"It made a businessman out of me," he admits. "But I like people with more personality than you can afford in business."

An Unquestioned Success

There can be no question of his success as a businessman. He now owns 20 across and three houses on Martha's Vineyard, part of a Cambridge office building, two fishing boats and the Six Footer Companies, which makes, among other things, the most popular scarf in the Square.

But the Business School also confirmed his distaste for what he calls "the comforts of repetitiousness." The U.S. Navy did the rest. After serving on a destroyer, Dietz was assigned to Admiral Nimitz's public relations staff on Guam. It was Dietz' job to greet officials visitors, such as Congressional delegations, and take them on tours of the island. When a delegation lost all its baggage, as one actually managed to do, Dietz was supposed to commiserate with the Congressman on their inability to dress for dinner with the Admiral.

Another p.r. man on Guam, William Brinkley, wrote a book about it. The book was called "Don't Go Near the Water," and Dietz, in case you're wondering, was Ensign Max Siegel.

The war left Dietz, once again, with nothing more than scratch. "I still haven't landed or alighted in a job, and am neither married not with children," he wrote in his class report for 1947. But, after a few lean months in a subterranean brownstone apartment in New York, all that changed. Dietz worked in a ladies' hosiery plant, then with a tie manufacturing company, and finally dreamed up the Six-Footer Company. And he met his wife, Annabelle.

Dietz's contempt for the experts grew with his prosperity. When he wanted electricity for the home he built on Martha's Vineyard, his lawyers told him he couldn't get it. He went all the way to the Massachusetts Public Untilities Commission and got it. When he moved to Cambridge, his lawyers told him he wouldn't be able to obtain title to the house he wanted. He went to the courts and got it.

But the experts made their big mistake when they tangled with Dietz's private dream -- Palmer Street, the little street between Harvard and Brattle Squares.

Dietz and two partners bought an old warehouse at the corner of Palmer and Church Streets in 1962. They renovated it and rented it to such tenantz as architects Sert, Jackson & Associates.

As he worked on the building. Dietz somehow imagined Palmer Street without the trailer trucks that roar down it and block it by pulling up on the sidewalks to unload. The street had a "village character," he claimed. If he had had the money, Dietz says now, he might have tried to develop the street himself.

But it was the Coop that had the money. Early in 1964, it announced plans for a $1.3 million textbook annex on the West Side of the street. Dietz promptly sent declarations of war to every Coop director -- copies of God's Own Junkyard, and book of photographs of urban and rural blight.

The Coop's plans were all wrong, Dietz argued before the Cambridge City Council, the Cambridge Board of Zoning Appeals, Governor Endicott Peabody '42 (an old football friend), and a Massachusetts Superior Court. There was no reason, he said, to accept the assurances of Coop directors--some of them Harvard officials -- that their plans were the best possible. "Intelligence in one particular field," he wrote at the time, "is not generally transferable."

In fact, he became more and more convinced that Coop directors were shirking their responsibility to the community. "Don't write about me, write about the Coop directors," he pleaded with a reporter at one point. Then, he grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled: "The Coop directors are violating all the teachings of the Harvard Business School, the Harvard Law School, the Harvard School of Public Administration, and in particular, the Harvard Divinity School."

One Quixotic Attempt

He even made one quixotic attempt to rouse the community. A few weeks before the Coop's annual meeting in 1964, Dietz announced that he would nominate nine Harvard and M.I.T. professors to oppose the official nominees for the Board of Directors. None of the professors had been told in advance about the honor. At the meeting, be haranged a crowd of applauding students for five minutes and closed with what he said was a poem: