Too close for comfort

"The question is," Gary says, looking back after three years, "were we strange when we came in, or did we became strange?"

Of the 18 members of the Class of 1984 who were assigned to Lionel Hall B freshman year, only 10 are graduating today, including the authors of this article. Three have yet to go beyond sophomore year. "People have simply lost it," notes Carol, or they have found themselves in ways that took them away from here." Among those who have found themselves elsewhere are Suzie, who left Harvard after two years, married a childhood boyfriend, and is now raising a kid in New Haven, and Jeff, who left sophomore year and now works in a bank Among those who may have "lost it" is Shawn, who has tried three times now to return to Harvard each time unable to complete a semester.

Lionel was, many people now say, Harvard diversity run wild Some Lionel residents speak in vaguely conspiratorial terms of how such an odd mixture could not have happened by chance. Kathy notes that fully four of the 18 members of the entryway grew up on welfare, a startling percentage for Harvard Carol notes that 15 of the 18 came from public schools, while the other three went to parochial schools, with not one real "preppy" in the group. She points to the male suite on the first floor as an example. "A Mennonite from Indiana, a Jewish kid from Great Neck with rabbinical aspirations, a shiny kid from Vermont just amazed by the city, and a Mexican-American from California. They seemed to me a kind of testimony to Harvard's conception of diversity." Kathy, who has taken three semesters off, adds, "we just didn't have many people on the regular track."

The extreme differences in viewpoints and outlooks would not have mattered so much if Lionel people had been less close. But in part because of its physical isolation. Lionel is hidden from the rest of the Yard behind Hollis and Harvard Hall-and in part because of the temperament of the occupants. Lionel residents spent almost all of their time together. They are almost every dinner together in the smoking room of the Union, had Friday happy hours and Saturday Night Live parties, and a seemingly endless stream of group activities.

Carol soon took on an informal role in creating the sense of family. She often arranged the birthday parties, and it was she and Mary who kept their door open late and the beanbag chairs available. It seemed entirely appropriate when May rolled around and the dorm sent her a mother's day card.

The result was at times an almost oppressively friendly and strong bond of community, unusual anywhere at Harvard. As Kathy describes it. "I could sit in my room on the third floor and hear the door slam downstairs and hear footsteps, and know who it was, where they were going, and why." And Jeff remembers, "I look back on how close we were freshman year, and it blows me away."

For many freshmen, a dorm is little more than an address in the Yard Dorms often become close, sometimes remain anonymous, but rarely does a dorm develop enough of a character to have a real imprint on each of its members. Yet despite its many problems, or perhaps because of them. Lionel B residents today still seem to feel just such an imprint Looking back on it now, their words seem to trip over each other, rapid and contradictory, as if welcoming the chance to try to make sense of a year they even yet do not really understand. Most seem to agree that at the center of their freshman year was a paradox: Lionel was one of the closest groups of friends they had ever been a part of, almost a family, yet at the same time its individual members were so radically different in background and temperament that it soon became clear that the center could not hold. "They certainly tried to expose all of us to diversity, that word we've heard so often." Gary says. 'I thought they might have tried to choose people who could live together but there seemed to be a lot of divisiveness."

As it turned out, much of the year consisted of various members of Lionel having shocked and traumatic reactions to the rest of the dorm. In one rooming group, all four of the roommates had vastly different views on whether and when they should rotate among the best and worst rooms in the suite, and the disagreement nearly came to blows. Meanwhile, on the first floor, Jeff, who grew up on a farm in rural Vermont, could not comprehend his roommate Manny's relationship with Suzy, the girl next door. Suzy, who had led a tough life growing up in a troubled family situation in the South Bronx, and Manny, a cynical, often dour Mexican-American from California, were unlike anyone Jeff had ever seen before. Manny and Suzy's loud and often violent fights worried many people in the dorm, but it was Jeff who seemed scarred by it all. "I had never seen anyone deal with each other like that," Jeff recalls now. "All I could compare it with was the soap operas I had seen as a teenager. I don't understand how two people can be so caring one day, and so violent the next."

