When Men Were Men and Women Were Wives

Within a few weeks after arriving at Harvard in the fall of 1954, I established a late afternoon ritual for myself which I followed as faithfully as I could for the remainder for that year. My three roommates and I shared a "quad" at the top of Holworthy Hall. It had a spacious living room, well-lighted by two large windows that overlooked the Yard. I had arranged my desk and bookcase by the corner beside one of those windows. There, late every afternoon, with my roommates scattered to Lamont or some other sanctuary, I sat with my notebook, my Latin lexicon, my small grey copy of Catullus, and a radio--carefully turned to the gravelly voice of "Symphony Sid, your musical host who loves you the most."

Symphony Sid, was a disc jockey for a small dawn-to-dusk radio station in Roxbury or some such place. Its signal was so weal that even in ?Cambridge it cam in as quavering and erratic as a BBC message from Winston Churchill to the French Resistance. But I strained for the sound because for fifteen minutes every day just before signoff time, Symphony Sid broadcast a kind of music I had never heard before and was not to hear anywhere else for some time. Years before Elvis Presley tumbled America into moral crisis by appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show, that they Boston radio station played Black rock and roll. The real stuff: Bo Diddley, Little Richard, "Earth Angel."

It had something in common with Methodist hymns I had learned as a boy in Southern Illinois and real kinship with the gospel music I occasionally heard coming from Black churches in that long-ago time when "separate" was still the

Still, the differences between Adams's Harvard and ours seem enormous. Despite, the supposed apathy, there was a great deal of passion. And, unlike Adam's experience, it seemed to me that many of the upheavals in later years were the unsurprising extension of things we encountered at Harvard. The transformation of popular music is an example those with finer sensibilities may dismiss. For there was nothing trivial about the entry of Blacks into areas of national cuture long reserved fro whites, and rock music helped unify the youth subculture that sometimes seemed to be waging open war against the adult world.

Nor did we seem all that isolated from the country's business. Foe McCarthy and the Justice Department were hounding Harvard professors who refused to tell Congress about the political activities of their colleagues. Harvard students helped organize a protest rally at Fancuil Hall when Soviet troops crushed the Hungarian uprising. And when Sputnik went up, several Crimson editors had front row seats for the nation's embarrassment: the center of the embryonic US tracking system was at Harvard, but when the Russian satellite began bleeping through space, the center's electronic gear, communications equipment, even its desks, were still waiting to be uncrated.

One of my roommates, Sandy Jencks, was attacking the sterility and lack of relevance of much formal education long before the issue was debated coast to coast. There was a drumbeat of criticism in The Crimson and other forums about all manner of substantive University policy. There were even widespread feelings in 1958 that waxing rich in the corporate world was not a sufficiently useful way to spend one's life.

Most of all, there were one's tears. David Halberstam was pursuing then-Dean McGeorge Bundy with the same instructive ferocity he displayed a little later in bringing the war home from Vietnam. Archibald MacLeish was the Faculty post-in-residence, but Gregory Corso was holding forth on the street. Joan Bacz was finding her voice in a coffee house on Plympton St. And there was a graduate student named John Beebe, a tall, looking man from rural Indians who had alarmed his family by giving up a secure to seek a PhD in Slavie when it came to language, he was a natural athlete, and he worked for the Crimson Printing Company at night, setting exotic language and mathematics texts on the linotype machine. J.R.R. Tolkien was publishing the last of "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy just then; Sandy and I got a scarce early copy from the old man who ran the Grolier bookstore and took turns staying up around the clock to read it. Afterward; for many nights at the Hays-Bick after the Crimson was on the press, John Beebe would tell us stories about the ancient epics from which Tolkien's saga descended and about the interningled people and languages behind them. It was the kind of education that perhaps was not available in the Boston of Henry Adams.

It had something in common with Methodist hymns I had learned as a boy in Southern Illinois, and real kinship with the gospel music I occasionally heard coming from Black churches in that long-ago time when " separate" was still the law of the land, never mind about equal. Unaccountable as it may seem now, however, in the early 1950s, real Black popular music was almost never played on "while" radio stations. There was considerable consternation a few years later when people like Pat Boone started issuing Bowdlerdized 'cover", records of Black rock songs, and we all know where that path eventually led: to Chubby Checker and the Twist, to the Beatles, Mick Jagger, Woodstock, and that cradle of national decline-- "sex, drugs, and rock and roll."

The future, my experience with Symphony Sid seemed to suggest, was something the unwary might stumble upon at any minute. An education is sometimes just a matter of seeing the connection between things.

By coincidence, Henry Adams--his quasi-autobiography. "The Education of Henry Adams," was still widely read as an American classic in 1958--arrived at Harvard College exactly 100 years ahead of us, in 1854. He complained later in life that he had been caught on the wrong side of a kind of historical fault line, the breakpoint between two tectonic plates. Great-grandson of the second President of the United States and grandson of the sixth, he was equipped by birth with all that 18th century American had to offer. Yet he had to live almost all of his life, Adams complained, in a time when new science, new technology, new wealth and new people seemed to be uprooting and replacing almost everything that had gone before. And Adams found much wanting in his Harvard experience.

"Harvard College as far as it educated at all, was a mind and liberal school." Adams wrote. "Leaders of men it never tried to make. Its ideals were altogether different. Unitarian clergy had given to the College a character of moderation, balance, judgement, restraint....Four years of Harvard College, if successful, resulted in an autobiographical blank, a mind on which only a watermark had been stamped."

"The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned with it, teachers and taught," he declared. What caused the boy most disappointment was the little he got from his mates. Speaking exactly, "that left him nothing....He made no acquaintance in college that proved to have the smallest use in afterlife." The faculty fared scarcely better.

Henry Adams's experience provides an interesting point of comparison for the similarities and the differences. There is the all to familiar backhanded smugness of his remark that, for all its shortcomings, "Harvard College was probably less hurtful than any college than in existence." And it was certainly still true in 1958 that, as a body, the most formidable critics one would care to meet, in a long life exposed to criticism. I cringed to remember the soon we heaped on an innocent who, asked in a freshman humanities class what it meant to say the gods in the Iliad were symbols, suggested it meant they were invisible.

There were academic fads in 1858 and 1958 alike. In Adams's day it was "German scholarship," and Goethe. 100 years later, "The Sorrows of Young Werther" were required reading but they had become incomprehensible, indeed ridiculous. But we had Freud--in Shakespeare, in history, in the family, everywhere but in bad, (particle hours is a phrase contemporary students may never have heard: it means "never in bed").

And student drinking ("the more recollection of it made him doubt his own veracity," Adams wrote) spanned the ceremony undeterred: I recall a midnight, dead-of-winter trip to Plum Island with a few friends. We put on most of the clothes we owned, folded down the top of his MG-TD (then a new car, not an antique) and had a glorious time ripping along the joy road till dawn. We drove with such panache I never guessed he was no drunk that the next day he could not remember the trip at all.

Even Adams's description of the propionate character of Harvard['s intellectual ideal seems certainly appropriate for 1954-58, it may have been it led some in later decades to courtier the "apathetic 50s.