not escorting nurses,” he says, almost automatically, without pausing in his narrative to see if anyone will give him an appreciative chuckle. Griffin’s job actually entails escorting patients from ultrasound rooms to hospital rooms and anywhere else they need to be. With the floppy white hair and stream of self-deprecating and ridiculous humor, Steve Griffin seems like he would be a comforting person for a sick and scared child to look up at from a wheelchair. Or, for that matter, a scared-sick first-time van driver—because in Griffin’s eyes, the PBHA volunteers can do no wrong.

“They should get more credit,” he says. “It’s something that the University really exploits. I can’t think of any group as praiseworthy as our students are.” Griffin works for both PBH (the building and department of the Faculty of Arts and Science) and PBHA (the non-profit umbrella service organization that includes the Progressive Student Labor Movement). “I’m a janitor for PBH but I identify with PBHA only,” he says. “I even identify with people like the PSLM. I’m a Reagan Republican and I still think they’re great kids. All those kids put their academic lives on the line. Someday they’ll be looked upon as examples of how wonderful Harvard students are. PBHA kids sacrifice their studies—at least it appears to me that they do. It’s very tough taking care of a lot of kids.”

When he’s actually on the job, however, Griffin’s running commentary moves away from praise and toward trivia and anecdotes from his many years of experience.

As Tierney nervously edges out of the parking lot, Griffin decides it is an opportune time to talk about a driver who got a van stuck in the ramp of a parking garage. Body work was required. Griffin turns the tables on Tierney and asks what she would do in a similar situation. The correct answer is she would never get herself into a similar situation.

Tierney does not allow herself to be distracted by the running commentary on Alewife (a member of the herring family) and on the surprisingly smooth and durable pavement (which has textile underneath it).

Griffin refers to himself as PBHA’s resident Roads Scholar and he has the smarts to back up the pun. Tierney turns onto Interstate 95, which leads into a lesson on road numbers. The details are a bit hazy, but odd-numbered roads run north-south, three digits in a road name means it’s a loop and 93 percent of the country is to the west of I-93.

He feigns secrecy regarding what he did before dealing books and training van drivers but he is actually forthcoming about his past pursuits. He claims some role in the invention of the first Westinghouse continuous-reading bore hole drift probe created—specialized equipment that keeps oil drills from straying too far from their marks.

On the way out of town, Griffin points down Concord’s tony main street. “Thoreau would have walked around here as a boy, gone to Starbucks maybe,” he quips. It is clear that he tells this joke a few times a week.

Griffin is an institution at PBHA. He knows it, but he’s a little unclear as to how it got to be so many years. “It was just supposed to be a temporary van guy. Nothing as intensive as this,” he says. But he grew into the role and now feels responsible for his students. “I view myself as the adult, so to speak. I always have this image of myself on the witness stand—the attorney saying to me, ‘Did you know the brakes were bad?’”

Tierney’s trip itself was a pleasant break from studying, but parking the van in the incredibly awkward lot near Lesley College is the day’s most daunting task. PBHA policy dictates that when someone is backing up, someone else must always get out of the car and signal to the driver. Griffin dutifully pops out of the van. “Don’t let me hit anything, Steve,” she pleads as the van nearly brushes the van next to it. He laughs from the outside, puzzling over the geometry of head-on parking. Tierney masterfully wedges the van in between two other vans, one well dented already. Griffin won’t let her hit anything, at least not very hard.