Rick Stafford peers through the window glass at 17 Quincy Street and raises his eyebrows in alarm. "Oh boy! We've got a function going on here," he says, pressing the buzzer firmly. No one responds so he knocks on the door, waits and buzzes again. Finally the door opens and he strides in and over to a small room where fancily dressed people are sipping cocktails. He spots Helen Gilbert (chairman of the Radcliffe Board of Overseers) whom he is supposed to photograph, and moves away to attach his flash to his camera. He thought Gilbert would be alone, waiting for him.

"I thought I had a fixed set-up," he says, "they never give you enough information on these things." "This would be the one time I didn't wear a tie," he says, smoothing back the thin black strands of hair on his balding head and buttoning his top shirt button. The guests begin waltzing into dinner and Rick follows cautiously, pausing at the dining room door. Finally he approaches Gilbert at the table. He gets a couple of shots of her there but must return after dinner for more. This shatters the smooth schedule he envisioned of processing the film immediately, getting it in the mail to the New York Post where it's due tomorrow and picking up his wife at the grocery store at nine. "This by the way is not very unusual," he says.

In an hour he returns but an after-dinner meeting is in progress and he must sweat it out for a while longer. When the guests start dribbling out Rick approaches Gilbert again. "Oh, you wanna take some more pictures, Rick?" Gilbert announces to the room with a wide smile. She asks a friend to wait for her, "Rick is only gonna take a second."

"Quick!" she says to Rick while she corrals two students for conversation. "You have to be taken with the chairman of the Board of Overseers," she says, maneuvering one student on each side of her for the pictures. She grins and talks to the students in a booming voice while Rick clicks pictures repeatedly. "Rick is the official photographer of everything to do with Harvard," she begins. "He once took my picture skidding along the ice, for a charity show. He's gotten thin! I think he must have eaten nothing. I've been putting it on while you've been taking it off," she says to Rick, gleefully.

"It's very simple," he answers, "I just got sick."

"Now that's enough, Rick," Gilbert says, smiling goodbye to the students. Rick takes their names for cutlines (the captions beneath pictures), then hurries to the door.

"Now that's better than nothing," he says, "I think I'm gonna get one of her as she comes out the door." He positions himself in front of the door and stands in the chilly night air waiting for her. He checks his watch and figures if he runs like hell to his car he can make it to the grocery store in time to meet his wife.

"Okay," he whispers as Gilbert appears in the doorway. The flash goes off, shocking her out of conversation--he had caught her.

"Damn, damn, damn, damn!" she cries, then she grins, touches Rick's arm gently and walks off down the path. "Rick," she calls, not turning around, "that picture of me in People was awful."

"But that wasn't mine, don't blame me for him," Rick calls lamely to her disappearing form.

If it weren't for Rick Stafford's quiet grin and easy manner of breaking into conversation with everyone he takes pictures of, for and with, nobody would notice him. It's his job to be at every Harvard event but not to be part of it--he must be off to the side while people have their great moments in life, as he must record their glory for them. His is a lonely job, so he always chats with those around him. He gets to know everyone from professors to administrators to football players in his travels. They all remember him the next time he pops up, and they smile and call him Rick. He shoots some pictures and usually takes off long before an event is over, never even spotted by most of the people he photographs.

Rick Stafford came to Harvard when he was 18 but he never took a course. Instead he's been working here full-time for the past 25 years. He feels he grew up here--he loves Harvard. His grandmother told him, "you either go to a big university or you work for one," but Rick hasn't gotten the education she hoped he would absorb from hanging around these ivy walls. He worked his way up from a caretakers job in the animal labs to his present position as photographer for the News Office. He wanted to be a photographer for years, but he couldn't figure out a way to start. "It's not a poor boy's profession," he says, "because you need to be able to sustain yourself for a while to get established." He finally got his break when Harvard exploded in political violence in 1969.

When University Hall was taken over, the Gazette was founded as a public relations organ for Harvard. They had a P.R. photographer already, but Rick convinced Harvard there was a need for someone to shoot the demonstrations and street action. "I wasn't a journalist; I was a photographer--I took what they told me to take. Now, after I switched to the News Office, I do much more P.R.--we avoid demonstrations, especially using pictures for identification. Chuck Daley [vice president for government and community affairs] decided we should get out of the police business. That was a very good decision," Rick says.

When he started at the Gazette he ran himself ragged covering several simultaneous events and evening events each day. "It didn't matter that I had pictures to take at the field and the Science Center and Bok's office all at the same time. You have to move quickly and figure how long something is going to be cooking and can I afford to be late for that or will I miss it," Stafford says. Now life is a little easier--he can send his lab assistant, Dave Bailey, on assignments if he has a real conflict. But he still can't do his job on a 9 to 5 schedule, so he misses his family often and feels bad because, financially, he says, "they haven't had the easiest time of it."

Because Rick moved from one job to another for 25 years at Harvard, he has a broad social circle. He'll chat in the yard with John Finley about the resident birds or discuss his last assignment with a Harvard cop. "I have a very deep vertical cut because of the way I came up in the university," Rick says. "I still have a lot of friends who are engineers and janitors and I talk and eat lunch with them--they're old friends. But I've come up a little."