A large number of their wives are housewives, many beginning careers or returning to jobs only after the children are grown. About half of the wives work part-time or as volunteers. Given the goals of most women 25 years ago, even the one-fourth of the women who do work full time is a larger number than their husbands would have expected. Trustman says he "never met one woman here who had any interest in having a career. Harvard was just an esoteric hobby for them. They got jobs if they did not get married right away and a job was 'good' or 'bad' depending on the likelihood of meeting a marriageable man there."

Trustman, who divorced his first wife and remarried, believes that the "passive acceptance of women's roles then was devastating. All of a sudden, a woman was supposed to maintain a house and a social life, bear and raise children and preserve herself as an attractive female for the rest of her life, to the exclusion of everything else. It was the source of suicidal depressions and huge explosions" among many of the couples Trustman knows.

One man in the Class, however, chose the Reunion reports as an opportunity to reveal to his classmates that the dream he once shared with them wouldn't come true for him. "I came to grips with the fact that for me there was not going to be any wife and kids, and that were I ever to have what I'd thought I wanted--the 'house with the white picket fence'--the partner there would be a man rather than a woman," Alvin H. Baum Jr. '52 writes.

But 25 years ago, when these men were planning their careers and weaving their dreams of normalcy unaware of the changes they were to face personally, professionally and politically, Harvard was a very different school. Local merchants advertised grey flannel suits on sale for $39.95; Crimson editors annually elected a Miss Radcliffe from each freshman class. Although most upper-level courses were already coeducational, Harvard and Radcliffe were two distinct schools. Women were allowed into newly-opened Lamont Library only at specific hours and in specific rooms. Men could only entertain female guests in their rooms until 8 p.m. and had to check their visitors in and out with a House guard.

The parietal rules elicit nostalgic chuckles from members of the Class today. "We all thought the rules were stupid but at that time we never doubted that that was the way things were--it really is ludicrous," Brody recalls. The rules weren't always strictly observed, although Brody doesn't recall any occasions when either he or any of his friends kept a woman in the dorm overnight. But, he says, "you could screw in the afternoon and that was happening a lot. We also had a car and so there was always the back seat." Trustman says his whole generation "learned to be sexually active between 6 and 8 p.m. The style was first to make love and then go out to dinner."

Trustman says he has trouble understanding how today's coeducation can work. "The prior system was probably repressive and imperfect but I wonder what I would have been doing and thinking about if half my dorm were girls. I wouldn't have gotten any work done!" he muses. When he and his wife visited a student in the Quad last year, he found Cabot Hall "excruciating." He was amazed to greet an undergraduate in her slip and watch her stroll into a bathroom occupied by several men. "It was like seeing a woman walk into a men's room in a restaurant," he said; "I can't get used to it."

The House system was well-established by then, and stereotypes apparently haunted the various Houses then as much as now. Some characterizations changed in 25 years; others are remarkably persistent. Harding says Winthrop was known as a jock house; although Harding adds that he was not a jock. Trustman recollects that Lowell House was "significantly homosexual and History and Lit." Eliot House, as Brody remembers it, was the home of the "white shoes," which are roughly the equivalent of today's Lacoste T-shirts. He always felt Eliot was a place in which he didn't quite belong, finding the cocktail parties and dinners pretentious, the attempt "to inculcate gentlemanly values" in Eliot residents false and the quasi-opulent living rather ridiculous. But he remembers rationalizing "they offered us a suite with five private rooms and a living room for $95 each a semester. So we took it."

The requirement that all men wear a tie to dinner was always one of Brody's favorites. He likes to remember all the times men came into the dining room "in the scruffiest outfits imaginable...but wearing a tie."

In other ways though, things haven't changed much. True, Alfred Hitchcock's arrival in the Square would now be a minor occurrence compared to Bob Dylan's grand entrance, but lines still form in front of Bogart movies at the local theaters. University librarians perpetually devise and abandon schemes to force students to return their books on time and Cambridge officials continue to fret over illegally parked cars. And the town remains, as The Crimson warned incoming freshmen more than two decades ago "a dreary place, given to rain and coal smoke and brown, granulated slush." Perhaps most importantly, or to some, most disappointingly, the campus has recaptured the quietude and air of normalcy that enveloped it in those early peaceful days 29 Septembers ago.