At 50 Holyoke Street, the residents are painting the kitchen, repairing chairs, and dreaming plans for a rose garden and a spiderlike ham radio antenna. After a year as acting co-masters, William and Mary Lee Bossert are still moving in, physically and psychologically, to the permanent mastership of Lowell House.

The Bosserts have a hard act to follow--the "traditional" mastership of Zeph Stewart. Presiding over High Tables in Lowell for 12 years, Stewart instituted many of the House's idiosyncratic traditions and threw himself into most aspects of House life, from administrative snafus and individual rooming problems to writing recommendations for Lowell House alumni.

The new co-masters have eased comfortably into the vacancy stamped by Stewart. While maintaining traditions such as High Table and Thursday teas, they are handling firmly-ingrained practices with an untraditional style. (Bossert: "Lowell House students made keeping the traditions a condition for the new masters. Students are terribly conservative about traditions.")

"They (the Stewarts) were formal and we are informal, which leads to a major difference in House social functions," William Bossert says. "I couldn't get dressed up for our Tuesday-night parties and 'receive' as the Stewarts did."

"I never had time to think about following the Stewarts," adds Mary Lee Bossert, whose elaborate cakes, pastries and other culinary artwork are Tuesday-night attractions. "We kept the traditions but I didn't worry about whether we did things like the Stewarts."

Those well-attended weekly parties have been the Bosserts' major setting for getting to know students, and the co-masters feel satisfied with their efforts in that direction. However, they plan to cut back the number of fests this year. "There were two problems: we got tired and were going broke," William Bossert says.

The Bosserts feel they have done as much as possible to get to know Lowell House students, but they recognize other differences in style between the Stewarts and themselves which perhaps make them less accessible or at least less visible to students. "Zeph went out into the House more," Bossert says. "We haven't gone out of our way to find problems in the House, but most students know we're here and available."

"We're not as good as the Stewarts were about eating in the dining hall," Mary Lee Bossert adds. The Bossert family, which includes two children (ages 12 and 14), rarely eats dinner with Lowell House, but Mary Bossert explains that by her children's reluctance to venture into the dining room.

The Bosserts can claim a long affiliation with Harvard. While originally midwesterners (he, Missouri and she, Oklahoma), they both came east to school--she jumped from art history to biology at Wellesley while he studied physics and lived, appropriately in Lowell House. William Bossert received his Ph. D. from Harvard, was a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows, joined the faculty in 1963 and holds joint appointments in Biology and Applied Mathematics, where he is Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Math. Mary Lee Bossert worked in the surgical research labs at Mass General Hospital for several years, but now the family and Lowell House fill her time.

Bossert says he accepted the mastership because "if you're serious about undergraduate education, this is where the action is. I didn't have any great misconceptions when I accepted the mastership. The position of master has certainly changed since I was a student here. It is less grand, involving less ceremony and more work--which is perfectly all right."

While the Bosserts see no major changes peculiar to Lowell House which they would like to institute they would like to see changes in the Houses generally. Bossert believes Houses should play a stronger role in teaching, by increasing the number of courses centered around Houses.

He is vehement about physical problems faced by the Houses. While he concedes that the Quad Houses need major renovation more than those by the river, he would like to see more attention paid to deterioration in all Houses. Last year, the Bosserts tangled with financial problems at Lowell House when flooding in some rooms necessitated plumbing renovation. The construction of two manholes in Holyoke St. Clogged up relations with University Hall for awhile, Bossert remembers. Lowell House students recall with distaste Bossert's "State of the Plumbing Address" at dinner in Lowell House Dining Hall one night--a speech which one resident describes as "interminable" and "ill-planned."

"Students take the master seriously," Bossert says. "Most faculty members do not. Everyone likes to be taken seriously."

Mather House

David and Patricia Herlihy