And it was this vacuum that Crane decided to fill. The CCA backed candidate fought his way onto the council and with the help of political and collegiate pal Joseph DeGuiglielmo '29, a man with Crane-like credentials, wasted no time in manipulating Cambridge's first city manager, John Atkinson, into making 13 years of yes-man decisions.

At the same time Crane began to call the key business friendships needed to exercise the necessary influence that his title of mayor could not provide. Frank Townsend, Chamber of Commerce president in the fifties--a man about whom Dyer says, "When I was selling Chamber of Commerce memberships to the city I was really selling Townsend,"--full into the Crane fold. He and the rest of the Harvard Square businessmen--at that time native Cambrigians, residences in Cambridge being perhaps the most important prerequisite to community power--played ball with Crane. And through Atkinson, Crane reciprocated, cutting taxes when every other town's bills were skyrocketing.

With Harvard being at best naive, or reluctant to throw around the financial weight that its property ownership and endowment allowed, Crane and all other entrepreneurs looked across the street to Harvard Trust for fiscal leadership. Robert R. Duncan, president of the bank during the fifties, a man whom business people in the Square still remember as a "mover and a shaker," proved to be the perfect spearhead. Insurance man Dyer grumbles about the current leadership scene saying that if you asked him who could move things in Harvard Square today, ten minutes later he still wouldn't be able to come up with a name. But, Dyer points out quickly, "If you had a problem in those days--then you went straight to Bob Duncan" Current Harvard Trust President Ernie Stockwell explains that Duncan's power base lay not only in his position with the bank, but his address. "He was a Boston attorney," Stockwell said. "But more important he lived on Brattle Street and was very closely involved with the local business interests."

But even while Duncan was exercising considerable power as a native banker interested in the community. Brattle Street's Phil Eisemann, as president of the Bay State Holding Company, was maneuvering his way into majority ownership of Harvard Trust. En route to making Bay State the third largest banking conglomerate in Massachusetts with $1.8 billion in assets. Eisemann first got 51 per cent control of the bank's stock during Duncan's reign, and later expanded it to the present 98 per cent ownership.

Although the retired Eisemann now claims to have exercised no interest in Harvard Square politics and never held a position in the Chamber of Commerce, several Cambridge reformers insist that he was a force even Crane had to reckon with. He still exerts influence as treasurer for select CCA candidates on the Cambridge ballot.

When realtor John Briston Sullivan wanted to erect the Treadway on city land between Mt. Auburn and Eliot St. in 1961, he had to go to Crane for the needed parcel. And in a unique deal Crane engineered the sale of the "air rights" to Sullivan to build the hotel provided he leave some municipal parking spots underneath. The Boston Phoenix reported in 1971 Crane was duly rewarded with some legal business at the other end of the state. Although Harvard had at the time offered to build a much larger parking garage on the site and then give it to the city in the manner of the University's underpass deal between the Yard and the Science Center, the city council passed Sullivan's project without giving the Harvard proposal much thought.

"If Harvard made an offer, I never knew about it until after the vote," Wheeler, who voted for the proposal, maintains. "At the time it seemed like a logical proposal. The Square needed a motel and I didn't think it was all that bad."

Harvard's relations with Crane and the community were mostly colored by the president. And when Nathan Pusey '28 ruled, the administrators seldom packed out beyond the Yard's wells--unless there was some land to buy. Although University disciples would like you to believe that Harvard altrusticly scratched itself from the race to beat MIT to Central Square, actually Harvard did its best but was saddled with too meager a mechanism to buy, or just wasn't shrewd enough to deal with private land developers. When the banks of the Charles were covered with old coal storage dumps, only a few alumni had the foresight to buy the parcel and donate it to Harvard in the 1920's.

As city councilor Francis H. Duchas '55 recalls, the coalition Crane led was built around keeping taxes down and forcing unrestrained development, and was little interested in provided low-income housing that Cambridge's blue collar, poor and elderly could use. But MIT, under chairman James Killian, feeling the heat from MIT's bulging tax-exempt holdings persuaded Pusey to help form the Cambridge Corporation in 1965 university backed vehicle to support the building of low income housing.

Harvard flew in Dean Harvey Brooks's brother Oliver to decorate the Cambridge Corporation facade, and despite or because of Oliver's close connections with the administration, he never got anywhere in public housing. "Harvard has a bad record of efforts it could have made and to a degree it has suffered not inconsiderably," an embittered Brooks immediate progress in low income housing I asked for property to build low income housing before the revolution of 1969 but I received no answer from my letter to Pusey Six months later with students sitting in University Hall he gets me on the phone saying we are having a Corporation meeting down here in an hour and a half--can you submit a site so we can move ahead? Pusey selected one of the same ones I had submitted to him earlier in the year."

While Harvard was making attempts to grab property in the densely populated Square area, the Dow family was slowly amassing land on Brattle Street, Richard A. Dow '33 fell heir to most of Brattle Street and with it the potential to exercise power over a substantial portion of the Square. But Dow maintains now, "I'm not really involved, nor have I been involved in Cambridge relations today." And he is right, as few community leaders mention Dow as a man with influence around the Square.

Harvard's other land competitor, Bertha Cohen, a Russian immigrant who when she died in 1965 had properties that virtually ringed Harvard holdings, also stayed aloof from both Cambridge politics and her neighbors. Through land speculation and stock earnings Cohen became a millionare several times over. However, Bradlee recalls, "If you saw her on the street you would never have known she had a dime."

She slaved over the books under a 15 watt lightbulb, says Dean Whitlock, then assistant to Pusey for community and government affairs. When Pusey sent Whitlock to ask Cohen if Harvard could have a strip of land on Mt. Auburn Street where Tommy's and Cahaly's are now for a Bertha Cohen Memorial Park when the elderly widow died, Whitlock recalls "She cursed me out and told me that the last thing she wanted was a park named for her."

Former Mayor Edward A. Crane '35: "I'm not talking about a God or a Franklin Roosevelt stepping out of the woodwork either," Chamber of Commerce President Robert A. Jones says. "What we need is another Eddie Crane. He could get the coalition together to get something going at Kendall Square."

President Emeritus Nathan M. Pusey '28: Harvard's relations with Crane and the community were mostly colored by the president. And when Pusey ruled, the administrators seldom peaked out beyond the Yard's walls--unless there was some land to buy.