In several cases, the gap between individuals and the rest of the group seemed insurmountable. Shawn, above all, was someone that everyone liked a good deal, but only eventually grew to realize they could not save. She was instantly likeable, and entered as Lionel's only certifiable celebrity; she had been a regular on the children's television show "Zoom," and was often recognized in the street. She was quiet yet friendly, and everyone considered it entirely in character when on her birthday she gave out presents to everyone else in the dorm. But behind the composure, residents of Lionel soon realized. Shawn had a profound inability to cope. People vaguely knew that she had originally entered with the Class of 1983, but only lasted a few days into freshman week. Shawn made it through freshman year, but her roommate Kathy says that she only made it because of the supportive atmosphere she found in Lionel. "She doesn't deal well with stress, her way of dealing with stress is to go to bed," Kathy says. "I was sort of pulling her out of bed and making her write her expos papers."

Such widely different backgrounds and world views often made communication difficult between the various members of Lionel At times. It was a literal inability to communicate Gary recalls that Robb's girlfriend's mother had a Boston accent that was so thick that when she called, he took messages that said her name was "Korea," rather than "Currier," as he later realized it was. At other times, it was a case of bizarrely mixed signals. While there was no doubt that Suzy was kidding, there was also no doubt that Jeff, who was considerably smaller than her, was legitimately afraid when she attacked him. "Suzy almost raped Jeffy twice," Gary recalls with a laugh. "Once she had him pinned and started taking off his shirt, and he came running up to our room for shelter." His fear would prove warranted late in the year when she accidentally broke his jaw.

In some cases, there was little communication at all. Many members of Lionel remember that Tim, the Indiana Mennonite, bad trouble talking with other members of the dorm. Carol recalls that when she and Tim once talked about rape, her feminist views and his religious ones clashed so violently that the discussion eventually had to be broken up by force. Others, however, remember how little Tim ever said. Gary perhaps noticed it most, since he and Tim drove west together over several vacations. "We drove west for 15 hours and he'd say absolutely nothing," Gary recalls.

The difficulties in communication often extended to families of Lionel residents. Gary recalls that he had never spoken a word to anyone like his roommate Scorch's mother. He remembers that when she called, she would be just as happy if Scorch wasn't home, so she could barrage his roommates with a seemingly inexhaustible series of questions about him. "She always had all those questions," he says. "Does Scorch have lots of friends? Is he happy? One time, I felt like saying. 'Yes, he's happy, he's not on the phone with you. I'm unhappy.'"

Finally, Lionel's proctor was perhaps the most confusing aspect of an already very confusing situation. In describing their Lionel experience, almost everyone begins by offering an opinion of Larry. In addition to serving as proctor and taking pre-med courses, Larry spent much of the year as a founding force behind the Committee on Central America (COCA). Everyone agrees that Larry had a huge influence on dorm life, but no one agrees how. The words that emerge from people's descriptions of him range from "Mentor" to "Moonie," from "inspiration" to "brainwashing."

Jeff says that Larry did a "wonderful" job. "I think he was a great proctor," says Jeff. "I've heard enough stories about proctors that I appreciate him. I really think that he cared, he's just a caring person." But others speak of him as a political leader who used his proctees to support his causes, showing less concern for those who did not help in political work. "A lot of people felt there was a wall there because of COCA," says Gary. "People felt they couldn't go to Larry and say, 'Look, I have problems.'" Kathy adds that There was a sort of feeling that there was an inner circle and an outer circle."

If there was an inner circle around Larry and Latin American politics, it certainly began with Daniel, Mary, Carol and Fernando, who became the self described "Fearsome Foursome" of Latin American lobbying, who devoted much of their waking hours to planning forums, writing newsletters, and organizing marches. "I look at my picture for the Dunster House facebook, and I had circles under my eyes and I was pale," recalls Carol. "Mary and I used to joke about crossing eating and sleeping off of our list of things to do." Fernando remembers that this interest in Latin American causes extended even to Lionel residents who were not very active in COCA. "I think a lot of people in the dorm were socially aware. Even if they didn't do a lot of the work, they at least wore the buttons and showed up at the events."

Mary has only the best memories of Larry as a proctor, and says that he did a good job of helping her to discover her own opinions. "He didn't shape my political views, but he helped me voice them," she says. But others are not so sure. "I sometimes think it wasn't fair for Larry to do what he did, us being naive freshmen," says Rich. "He didn't force his ideas on us, but he argued very persuasively," Kathy, who was often active in COCA, has perhaps the bluntest assessment: "I know some time the next year I looked back on it and wondered how I got involved in all that. It was sort of like being in a cult."

