IS THIS fair? Bob Storer (Belmont Hill; John Hancock Life) says, "Sure, I lived in Wigglesworth and then Eliot House. We all went to prep schools and then to Harvard. Sure we all joined clubs. But I think this-a great many of us went on to become top-flight lawyers and bankers and insurance men. I don't think a lot of us have made a hell of a lot of money, but no one's broke."

Storer and Goodman had a couple of long conversations about a year ago concerning the Class of 1945 gift. (The class's original goal was $900,000, It has since been reduced.) Goodman wanted to propose giving part of it to struggling black colleges in the South "whose faculty are being stolen by Harvard and others to create their own facades, to try to curtail this endless, endless hoarding of money by Harvard when so many other colleges are dying for the lack of only a little." Goodman chose Storer to deal with because, he says, "he's the most humane one in the tight cabal that runs the class-the only one who bothered to show up at my trial two years ago." The plan got nowhere-even a compromise version that would have earmarked part of the money for recruitment of and scholarships for black students at Harvard. "There are too many Southerners in the class-many whom donated generously-for us to give the money to Negroes or the underprivileged or people from the ghetto or things like that," Storer said. "It would offend them. And if we had a vote of the class, many of those voting would be those who didn't give any money.

"Another thing we feel about a Goodman," he said, "is that a Goodman complains without being constructive. SDS and that are just trying to destroy. They say they will be constructive later. Well in business that's not how we do things. If it's true like we read in the Herald that only five per cent of the current Harvard class is making all the trouble, then we'd like the other 95 per cent to make themselves known.

"In our day we would have as many intellectual discussions as the boys today. But then we'd go back to our rooms or to the OG [Oxford Grill] for a beer instead of forming committees and demonstrating and some such.

"We went through college in troubled times too, you know. We didn't know when we would have to go to war. ROTC was called up between Christmas and New Years of 1944 and we didn't get any credit for that whole preceding term. Now the students are demanding credit for no work because they say these are troubled times. We had the war, and a lot of us were not for the war. God knows we didn't want to go. We turned around, though, with PearlHarbor which in my mind was completely brought about by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who needed an excuse to declare war. This group today needs a catalyst. If a Chinese ICBM landed in California that would make people realize that Nixon's handling of Vietnam is not that bad."

Goodman recalls that on the day Franklin Roosevelt died he was studying in the Lowell House library, which overlooks the Owl Club garden. The Owl Club, he says, threw a party that afternoon to celebrate FDR's death.

Storer says. "Mtich Goodman said he wouldn't come to the reunion because it's too frivolous. We feel that when we're working at our jobs we work like hell. We play like hell too. Why can't we come back and have a hell of a good time? A successful guy has lots of friends. I think it's great."

PERHAPS the most successful man in the Class of 1945 is Hugh D. Calkins, Calkins is the youngest member of the Harvard Corporation a prominent Cleveland lawyer, former member of the Cleveland school board, trustee of his alma mater Phillips Exeter, and frequently mentioned candidate for higher office in Harvard and the nation. At Harvard Calkins graduated Magna and was president of the CRIMSON. Naturally, he is chief marshal of the 25th reunion. Calkins has lots of friends. Bob Storer recalls. "From my point of view he was a little liberal-not really in with the Brahmins, even though he did go to Exeter."

Mitch Goodman, who was managing editor of the CRIMSON under Calkins, reminisces. "In the forties we didn't understand what a little pusher Calkins was. We were taken by his enormous propriety. His character at Harvard was that of a well-trained student guy who doesn't fuck around. He's the perfect example of a man not really upper-class, but a semi-decayed pilgrim descendant who had to make good on his own. He's the prime example of the paragon good boy-never made a mistake."

One of Calkins's classmates who's been successful in his own way is James Leroy Bernard. Bernard refused to serve in World War Two, and spent time in McNeil Island Federal Prison, then the psychiatric section of the Veterans' Hospital in Los Angeles. He visited a Utopian colony in Paraguay after the war to gather material for his senior thesis, and ended up staying thirteen years until the colony went out of business in 1961. He and his wife organized an obstructive but non-violent picket line at Port Chicago, California, from which 90 per cent of U.S. ammunitions for Vietnam are shipped, and maintained it for 800 days despite official pressure, police harassment, and arrests. A second series of raids by federal authorities "convinced me that if I wanted to stay free I'd best stop being brave," so Bernard moved to Costa Rica, where he's organized a commune for "exiles from military dictatorships near and far."

Another prominent member of the class is Justin Kaplan, whose biography of Mark Twain won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Kaplan lives in Cambridge so he can be near Widener Library. As a consequence, he is more in touch with students than many of his classmates. While he probably agrees with, most of Goodman's criticisms of their class, he is more gentle about it. (He remembers Calkins as "someone terribly nice.") Kaplan graduated from Horace Mann School in New York, and says when he came to Harvard he was "definitely made to feel marginal." Nonetheless he does not see any Brahmin conspiracy to control the class.

"In my time around here," he says, "there were the early bloomers as politicians from Winnetka and Oak Park. You could get elected president of the freshman class with only five votes if you really wanted. But as soon as the class graduates, it falls into the hands of the alumni association, the leaders of which have got to be from Boston, and have got to be involved with money. So you end up with the State Street or insurance types almost, by definition after all the express purpose of the 25th reunion is to get money from the fat cats.

"Mitch thinks I've been co-opted, but there's a difference in style. My job is to organize 'the college activities' for the reunion-wholesome pauses for intellectual activities in five days of orgiastic drinking. If I didn't do it, someone worse would. If one of those State Street people took over, it would be bland propaganda. They are all too inert to be shaken up-but at least we'll try to excite them a little. You can call it co-optation, or you can call it boring from within.

"I'm amazed at how terribly meek they all are-more and more. They genuinely want to learn things, I think. At a certain age they realize they have a certain insularity. But of course they really can't get off their asses. You're not going to get Ralph Lowell Jr.-a classic Brahmin fundraiser type-to raise money from Southern alumni for black colleges."

Kaplan remembers a different Harvard from the one Storer loves and Goodman hates. "I've never since felt as alone as I did freshman year." he says. "I talked to hardly anyone. But I made beautiful discoveries academically. I thought the beauty of Harvard was that they left you alone. We moved back to Cambridge ten years ago just so I could be near Widener Library-I love it and depend on it."