The club also sponsors evening and full-day lectures and seminars conducted by Harvard professors and other notables. The club's annual dinner is usually held in January and features a prominent member of the Harvard community. Recent events include conversations with Nelson A. Rockefeller and Andrew Young, a billiards exhibition starring Minnesota Fats and a program on antiques. Between 75 and 100 members watch films of Harvard football games every Thursday during the season. The club also fields chess and bridge teams that play in college club leagues.

Squash is taken seriously at the Harvard Club, with eight courts and a full-time professional to help tune the members' games. The courts are almost always busy and the team perennially fields strong entries in the four levels of the highly competitive New York club league. The is also a small gymnasium, a sauna, a steam room and Nicky the masseur to complete the sixth-and seventh-floor sports facilities.

Despite the athletic paraphernalia, the club's most prized asset may be its library, a 25,000-volume, six-room affair with a large rare-book collection and the largest collection of Harvardiana outside of Cambridge.

Lounsbury D. Bates, or "Biff" to his friends, presides over the growing collection with almost paternal affection. Bates, a 1928 graduate of the Law School, took over the library six years ago after he retired from private legal practice. A member of the club since the '30s, he is an unofficial historian, having watched the club change over his more than 40 years of affiliation.

Bates is especially proud that the library is now a tax-exempt foundation called the "Harvard Library in New York," which has raised more than $6000 in its one month of existence.

Chomping on an unlit cigar with his slickedback grey hair parted in the middle, he is, as one member described him, a "Mr. Chips type."

"One of the things I enjoy about the library is that it's busy, it's not just like an old man's club where maybe one old guy sits around all day long," he says. "We get 110 publications, including The Harvard Crimson, Gazette and Independent, and, oh yes, people do read them."

Bates remembers when the club had a pool, but notes, "it was only big enough to take a splash in anyway." He says with pride that the building has been designated as a landmark by the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission, so it mayneverbe torn down or its facade destroyed. "There used to be a plaque outside, but somebody stole it for the copper," he explains.

The biggest change in the club, Bates and other old-timers agree, has been the decision to allow women to join. There was, and still is, a Radcliffe Club with quarters inside the Harvard Club, but Radcliffe Club members never have been able to use the building's facilities. The membership voted 2097 to 695 on January 11, 1973 to open the Club to women and there are now about 400 women members.

"It's been very popular, more popular than one might have guessed, with younger women graduates for a very specific reason," Rothschild says. "Women in business today like to take clients to lunch the way men do and it's hard. You go to a restaurant with a man and the waiter will inevitably give the man the check. This way the women like to be able to take someone to their club," he adds, but women remain greatly outnumbered in what is still essentially a male institution.

Linda Rawson '76 joined the club to play squash, and says "it took a lot of fortitude to remain a member." She notes that women were allowed on only four of the eight squash courts and had no access to locker room facilities. However, a major renovation of the facilities in 1978 which improved quarters for women, made, as Rawson says, "a whole different world" for women.

LouAnn Walker '76 also joined to play squash, but thinks some members' attitudes as well as the locker room facilities merit renovation. "Some men there really dislike women intensely," she says. She finds the almost all-male atmosphere "very oppressive" and remembers several hostile outbursts from male members, including a denunciation by a member who accused Walker and a fellow squash player of using the club as "a girly pickup bar."

Though there are few women, Rothschild is right when he says "you go in there and there are a hell of a lot of young people in there." Of course, the gentlemanly oldsters who look like escapees from New Yorker cartoons are still adequately represented, but they are a minority. The club has made extensive recruiting efforts in the past decade, usually making two or three trips to Cambridge every year to streamline the admissions process for new graduates. The admissions procedure, once a formidable obstacle, is now a mere technicality. William S. Kelly '70, a member of the admissions committee, could not remember rejecting one candidate in his ninemonth tenure.

But the most persuasive lure to prospective members is now and has always been the low dues for recent graduates. For the first four years after college, the fee is only $72 per year. Then it goes up rapidly, levelling off at $360 per year for those out of college ten years or more.

For Richard F. Conway '76 and many other young graduates the reason for joining the club is that it is "very cheap compared to most other New York clubs and I wanted a place to play squash."