Now, Cross is supervising the building of a sewer system in the town, which has one street and 600 people. "I still have to drive an hour and a half to go to the movies, but rural America is where I want to live."
Edward P. Atkinson '71 is a freelance carpenter, working on renovating an apartment building he owns in Boston's South End. "I don't have any fond memories of Harvard. It was a mistake for me to have gone there. I did some work in Visual Studies but I couldn't do anything because the professors were more concerned with their outside work."
"I grew more embittered by the fact that the understanding of urban issues at Harvard is not good. If anything is going to happen in the cities, people have to understand them. The main thing is that the professors lack an understanding of the way people live their lives. Nobody can get concerned about social issues with high taxes and street crime and racism. I had the feeling that none of those professors had even been in the city."
Ten days after graduation, Endicott Peabody Jr. '71 went out to Colorado and joined the Colorado National Bank as a management trainee. "There was a lot of ferment and people who were restless and anxious to do something about the Vietnam war in some form," Peabody said last week about his undergraduate stay. "I kind of feel sorry that it happened when I was there or that it happened at all. We got away from the college experience--we were nationally oriented."
"The demonstrations brought the real world into perspective. I'm not sure that my brother (a Kirkland House junior) is really aware of what's happening in the world."
"I'm not sure my values have changed," Peabody continued. "Rather than changing values, it made people stop and think about it and question what was happening. It forced you to listen and evaluate things on your own. In my own case, I'm in a position to look at all sides before I make a decision."
"For the most part, I was glad to be at Harvard then, although it made people so intense that it became more difficult to concentrate on other aspects of college life," Peabody added.
Eugene L. Herzog '71 is graduating from Harvard Medical School this year and plans to do a residency in family medicine. "The demonstrations loosened up my thinking a lot. The strikes were particularly valuable because the school became a lot warmer and people were more open to new ideas," Herzog said last week.
"The war was in everybody's thinking. People tried to stop it or bring about a revolution. Harvard, as an aspect of the American dream, was disillusioning people. Now I'm finding that it is very hard to lead the life you want to lead if you're a thinking person."
"My Harvard education led me into an interesting way of looking at the world," William B. Beekman '71, a freelance screenplay writer living in California, said last week. "I'm a fairly balanced person, but that doesn't help me in the practical world," he continued.
"I went to Harvard with a radical romantic ideology, but SDS quickly turned me off of that. I never trusted people who organized for causes I believed in. Great things have been co-opted by organizing people. When I got to Harvard, I found things pre-packaged and suspicious. We were the beginning of the end."