At least four Roosevelts--Theodore the younger, Kermit, John, James--as well as University presidents Lowell and Conant have been on speaking terms with the proprietor of the shine parlor-newsstand strategically set on Massachusetts Avenue opposite Widener's back door. Felix Caragianes is not the commonplace sort of man you would expect to find commanding a battery of bootblacks: in the wide grin behind his horn-rimmed spectacles there is a contagious adolescent exuberance which has put the purchase of a morning paper on a personal basis for a generation of the Harvard community.

Now nudging sixty, Felix was born of humble shepherd stock in Megalopolis, Greece. At eight he ran away to Athens to sell papers; by nineteen he had saved sufficient money to join the great immigration wave to America and to make sightseeing stopovers along the way at Marseilles, Paris, London, Liverpool, and Halifax. Reaching Boston with one lone dollar to his name, he first worked in a friend's establishment on Essex Street and after a brief stint on his own in the Hub made the move to Cambridge. He had never enjoyed an education of his own so basking in the erudition of others appeared an attractive substitute. "If you gonna go near a big college," he explains thirty-five years after, "you be 'round the better people."

Felix has marked difficulties with the language but despite dialectical handicap he cuts through with ease if something is really on his mind. Passers-by do a double-take when they see him in animated conversation with such figures as Pound, Morize, or Copeland. During spare minutes he likes to scan his stock of magazines. Indeed, only an overriding sense of nationality, ranks in his makeup with this semiliterate but deadly earnest intellectual streak. A leader in Hellenic causes, he has helped to form the Megalopolitan Club of the United States to raise money for the construction of modern schools at his impoverished birthplace. In Boston the Greek Orthodox Cathedral benefits from his generosity. Over a battered desk hangs perhaps his proudest possession, an autographed portrait of Eleutherios Venizelos, until his death in 1935 the towering Greek democrat of this country. Felix does not boast a grasp of political nuances but he holds a simple hatred for the Communists in Greece.

In business, preferences ideological and national give way to one of the most remarkable assortments of reading matter available anywhere: Daily Worker, Irish World, Turf Flash, plus language sheet and pulp (over 600 in toto) mingle on the shelves unembarrassed while Felix looks down with a benign tolerance. "It's no matter if a man buy something," he reasons, "he like to see what it's all about." What does dismay him is the wicked popularity of sex trash. When men are buying that which is portable cover-out, it will likely be current bestsellers Life and Look--new faces since the days in the Teens when Literary Digest and Punch drew the tinkle of coin. Old-faces Crimson, Advocate, and Lampoon remain top attractions, although he confesses to selected clientele that the latter has fallen off considerably since the University's Golden Day. Education-admirer Felix, of course, does not admit to difference between the Harvard of today's Postwar and the Harvard of the Roaring Twenties. He has not looked for the trappings of opulence hut rather for the constant Knowledge. There is really nothing incongruous about this little man's carrying on a twenty-minute chat with Dean Pound after all.