After three years, it is difficult to look back on one single year and extract meaning from it. Certainly Lionel residents have taken an unusual route through Harvard, but Gary's question remains: whether we were strange when we came in, or did we become strange. Looking at the time off taken by Lionel residents provides just one indication that, as Mary says, "more people in Lionel struggled with more aspects of their Harvard experience" than otherwise seems to be the norm. It is not just the sheer number of Lionel people who decided to take time off to try and find themselves--eight of the original 18--but also where they chose to look. There wasn't one "typical" Harvard time off job, not one Capital Hill job or journalism internship. Two, Mary and Fernando, went off separately to work in the Catholic workers movement, dishing out food in soup kitchens and doing other volunteer work. Two took jobs at schools, Kathy teaching "survival skills" at a school for blind children, and Rich teaching at a private school in Brookline. Tim went off to Africa to do Mennonite church work. At the other extreme, two Lionel residents, Shawn and Suzy, were both working at Mug and Muffin.

It's hard to pinpoint a legacy. Certainly, a few members of Lionel broke away from the group. While 10 members went to Dunster House and three to Currier, several left all Lionel people and took off for other Houses with other roommates. But even those who did so did not necessarily leave Lionel behind. Rich, who left his Lionel roommates and went to Leverett House recalls that he "regretted it partly sophomore year. You really got close to people freshman year."

Yet there seems to have been something more to Lionel than just the people who comprised it. If there was a single ethos, it was probably the almost forced encounter with diverse people and views. To some extent, those who were best able to handle Lionel, and those who held strongest to the legacy, were those who opened themselves up fully to its diversity.

Some, like Rich, seemed to have contemplated Lionel's lessons over the years, and are still profiting from the Lionel legacy. He notes that Lionel was an often rigorous intellectual environment because of the constant diversity of viewpoints. "I had all kinds of checks and balances working on me. I had Larry saying one thing, Manny saying the opposite, and Jeff saying something totally different."

Others like Daniel, managed to incorporate some of the ideas that they heard in Lionel into their academics. He notes that his high school in Revere, Mass., did not even have a Democratic club, yet somehow, he ended up taking a term abroad in Columbia, and ultimately wrote his Social Studies thesis on that country. Daniel notes that without Larry and Lionel, Latin American issues "wouldn't have occurred to me," adding, "I still feel Larry's influence shaping my college career, not a direct influence, but something more subtle."

Of course, it is still early to tell what Lionel's final legacy will be for the 18 freshmen who lived there. While two are going on to Harvard Law School in the fall, and two are going immediately on to medical school, there are many who are still wrestling with the same questions about their future that they struggled with while at Lionel.

Kathy speaks for a whole contingent of Lionel when she says. "I'm going to try to finish school, which may be difficult." While speaking vaguely of perhaps switching out of her current joint major of Applied Math and Biology into straight Biology, Kathy says, "Maybe someday I'll go to med school, maybe I'll drop out of school." Jeff speaks of returning in the fall after a two-and-a-half year absence, although he is not sure what he ultimately wants to do with his life. Daniel is going to work for the City of Baltimore and considering law school, Rich wants to teach high school history. At the furthest extreme, none of Shawn's friends have heard from her since December. Kathy isn't sure, but she thinks Shawn may have simply gone to bed.

Yet oddly enough, Kathy may have summed up the Lionel experience best when she said "I always thought of us as pretty typical. Looking past time off, past the inability to communicate and the near fist-fights, past the violent clash of cultures, it may just be that Lionel was somehow "typical"--like the rest of Harvard, only more so. If Harvard is about special people, leaders of their respective communities, people who refuse to follow the beaten path, then Lionel wrote the book on all of those qualities freshman year. If Harvard is about diversity, and people learning from people who are different from them, this describes virtually every moment of life in Lionel, from talking politics to arguing over which channel to watch. And at the very least, the legacy of Lionel is having spent a year living with 18 of the most diverse people ever to live under a dorm roof. "When I run into anyone from Lionel, even though they may have changed, I still feel I can have a real conversation with them," Mary says. "I know more than just their face--I feel I know them. "It was Harvard at a dangerous voltage, good while it lasted, but also good when it ended. As Carol recalls, "A lot of it looks very humorous now, and I was laughing even then, but I would never live through it again."