Schine spent that off year in the Army Transport Service. On his reapplication to Adams House he said he was a "lieutenant in the Army," but this was not so. He had the "simulated rank of lieutenant" which apparently meant that he had the same pay scale as a lieutenant, but he was only a civilian. His actual job, according to Colley, was that of an assistant purser on an Army transport.

In Schine's first year at Harvard--he entered in the summer session of 1945--he attracted little attention. He lived in B-entry of Winthrop, which was then used as a Freshman dormitory. In the spring of 1946 he moved to Adams and roomed with Herbert Fisher in C-37, but still attracted relatively little notice. It was not until his return to college after the year off that he began to give rise to the series of stories which make up the Schine legend.

In his application to Adams, Schine had asked for a single room, giving as his reason the fact that his work suffered if he had roommates. But because of the crowded post-war conditions he was put in a converted double with Colley. It took only a short while for Colley and everybody on the floor to begin disliking him intensely. One thing that irked them most was his "masquerading as a veteran." Says Joseph Blundon '49, "We were all veterans and his pretending to be one went over like a lead balloon."

Schine soon complained to Headmaster Little that nobody was speaking to him and Little asked his roommates to be a little nicer to him. "We tried," said Colley, "but he made it impossible."

Finally in the spring of '48 Schine was moved to a single room, Adams G-43, where he stayed for the rest of his college career.

One story, told by Colley and repeated by several other people, may be partially apocryphal, but it indicates the sort of flamboyant act which is constantly associated with him by all his old acquaintances.

Schine had ordered his fantastic electronic piano, called a DynaTone, from the Ansley Radio Corporation in Trenton, New Jersey. Colley describes this strange instrument as having strings like a regular piano whose vibrations were reproduced by vacuum tubes and played through an amplifier instead of sounding directly. The same amplifier could also be used for a radio and phonograph which were set into one side of the piano. With this arrangement the piano could be played with either the radio or phonograph through a series of microphones in the piano. Colley also seems to remember a cabinet for a TV set, although Schine did not have one since there was no television station in Boston at that time. The whole thing was finished in bright white.

Colley describes the arrival of this instrument late one spring afternoon. The thing was so difficult to move that a permit had to be obtained to block off Plympton Street for a short time. The movers apparently felt that the piano could not be moved five flights up to Schine's room that evening; but he reportedly insisted, promising to pay them overtime. The movers agreed, but after moving it about half way they told Schine that even if they got it up there that night he would not be able to play it since it would need to be installed by a technician. Incensed, so the story goes, Schine rushed to his room, got on the phone, called Mr. Ansley in Trenton, and told him that he wanted a technician immediately. After some argument, Ansley agreed and a technician grabbed a plane, installed the piano, and flew back again. With the piano installed, Schine sat down, ran his fingers along the keyboard and said "Well, I guess I'll go to bed."

This story, says Colley, illustrates Schine's attitude. "He always insisted he could do anything he wanted. He could too, you know. The word Schine always seemed to work magic. He could always get plane reservations which nobody else could get. But this power gave him an awful contemptuous air--a "You're the sucker' attitude."

Obsessed With Power

This assessment is supported by a Radcliffe girl whom Schine dated frequently. She describes how Schine was obsessed with power and the contrast between the strong and the weak. She tells of a paper which he wrote for a Human Relations course that he took. The paper was supposed to describe a concrete situation of human interaction, and Schine chose a real conflict with his roommate and the other men on the floor. It seems that all the others on the floor were extremely good friends, very gregarious, and liked to have the fire doors on the floor left open. But not Schine. He objected and asked Dr. Little, to have them closed. He was not successful.

Schine chose this conflict for the theme of his paper. He described the conflict between the "strong roommate" who wanted the fire-door closed and the "weak roommate" who wanted it open. The strong one won out in the end, of course. Schine's section man gave him a bad mark on the paper and commented that the "strong roommate" was probably in need of psychiatric help.

Schine's obsession with the question of power is also illustrated by his strange preoccupation with Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. In his days in Adams he used to say over and over again that this was his "favorite book" because it illustrated the importance of power and what a sham altruism was. He used to have long intense discussions with this girl on the subject, but she never succeeded in arguing him out of his position.

She also says that Schine was naturally a rather gregarious person, but that when he found difficulty in getting along with others he began to rationalize until he insisted that he did not need friends. "He liked to be thought of as a mysterious loner, somebody nobody knew very much. He wanted people to point him out and say "There goes that mysterious Schine guy.'"

But if he did not want friends he certainly did not get them. Fisher says, "I can't remember anyone who was disliked by so many people. He had a host of enemies. But Schine never lot on that this bothered him. He never seemed very concerned about anything that went on at Harvard. His interests were elsewhere and he never even spent much time in Adams."