At first it didn't work: Crooks steered clear of the mines, but after high school he went instead into the brickyards, which were even worse. After a while a new foreman came on the job, the son of the owner. "He was a fancy son of a bitch," Crooks says. "He used a cigarette holder, and it turned out he had been to Harvard grad school. I was really resentful of him at first, but we got to be friends. He introduced me to books."

Thanks to his new friend. Crooks got a softer job as a shipping agent in a neighboring brickyard, a job he held until World War II broke out and he jumped at the chance to get out of Pennsylvania. He became an Army officer, serving combat duty in Italy until at daybreak one morning he walked over a hill where some of his men were setting up a new position to find a lot of Germans pointing machine guns at him. He was captured; they took him to a prison camp in Poland for a year.

"I was constantly afraid," he says. "Once you surrender in combat you really give up. The one thing you decide to do is survive. The first thing the Germans said to me was, `for you, the war is over.' And it was. You become a survivor."

So Thomas Crooks survived, and the war ended, and he went back to Pennsylvania and decided to go to Harvard. He applied here and they rejected him, so he went to Carnage Tech. got good grades, applied to Harvard again, got in, and joined the Class of '49, never to return to Pennsylvania for any length of time again.

By the time Crooks graduated he was 31, married with a baby boy, naive and idealistic. He got a job as assistant dean of freshmen here and joined the reserves and thought about peace until the Korean War broke out and he was called up. He served at West Point, teaching, and came back in 1954, job hunting.

One day Crooks was walking by University Hall, and Dean John U. Munro leaned out the window. "Hey Tom," he said, "you want a job?"

"With who?" Crooks yelled back.

"Ford Motor."

"No way."

Thinking it over, perhaps becoming master of Dudley House was what did it, what committed Crooks to a life at Harvard.

But after some talking Crooks went to work for Ford Motor, in Somerville. He says he enjoyed it, but when Harvard called two years later he jumped at the chance to come back and has been here ever since. He was director of student placement, assistant director of the Summer School, dean of special students, master of Dudley House and director of the Summer School, a career on the edge of the University but a long way from Seminole all the same. Thinking it over, perhaps becoming master of Dudley House was what did it, what committed Crooks to a life at Harvard; he remembers spending a long time deciding whether to take that job.

All this talking about himself makes Crooks a little uncomfortable. As a man gets older he has more license to do that sort of thing but it still doesn't seem quite right. So Crooks is glad to see Martha Armstrong Gray, the director of the Summer School's dance program, come in to chat, it gives him a chance to think about something else.

Gray is an enthusiastic woman. "It's been a wonderful summer," she says. "Just great."

Crooks decides to say something that has been on his mind: he couldn't really understand the last Summer School dance program.

Gray seems a little taken absent "Do you make sense out of surrealist painting?" she says.