The next morning I opened a checking account under my new name at the Cambridge Trust Company and went in to Cramer's office an Devonshire Street, deep in Boston's financial district.

Impressive Surroundings

I found Cramer ensconced in a small third-floor office its walls lined with colored graphs on unemployment figures and economic trends, and book cases full of large volumes, mostly on labor relations. Cramer himself added to the general air of efficiency. He is about five feet seven, has a build like Sidney Green street and a personality which fairly exudes confidence from the first.

Asserting that "We're business-like but informal," he wasted no time getting down to work. The system was simple; he would scan the textbook (Binkley's "Realism and Nationalism") page by page and dictate a condensation of the material, slowly enough for me to copy into my notebook.

Great Background

Cramer knows his stuff, there is no doubt about that. He was able to supplement the text when I evidenced ignorance of some particular reference, and he showed a glib familiarity with treaty dates, foreign phrases, and the like.

"It impresses some people," he said deprecatingly, when I pointed to the Phi Beta Kappa key attached to the chain of a fancy Swiss pocket watch he kept lying on the desk to time our progress through History 32. "It's what a man knows that counts, not just the marks he can get"--a rather starting bit of philosophy to hear from a professional tutor. When I read him a list of six topics which Professor Ropp had given out as probable exam questions, Cramer said, "We don't want to aim for any particular topics. This man Ropp fooled some of the boys on the last exam, so we don't want to take any chances this time."

So we confined our "study" to the textbook, and at the end of two hours had covered approximately half of it. A session of equal length the next morning finished off Binkley, leaving only a few chapters in Schaprio's History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century" to be done.

Ah, for the Good Old Days

Cramer is a talkative man. He told me about the "good old days" when be was established in a whole floor of offices over Hayes-Bickford, as the Parker-Cramer Tutoring School. "We used to have three or four hundred students," he said wistfully. "Sometimes as many as fifty percent of the men in a course were coming to us."

Things are different now, though There is a limit to the amount of work one man can do, even if, as Cramer says. "I often work fourteen, fifteen hours a day during reading period."

Soothes Fears

When I asked him if this wasn't all slightly illegal on my part according to University regulations, he reassured me. "The only thing they don't like is groups of five or more." But what was the difference between this and the University's official tutoring bureau? "They don't guarantee you a decent grade. I can get you a B." And as for the official crackdown on tutee schools in 1940. "There was a lot of hypocrisy over at Harvard. If you're interested in journalism," he added, "it's a fascinating story."

During the second session. Inquired about having a term paper written for me. "I don't suppose you could save me the trouble of sitting here copying it down by writing it at your leisure and giving it to me could you.?" I asked. He didn't suppose so. "That would be too much like just buying a ready-made theme. It's good for your soul to copy it down."

Little more was to be gained by fur ther tutoring at this point, at least as far as the CRIMSON was concerned, so in the interests of economy I did the rest of the work for the hour exam myself. The grade tells the story; on the essay question, answered largely with the material covered in my tutoring sessions, I got an A minus; on the short-answer questions, my own contribution, a C plus.

Cramer had advised me to call him around the middle of December if I wanted help with the final exam, since he would be "pretty busy in January." To find out just how busy he was during reading period, and thus get some idea how many undergraduates were taking the primrose path to a Harvard degree, I waited till last week to call him.

Doubling-Up

It was late, but he squeezed me in on a joint appointment with another history scholar for Friday afternoon. When I asked him point-blank, "out of curiosity," just how many boys he is now helping through Harvard, Cramer replied that he "would rather not say." But he admitted that he was a hard taskmaster: "If I were working for someone, I'd insist on a full hour for lunch. But I exploit myself."

Another session last Tuesday finished the main reading period text, and my mentor pronounced me "ready for the final."

Cramer's parting words, as I pressed the last of $34 of CRIMSON money into his hand, were, "I just hope the word doesn't spread around too much about this. All I'd need would be an article about it in the school paper. . . .