Harvard, Prohibition-Style

DormAid, eat your heart out.

When he returned to Harvard almost 75 years after his graduation in 1933 last week, A. Lincoln Gordon explained that, back in the day, dirty work was left to a staff of hired housemaids.

“It was a lot like a hotel,” he says with nostalgia, before adding, with more than a little patrician guilt, “I’m sure that those women made next to nothing.”

At 92, Gordon remains sharp and reflective. “It’s a whole new world now,” he says, ambling along the cafeteria line. “We were always waited on in the dining halls.”

Later, he would become U.S. ambassador to Brazil. But as an undergraduate, Gordon spent his time with the Glee Club. It was the tail end of Prohibition, so Gordon explains the Glee Club’s parties usually featured just wine, not hard liquor. “People wouldn’t get raucously drunk,” he says, “but they’d get comfortable. They would definitely sing dirtier songs than normal.”

Bans on booze, though, were nothing compared to the regulations for female guests. In the early 1930s, women were only allowed in a Harvard gentleman’s room from 3 to 6 p.m. on Sunday afternoons—and only with the door open. “I suppose that policemen came by every so often to check,” he says.

Despite these draconian rules for encounters between the sexes, Gordon managed to meet his future wife, Allison Wright, one February evening at a film exhibition in Dunster. Four months later to the day, they were married.