Harvard University - Red Book Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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This new life began with a Hurry of activity after the beginning of hostilities, the ARP held an air-raid rehearsal, blood donors flocked to the Red Cross, and rumors that the drart age was being lowered to 18 began going round. There was no immediate reason why it shouldn't, but everyone seemed surprised that'college life went on almost as usual. We looked forward to the Christmas vacation, and tried to figure out schemes to get away before our last scheduled college exercise, and some Adams House men formed a societyeto save the Mole a character threatened with ex- tinction at the hands of Dick Tracy. The best freshman hockey team in years started its season, and the '45 basketball team was beginning to score 60 or 70 points a game. After the Christmas dinner most of us crowded into the undersized common room of the Union and heard Copey read from Kip- ling, Benchley and Dickens. Back from Christmas vacation, we regretted leaving our books in Cambridge with exams only two weeks away. The University voted war certificates for anyone finishing a year's work and the college went on a 12-month schedule with an expanded, 12-week summer school, which the Faculty volunteered to teach for nothing. The last two weeks ofjanuary were a special kind of hell for the freshmen, unused to the sustained effort of a two-week exam period. After it was over, we were more than ready to take the C1'im5on'.f advice and get away some- place where the name of Harvard was unknown. Unfortunate- ly we only had a weekend but we made the most of it. The new term saw the draft age lowered to 20, accel- erated courses injapanese and Russian, talk of a compulsory athletic program, seven new freshmen and charges for seconds at the Union. This last was a cruel blow, for Union food had been at least plentiful. All in all, though, Harvard was pretty much the same, and no sudden and drastic changes were to occur for a long time. December 8, 1941-President Conant pledges Harvard's re- sources to the war effort. The rest of the winter was dull, the weather was foul and boredom became a thing to contend with. Our worries about getting into Houses were lessened when the University announced that all students would hereafter have to live in the Houses. On February 28th, the Houghton Library was opened giving freshmen a chance to see what they had been passing six times a day since September, and on March 6th, we had our hrst blackout, perfect except for the Tilt sign on Mike's pin-ball machine. The Freshman Frolic livened at least one cold, slushy Saturday night. The new air-raid siren atop Widener, installed in january 1942, brought war close to the Yard.

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Our first miclyears-Brain-cudgeling in Memorial Hall. Sinking easily into Harvard life, '45 largely spent their first and second weekends resting up from the opening flurry of activity, and in conscientiously doing their first assignments, a phenomenon rarely to be repeated. By the opening of the football season, most of us had acquired some knowledge of Cambridge geography and slang, we stopped calling the Yard the campus and got acquainted with Union food. Weld met the 'Cliffedwellers at dances, jolly-ups and teas, and knew why they were linked with the food. Some venturesome souls even went out to Wellesley. As they had been for other classes, football and studies were our chief interests in the fall. We saw the team lose to Cornell, and then with Chub Peabody setting the pace, watched it beat Dartmouth, tie heavily favored Navy, and bowl over Princeton, Army, Brown and Yale. We learned the Fight cheer, yelled ourselves hoarse, ahd even forgot our indifference long enough to fight Dartmouth for the goalposts. Taken in by the term November Hours, hour exams caught us short in the last part of October. Our only defenses against such underhanded dealing by University Hall were long hours in dusty Boylston over Thompson and john- son and the Gov. I syllabus. The end of hour exams was the signal for the class jokers to begin functioning. Matthews formed sides for their water fights, Grays put up Squire Squinch for sheriff, and Allen Davis and Bob Curts advertised in the Crimron for a corpse. It was supplied, Gerry Levy, a fellow resident of quaint Mower Hall, wrapped in a sheet. The freshman football team, led by Jack Fisher, went through an uneventful season, and Bob Keahey was chosen for the lead in the Dramatic Club play. John Potter won the Annual Harvard-to-Wellesley bicycle race. College life seemed dull after the Yale weekend with its Yale-Harvard Ball, three House dances, cocktail parties and general hilarity. It was almost two months until Midyears and many freshmen wondered how they were going to fill the SFP' The skiers made ready for winter snows, and the basket- ball team opened its season with the usual drubbing of M.I.T. Many went out for the various competitions, others rested, some went to Deb parties or the Raymor, but the lucky ones got down to New York for weekends. Favorite Saturday evening diversion, however, was the combined card game and beer party, lasting on into Sunday morning, It was at about this time that we began skipping breakfast. Everybody felt that war would come sooner or later, but Pearl Harbor itself stunned the University. At a hastily- called student meeting on December 8th, President Conant pledged all of l-larvard's resources to the war effort. To the student body he could only say the visibility is low and advised us to stay in college until called. The advice was taken, only a few left immediately after the declaration of war. From now on everything was to be connected with the war, everything we did would be somehow controlled by the needs of the country and the armed forces. Many of us, for the first time in our lives, were forced to act with other in- terests than our own in mind. The Washington or University announcement was never absent from the Crimyon during the rest of our stay at Harvard, and long-planned careers were to be scrapped, changed and rechanged all within the space of a few days. H War comes on a quiet Sunday afternoon.

