The summer of one's senior year is traditionally a time for a last fleeting bout of irresponsibility before Entering the Great World That Lies Before You. The members of the class of 1929 took off for a summer in Europe or a season of sailing with all the seriousness of a group of children setting out on a picnic. For, the world of June, 1929 was, if not an oyster, at least a picnic, a beautifully tranquil, world in which happy boys and girls romped under a gentle sun while the stock market rose in an always ascending curve.

In the fall of 1929 the young men returned to begin serious work in advertising firms, brokerage houses, and graduate schools. They had been settled down for approximately three weeks when the bottom fell out of their world.

The stock market cracked and then crashed. On Wall Street brokers rushed frantically about, trying to salvage something from the debacle. The effect on Wall Street was immediate, but it took longer for the sound of The Crash of October 24 to reach the quiet streets of Cambridge for not until November 1 did the CRIMSON comment on the events of the previous days.

"The activities of the New York stock market in the past week," commented the CRIMSON urbanely "have doubtless lent force to the opinions of the more austere European critics who have so often blamed this country for the lack of continental finesse of the pursuit of this world's goods."

Predicts Some 'Ill-Effects'

But the editorial did recognize that the crash was more than a temporary set-back. "It is inconceivable that business conditions will not be affected in some way by this great decrease in the public's purchasing power--in spite of reassuring messages by President Hoover--and it would seem a reasonable guess that luxury lines and those trades which have padded their sales with the somewhat artificial methods of installment buying will feel such ill-effects as are developed."

Men in the class of 1929, however, experienced more than a loss of faith in the luxury market's future.

"After a pleasant summer in the brokerage office that Terry Collens is now running," wrote Benjamin H. Dorman in his class report, "I entered the Business School. This was two weeks before the crash that signaled the end of an era which had made this seem a most logical step. When I graduated two years later the step seemed considerably less logical. . ."

Almost the exact sentiments were noted by Sumner Cohen in his biography. "The decision upon graduation to enter the Business School seemed at the time to be a good one. After all, everyone was making millions in the stock market. . . . We were enrolled less than a month when came that Black Friday that ushered in the Depression. We spent the next two years in Cambridge concluding in consecutive monthly reports, backed by formidable statistics, that the depression was over . . . "

For those of the Class who has entered the Business School the depression seemed to destroy the very system in which they had invested their futures. But so long as they were in school some of them were forced to drop out when their father's business failed--they had no immediate contact with the depression. For those who had gone directly from College to work it was a different story.

Suicides were not the order of the day among the members of 1929. For the most part they had little invested in the stock market, in homes, or in families. They did not find themselves wiped out and out of a job with a wife and children to support. Their commitment to the Boom had been only a spiritual one. Their immediate problem was finding a job.

A common experience was that of Charles F. Ayers who upon graduation "went to work for the Aberthaw Company of Boston and stayed with them briefly until I became a victim of the great depression of mid-1930. Undaunted and completely ignorant of the economic trend of the time in which unemployment bulked large, I caught on with the Fuller Company . . . "

Others were not so fortunate. Many, like Richards H. Crawford, went through "several years of minor odd jobs with liberal stretches at leisure." Warren W. Anthony "searched in vain for two long years for a job connected with radio. There was not an opening anywhere during those depression years." And Richard Boonisar in the five years after graduation "changed jobs three times as the financial world and its values crashed all around me."

Makes Own Opportunities

With the golden land of opportunity no longer lay waiting in front of it, '29 fought desperately to make its own opportunities. Isaac Berman, now a manufacturer, was in quick succession a bell hop, A & P manager, magazine salesman, printing salesman, library book salesman, deck hand, and telephone directory salesman.