Quite out of it

My jealousy unbounded

While the statue was cheered with a torchlight parade for the 250th anniversary of the College, and the College's Memorial Society used to place a wreath at its base every November '26 the occasion of its 100th birthday may pass with little notice.

The Lampoon may take note of the anniversary however.

"We don't plan to throw a birthday party, said President Conan C. O'Brien '85, "but we'll probably stuff it with cottage cheese, maybe also with some chives Or else we may just spray it with some obscenity. It would be a good prank.

The Lampoon reportedly once also covered the statue with tar.

John Harvard himself attended Emmanuel College at Cambridge University before emigrating to America in 1637. He inherited wealth from relatives, and died of tuberculosis at age 30 about a year after arriving.

A granite monument was later erected to his memory in the Phipps cemetery in Charlestown, which is not, however, his burial place, but the bronze plaque on it has been stolen and missing since 1979, according to Mary O Shannon of the Boston environment department.

Ironically, the monument does not stand at the site of his burial (which was somewhere on "Burial Hill"), the site of his house is uncertain, since it was burned during the Battle of Bunker Hill, and only two copies of his signature exist. No portrait of him has ever come to light, and it is unlikely his father being an illiterate butcher, that a family portrait was ever done.

Yet while the details of Harvard's life are not completely known, the institution he donated to (in a verbal will to his wife) lives on.

As graduating seniors walk by the statue in the traditional "tipping of the hat" this June, they should think of President Eliot's words at the 1884 unveiling of the statue. "He will teach that one disinterested deed of hope and faith may crown a brief and broken life with deathless fame. He will teach that the good which men do lives after them, fruitful and multiplied beyond all power of measurement or computation."

Excerpts from French's correspondence used with permission of Michael Richman, a researcher at the National Trust for Historic Preservation.