Erik L. Sundquist '63-4, sometime Harvard student and part-time cab driver, has been nominated for the national Taxicab-Driver-of-the-Year award. The Harvard senior's selection is a result of a homicide in which he participated while operating a cab this summer in the Washington, D.C., vicinity.

The fateful day began when Sundquist picked up a passenger who asked to be driven to a succession of liquor stores and bars. About nine that night the man said he wanted to go home, where he could get enough money to pay the $36.45 fare. Instead of paying, however, he shot his neighbor.

Sundquist sped to the cab but, in the tension of the moment, could not make either it or its radio work. The murderer returned shortly and asked, while brandishing the murder weapon, to be driven from the scene. Sundquist complied.

The pair were seeing toward Youngstown, Ohio, when Sunquist threw open the driver's door and dived onto the pavement is the fashionable Georgetown section of the Capital. The cab ran on a few feet and then crashed into a parked car. A curious gas station attendant easily disarmed the dased, drunken passenger.

The national award consists in part of an engraved medallion suitable for mounting in a cab. Whether he receives it or not, Sundquist does not expect to become a folk here. As he realises, any attempt to idolise him would falter is the face of compromising facts, like "why I dreve the gay around all day when I knew he was psy chopathic and had a gun."