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Houghton Library, housing Harvard's rare books, was finished during our freshman year. The new calisthenics program was practically painless, we were required to take only one more hour a week at our favorite sport. Most of the officer candidate plans meant little to us at the time, and the spring was uneventful. As they had been for years, our big events were the Smoker and the jubilee. There was much assorted talent at the Smoker, and Jinx Falkenburg, whose talent was obvious. A riot was im- possible because of the rainy weather, but a stampede on the beer keg after the show satisfied the urge for self-expression. We all got into Houses which was not much of a sur- prise to us. Thejubilee, held a week after the Smoker, brought girls from all over the east for the freshman's big night, and our undefeated crew, stroked by Orrin Wood, acquired the reputation of being, next to the varsity, the fastest crew in the CASE. Taking exams in stride, or at least more so than inlan- uary, we went home for our three-week vacation at the be- ginning ofjune as the Crimson crews swept the Housatonic. Unfazed by rumors of heat, humidity and mosquitoes, '45 intent on getting a degree before Uncle Sam got them, came back almost to a man., The Harvard ofjuly lst, was not the Harvard of exam period. The formerly cloistered walks of the Yard now swarmed with women students of all 7 10 types, from the traditional Midwestern high school teachers to the sweater girls of the big Eastern culture factories. They sprawled on the grass and on the steps of Widener, played havoc with studious concentration in Boylston and Widener, and perked up attendance at lectures no end. Other new- comers were some 1500 military trainees, mostly naval officers who moved in on the northern part of the Yard. As they marched back and forth to the sound of music and announce- ments from a loudspeaker in Thayer, or asked us how to get to the Union, we knew that the southern accent had arrived for the duration. The highly complicated organization of the summer school was a set-up for us. The two courses we were taking hve times a week for four half-courses credits, somehow never seemed like more than half of a regular program, and no Saturday classes made weekends at the Cape and up north possible. Best of all, the unexpected presence of screens which the University managed to hustle from the WPB kept the mosquitoes in their place. In the middle of August we accommodated ourselves to a one-day examination period. The second half of the session saw the 1000 women reduced to less than 400, and the further southward advance of the Navy which took over the now vacant Grays and Weld. The armed forces were increased by a Chaplains' School which arrived with attendant publicity and disappeared into remote Andover Hall and the Germanic Museum. Intellectuals, bruised in body and mind by the calisthenics and compulsory drilling of the Physical Education program, found something to cheer in the Robeson- Webster Othello given its first performance in Brattle Hall. This must have seemed the one bright spot in a cultural vacuum as the Advocate siestaed through the summer and the Dramatic Club dealt art a heavy blow by producing Dracula in medi- eval Sanders theatre. As the weather cooled, the sleepy life of summer school began to pick up. The football team started its practice and exams, as usual, caught us unawares in September. Looking back on it, summer school seemed like a vacation with two-course credits, a pleasant if unproductive period. But there was a violently dissident minority who claimed that standing over a hot Bunsen burner Eve days a week in daily labs was hardly an ideal vacation. X, The regular college year of 1942-45 was to be a big one for '45. It was in these two semesters that many of us were to crowd our sophomore, junior and senior years. The class broke up into groups and cliques and types began to emerge, the aesthete, the dilettante, the club man, the joy boy, the activities man, the politician, the Phi Beta Kappa man and the grind. But the vast majority of us, as in other classes, were somewhere in between these types, the average Harvard man rather than the non-existent typical Harvard man.