It was a day of standing on lines. First in the morning at Memorial Hall, and then just after 6:00 P.M., when the dinner column began to form at the Freshman Union, winding outside, down its granite steps, and almost into Quincy Street. Naturally, each freshman wore a tie and jacket — although the garments varied in color and quality, depending on the means and background of the wearer. The rules explicitly proclaimed that the only civilized attire in which a Harvard man could take a meal.
But these formally accoutred gentlemen were in for a rude surprise. There were no dishes.
Instead, their food was scooped out into a tan plastic doggy bowl divided into unequal sections of undetermined purpose. The only rational compartment was the cavity within the hub of this contraption, which could hold a glass of milk.
Ingenious as it was, it could not hide the fact that freshman food was absolutely wretched.
What was that gray sliced stuff slapped at them at the first station? The serving biddies claimed it was meat. It looked like innersoles to most and tasted much that way to all. It was no consolation that they could eat all they wanted. For who would ever want more of this unchewable enigma?
The only real salvation was the ice cream. It was plentiful and filling. And to an eighteen-year-old this can compensate for almost any culinary lapse. And did so in prodigious quantities.
No one really bitched in earnest. Far, although not all of them admitted it, they were excited just to be there. The tasteless food gave every person in The Class an opportunity to be superior to something.
Nearly all of them were used to being number one in some domain. The Class contained no fewer than 287 high school valedictorians, each painfully aware that only one of them was good enough to match that achievement at Harvard.
By some uncanny instinct, the jocks had already started to discover one another.
At one round table in the outer circle, Clancy Roberts was subtly campaigning for the freshman hockey captaincy. At yet another, football linemen, who had met an hour earlier at Dillon Field House, savored what would be among the last meals they would be obliged to take with the plebs. For, once the pads were on, they’d be dining at the training table in the V–Club, where the meat, though no less gray, would be served twice as thick.
The huge, wood-paneled hall reverberated with the loud chatter of nervous freshmen. You could tell who had gone to high schools and who to prep schools. For the latter dressed in matching plumage — shetland jackets and rep ties — and ate in larger groups, whose conversation and laughter were homogenized. The would-be physicist from Omaha, the poet from Missouri, and the future lawyer-politician from Atlanta ate alone. Or, if after twenty-four hours they could still stand them, with their roommates.
Harvard did not choose your living companions without much deliberation and analysis. Indeed, some keen sadistic genius must have spent innumerable hours on this strange apportionment. And what a task it was — a smorgasbord containing eleven hundred wholly different dishes. What would you serve with what? What would go well and what give interpersonal dyspepsia? Someone in the administration knew. Or at least thought he did.
Of course, they asked you for your preferences. Nonsmoker, athlete, interested in art, et cetera. Preppies naturally requested and received accommodations with their buddies. But then, they were the few conformists in this monstrous colony of oddballs, where exceptions were the norm.
What, for example, could they do with Danny Rossi, whose singular request had been a dormitory as near as possible to Paine Hall, the music building? Put him with another music type? No, that might risk a clash of egos. And what Harvard wanted was harmonious tranquility among its freshmen, who that week were in the process of receiving the most agonizing lesson of their lives. They were about to learn that the world did not spin uniquely around them.
For reasons inexplicable to everyone except the college powers, Danny Rossi was assigned to share his rooms in Holworthy with Kingman Wu, a Chinese future architect from San Diego (perhaps the link was California), and Bernie Ackerman, a mathematics whiz and champion fencer from New Trier High School in a suburb of Chicago.
As they all ate dinner at the Union that evening, it was Bernie who tried to puzzle out why they three had been thrown together by the mandarins of Harvard roommate-ism.
“It’s the stick,” he offered as a solution. “That’s the only symbol that connects us three.”
“Is that supposed to be profound or just obscene?” asked Kingman Wu.
“Hell, don’t you see it?” Ackerman persisted. “Danny’s going to be a great conductor. What do those guys wave at an orchestra? Batons. Me, I’ve got the biggest stick, ’cause I’m a fencer. Get it now?”
“And me?” asked Wu.
“What do architects most often draw with? Pencils, pens. There’s the three sticks and the solution to the mystery of our being put together.”
The Chinaman was not impressed. “You’ve just awarded me the smallest one.” He frowned.
“Well, you know where to stick it, then,” Ackerman suggested with a self-congratulatory chuckle.
And thus the first eternal enmity among The Class of ’58 was born.
In spite of his outward self-assurance, Jason Gilbert was nervous about going to the Union on his own for that inaugural repast. So desperate was he that he actually sought out D. D. in order to propose they go together. Alas, his roommate was already back before Jason had even dressed.
“I was the third on line,” he boasted. “I had eleven ice creams. That’ll really please my mom.”
So Jason ventured out alone. As luck would have it, near the steps of Widener Library he ran into a guy he’d played (and beaten) in the quarter finals of the Greater Metropolitan Private Schools Tourney. The fellow proudly introduced his quondam rival to his current roommates as “the S.O. B. who’s going to knock me off for number one. Unless that guy from California beats us both.”
Jason was happy to join them, and the talk was mostly of the tennis court. And the wretched food. And doggy bowls, of course.
ANDREW ELIOT’S DIARY
September 21, 1954
My roommates and I celebrated our first night at Harvard by not eating there. We elected instead to go into Boston, have a quick meal at the Union Oyster House, and then move on to Scollay Square, the sole oasis of sleaze in the city’s desert of puritanical decency.
Here we attended the edifying spectacle at the Old Howard. This venerable burlesque theater has housed the legendary strippers of the age, not least of whom was tonight’s attraction, Irma the Body.
After the performance (if that’s the word for it), we all dared one another to go backstage and invite the leading lady to join us sophisticates for a drop of champagne. First we thought of composing an elegant epistle (“Dear Miss Body …”), but then decided a live emissary would be more effective.
At this point there were huge piles of braggadocio being hurled back and forth. Each of us showed our tremendous latent courage by pretending to be on our way in. Yet no one took more than two steps toward that stage door.
I then came up with a brilliant solution: “Hey, why don’t we all go?”
We all eyed one another to see who’d be first to respond. But no one did.
Then, in a sudden, inexplicable fit of conscientiousness, we unanimously decided that discretion bade us get some sleep to prepare us for the rigors of a Harvard education. The spirit, we reasoned, must take precedence over the flesh.