Crooks is a man who seems the tiniest fraction of a beat out of synch with Harvard, a man who describes himself as "sort of on the edge" of things here, as "not quite in the main stream."

"I waited patiently for the Lord," Priscilla Cushman was standing at the lectern in Appleton Chapel, wearing a solemn black robe and leading Morning Prayers: "and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry."

Thomas Crooks had just edged into a pew, carefully placed a small brown paper bag on the seat beside him, and opened his hymn book to the morning's responsive reading. "He brought me up also out of an horrible pit." Crooks mumbled along with the dozen other people in the dark, cool chapel, "out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings."

For fifteen minutes Crooks, the director of the Harvard Summer School, affirmed his faith in and debt to the Lord; as the services ended he stood and sang: "Guide me O thou great Jehorah. Pilgrim through this barren land: I am weak but thou art mighty: Hold me with thy powerful hand." The sentiments were noble ones, but of course one hardly takes that kind of thing literally any more: Morning Prayers is simply the sort of ritual Crooks enjoys about Harvard.

Mason Hammond, a retired Latin professor, enjoys Morning Prayers too--a great deal, more than Crooks himself. But the pleasure Hammond gets out of Morning Prayers seems to grow when other people are there, and he was clearly glad that morning to see Crooks, who sometimes goes to prayers and sometimes does not. "Good morning, Tomasso." Hammond told Crooks as the services ended. "How are you?"

Crooks swept up his paper bag, smiled, and said he was fine, perhaps thinking as he did that if it were not for Hammond there might not even have been Morning Prayers that morning. Last summer Crooks cancelled the prayers because so few people attended, but Hammond and others for whom the prayers had been a way of life for years protested gently and Crooks reinstated them. It was probably all for the better. Crooks enjoys the prayers himself, after all; one morning each summer he leads them himself.

After leaving Hammond, Crooks walked across the Yard to Matthews Hall, where he dropped off his paper bag, which contained two zucchini squash from his garden, at the office of the coordinator of the Health Careers Summer Program. Then he stopped in at Lehman Hall for a minute to borrow a morning Globe from Eddie Burke, the superintendent of Dudley House, where Crooks used to be master. He took the Globe into the Dudley Senior Common Room and quickly scanned it for a review of the previous night's Summer School concert; no dice. Walking out, Crooks called to Burke. "Oh Eddie, I forgot the Globe. I left it in the common room."

Burke smiled and waved him on and said, "That's okay master. I'll take care of it," so Crooks went on to work.

This is the slow time of year for Thomas Crooks: the director of the Summer School does the great bulk of his work during the regular academic year and doesn't have much to do during the summer. So he keeps a loose eye on things, stays in touch with the directors of his various subdivisions, and performs ceremonial functions--attending openings, representing the Summer School at official functions, and so on. After 20 years as a Harvard administrator and 15 as director of the Summer School it all begins to come easily, to develop into a series of comfortable routines whose pleasures lie in their repetition as much as in their content. In bringing him here, the Lord has with some assurance set Thomas Crooks's feet upon a rock, and established his goings.

But it is not all quite so perfect. Crooks is a man who seems the tiniest fraction of a beat out of synch with Harvard, a man who describes himself as "sort of on the edge" of things here, as "not quite in the main stream." He is director of a substantial fiefdom--but one very much apart from the rest of Harvard in time and in its basic assumptions and standards. He was a House master--but of the non-resident, catch all House. He graduated from Harvard, gaining a bona fide Ivy League background--but at the age of 31. And the particular patch of miry clay from which the Lord drew Crooks--a poor Appalachian coal-mining town in western Pennsylvania--seems, years later, more and more lovely, not the horrible pit Crooks once saw it as.

But here is Leonard Holmberg, with a problem. Holmberg, a silver-haired man with long sideburns who is the Summer School's registrar, has come into Crook's Holyoke Center office just after Crooks himself has gotten there: Crooks has barely had time to glance approvingly at the rave review in the morning Herald of the previous night's concert.

"Hi, Tom," Holmberg says. "The kids in Canaday are complaining about how it's too hot in there." Like most administrative problems, this one involves money. Canaday Hall is the only air-conditioned dorm in the Yard, but the air-conditioning is turned off because the students living there wouldn't pay extra for it. But since the dorm is air-conditioned it has few windows and, in short, the students have changed their minds. The problem is that it costs money, money the students didn't pay, to turn the air-conditioning on now.

Crooks begins to take care of it, weaving his way through the Harvard bureaucracy. It has to be done carefully; Crooks knows that certain administrators, the ones who will have to pay for the air-conditioning, will be harder to persuade than others. So he begins with the Buildings and Grounds Department and makes little headway. "This is Thomas Crooks," he tells one man's secretary. "Director of the Summer School, C-R-O-O-K-S. Yes. It's about the air-conditioning in Canaday Hall. It's 495-2921." They don't know him over there.

Forced to officials of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Crooks ends up with Bruce Collier, assistant dean of the College for housing. "Hi, Bruce," he says. "This is Tom Crooks. The bathrooms over in Canaday are starting to get muggy, and I think we should push the button over there."

"The key word," Crooks says after hanging up, "is bathrooms. You've just got to keep hitting bathrooms."