For every former advertising man who has shucked his job in mid-career for a chance to make a go at real writing (there are a handful of such confessions in the class's report), there is a lawyer on the Boston firm of Ropes and Gray (Harvard's own lawyers, if anyone should pose the question.) There are a sprinkling of established writers-critic John Simon (of Andrew Sarris Fame); novelist Julian Moynihan ( Pairing Off ); screenwriter Frank Pierson ( Cat Ballou and Cool Hand Luke ); psychiatrist Willard Gaylin ( In The Service of Their Country: War Resisters in Prison )-and a number of veteran newspapermen (two from the Christian Science Monitor others from the Boston Herald and the Globe ), but, again, there are also an equal number representing the field of corporate journalism, working for Time/Life and Newsweek -including, of course, Osborn Elliott, Newsweek editor-in-chief and chief marshal for Commencement.
Of course, with a pool of 1400 you do get a few, at least slightly unusual occupations. Richard Chapin grew up to assume the unenviable job of college president (at Emerson). Larrick H. Glendening manufactures and freezes bacterial cultures for food fermentation. And Richard le Ray Borden, Chief of the Pamphlets Staff of the U. S. Information Agency, deserves attention for his brief biographical note:
Not by birth, legacy or tradition, and not so much by free choice, but rather by force of circumstance, I have caused my lot to be cast among those who, collectively and anonymously, bear the label of "government functionary."
(It is appropriate to this mode of anonymity to state that no current photograph is, or voluntarily can be made available.)
To retain their sense of character, the class has attempted to steer the course of their Reunion onto a somewhat less frivolous route than might be expected. A crash course of seminars and panels has been organized to tell them where students are at and where administrators intend them to go. (Topics range from "Have We Moved Backward or Forward in 25 Years?", a Winthrop House discussion led by Physics professor Gerald Holton, to "The Spiraling Costs of Higher Education and How To Pay For It," by John Dunlop, Dean of the Faculty.)
Insists Caroline Head, the Reunion's senior secretary, "This class has been very conscious to emphasize the intellectual side of the Reunion. They really do want to talk to undergraduates and to get away from all of a reunion's connotations of fun." Where last year's reunioning Class of '45 found themselves burdened with the heavily criticized theme Funfest '70, the more pragmatic men of '46 have decided not to bother with the foolishness of a reunion theme at all.
The class that forced the dining halls to save $750 dollars a week by omitting extra cookies, deserts, bread and cereals from their wartime menus, has also exhibited a corresponding practicality in its plans for the week's festivities. This year, the traditional reunion hat is a baseball cap, so that classmates can still wear it to the ball park or the golf course when the whole affair is over. And the Harvard emblem has been stitched on extra lightly so that it need not permanently brand its wearer.
And while the Reunion Committee hasn't yet taken the drastic step of watering the riverfulls of drinks that will be consumed, they have decided "to save money this year, by going to plastic cups from glass," according to Robert MacNamara, a Boston attorney in the class who's made all the arrangements for the week's liquid refreshment. (One thing, though, that MacNamara probably didn't foresee-and perhaps he never even realized-was the panicky rumor that raced through parts of the class of '71 earlier in the week. Word, it seems, got around that it was the Robert MacNamara who had been billeted in Stoughton, thus making the former Secretary of Defense the prime candidate for an honorary degree-and, to those who remembered MacNamara's last public visit to Cambridge, it sounded like Commencement would be a nightmare of pandemonium.)
Percentage-wise, fewer of the men of '46 are returning to reunion as compared to more spirited classes like '42 or '43, but, in terms of actual numbers, this year's is probably the largest ever. For that, credit must be given to the crisis) and many kids are returntility. Each alumnus averages slightly over four children (most also list overpopulation as the world's number one crisis) and many of them are rterrning with their dads for a taste of the serious "fun." Which shouldn't be at all surprising, for, reading through the class biographies, one discovers that their families have made for the largest part of this class's life. Robert Cordell appears typical in writing that "Seven children keep Louise and me too busy for any deep philosophical thought."
(By the same line of reasoning, the classmates' earnest efforts to commandeer families often seemed more doomed than not. The personal histories of the class of '46 would fill months of Divorce Court dramas and the subsequent remarriages weeks of Search for Tomorrow. )
Although most of the alumni appear uneasily aware that the times are, indeed, changing, it doesn't appear that their kids have yet won them over to Consciousness III. A class poll reveals the men of '46 to be several points more conservative in their opinions than were their predecessors in a similar poll taken last year of the class of '45. (Unless that class, too, has dramatically retrenched over the course of the past year.) Seventy-six per cent would object to their son becoming a hippie (making that avocation slightly worse than that of SDS leader, to which 75 per cent of the fathers recoil. Eighty-three per cent believe President Pusey was right in calling in the police to bust University Hall in '69. Only 25 per cent think victory in Vietnam is undesirable. Sixty-eight per cent support ROTC in public and private schools, while a good nine per cent more would also add sex education to the curriculum. Fifty-nine per cent of the class believe the law should allow adultery, 69 per cent would permit homosexual acts, 88 per cent approve of abortion, birth control receives virtually unanimous support, but 49 per cent nonetheless maintain that it is immoral to violate parking laws.
STILL, it is probably quite unfair to so characterize the whole class. For all the personal testimony that reads in support of more discipline-both parental and in loco pariental-and for all the appeals for a return to older, more conservative standards, the class of '46 has its share of incipient radicals-both political and cultural. Edwin Randall, Jr., one of the two black men in the class, writes "for the minorities, power is the only answer-first political and then economic, legally acquired and wisely used." Melvin Maddocks of the Christian Science Monitor echoes the confusions of the class of '71 when he writes, "I guess I'm not sure Harvard really exists. But then, I had the same problem when I was there." And, Jacob Leed, an English professor at Kent State University, simply writes:
It's well an old age is out and time to begin a new.
One of the young students shot at Kent is paralyzed for life. The injured at Kent State and Jackson State have immediate medical costs of about $65,000 not covered by any insurance. Though this is not a huge amount, some of the families are under considerable financial strain, If you will help, send to the Kent State-Jackson State Medical Fund, Kent State University, Ken?? Ohio, 44240-an incorporated fund for which contributions are tax-exempt.
Leed's particular example aside, however, it is nevertheless quite possible to see aspects of our present generation of graduates in the history of those of '46. For, where fear of the draft kept the class of '71 chafing within Harvard's walls, it freed the class of '46 to wander the world. Yor could even avoid exams by enlisting in the Army and still be granted credit for a semester's work-a fact no one seemed to remember when last year's protestors demanded similar treatment. In the case of each example, the needs expressed are pretty much the same-it's just that the forms through which they were channeled are so dramatically different.
"From a personal point of view," Hal Friedman confessed, "the interruption was beneficial. When I came back I appreciated what was available. Without it, I would have just gone through in great haste."
For the class of '46, the 25th Reunion is one more such return, another chance to survey their pasts andtheir futures. They're not a class, perhaps, in the traditional sense. Maybe, in some dim way, they even foreshadow new legions of alumni. But then, who knows why they all decide to return this second time? One alumnus made the decision only after seeing Love Story. "It made me nostalgic," he told the secretary. "And are you going to bring your family?" she asked. "Do I have to?" he replied.
At the very least, their return seems emblematic of a group of lives that were filled with the kind of options that, amid the frantic energies of the times, might have appeared nonexistent, but, to a much more determniistic age, appear in some sad but nonetheless special way, somehow charmed. If only for the fact that, surrounded by the chaos of the forties, the silent death of the fifties, and the threats of the sixties, they once again survived.