He prepped at aristocratic St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H., and went on to Harvard where he graduated in 1938. "I was going through college because that was the thing to do," he recalls. "But I enjoyed myself immensely." One of his greatest joys was polo, which, he says, "even then was regarded as esoteric."

THE von Stade family are renowned horsemen. Skiddy's father, who was also named Skiddy--"He was what you called in those days a gentleman jockey," Skiddy Jr. says--founded the Museum of Racing in Saratoga, N.Y., along with Averill Harriman.

When the young von Stade arrived at Harvard, he brought two polo ponies with him. Needing more horses for a match, von Stade joined the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) and trained some of the field artillery horses for polo. "That was my drill," he says.

Von Stade was thrown out of ROTC when he took the first term of his senior year off to tour South America with an international polo team, which, he recalls, "turned out to be pretty much of a flop." Returning to Harvard to graduate, he was offered a job as a master at St. Paul's. He accepted the job, and then two years later, took another offer to come to Harvard.

And judging from both the amount of time he has spent here and his pronouncements, von Stade likes Harvard the way it is. "I wouldn't like to see the University reorient itself in any significant way," he says. "I wouldn't like to see it turn out a lot of Democrats or a lot of Republicans--certainly not a lot of SDS."

"I'm all for evolution rather than revolution," he commented. "That's partly to do with my age, and partly to do with my make up."

The process of evolution he believes in is not a rapid one. "Take a step and see how it works out," he says. "But I don't mean take a step this year and take another step next year. You've got to think in generational terms, which is only four years here. You've got to go slow."

Asked why he thought students wanted the process of change to go faster, von Stade said that he himself was equally impatient in his youth. "Students are taught to have ideas," he said. "But they have to learn how to feel about them."