One morning last summer Anthony Romano '90 sat in a Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) office, dispirited and ill after a camping trip with 20 Southeast Asian refugee children.

One youth had caught pneumonia. Another had gone berserk and required evacuation. A Vietnam veteran had stalked the mountain camp, threatening the youngsters.

An exhausted Romano, recalls Huyen Pham'92, took an early morning phone call from a young girl in the group. "She called and asked, `Anthony, are we going to see you today?' He said no, he was sick that day." Pham remembers. "She said, `What's wrong?' And he told her, `I don't know, I have to go to a doctor and see what she says.'"

"I think to myself, he doesn't have a doctor who's a woman. So I ask him and he says no, he doesn't." Pham marvels that Romano, amid his troubles, thought to find the little girl a role model. "To think of the impact one conversation could have, [so that] that little girl could think there was this woman who was a doctor...That's incredible."

The story of Anthony Romano, last year's PBHA president, cannot be understood without acknowledging the earnestness of his response. To his friends, Romano remains steadfast in his convictions about social equity, but conveys them with a seriousness that refutes any charge of triviality.

And for a young man raised in the prosperous white suburbs of Atlanta, this emergence as the leader of the University's largest social service organization has represented no small leap in social conscience--it is a metamorphosis for which Harvard typically seeks credit, but one that is far less common than its promoters would acknowledge.

To meet Romano is to discover a puzzle of contradictions in one persona. Raised in a Sephardic Jewish household, he also grew up comfortable in, and very much a product of, the South. An up-Close observer of de facto segregation's ugliness during his early schooling in Atlanta, Romano leaves Harvard this fall committed to a teaching program in rural South Africa.

At Harvard, he led the most politically sensitive student organization, while living in the College's most conservative house--Eliot House. It is a place which he himself criticizes as "racist, sexist, homophobic."

"Yeah, he's a mixed combination," says Silchen Ng '89, a close friend who co-directed PBHA fundraising with Romano in 1988.

"He knows what people like, what makes you tick," says Fidel A. Vargas '90, a PBHA steering committee member for two years and an associate of Romano. "He sort of comes at you from different directions."

Just as his background blends a Southern gentility with Judaic intellectual rigor, Romano presents an amiability that offsets his willingness to make sharp moral judgments. He retains the capacity for a mature rebuttal of selfinterest among the privileged while he himself is a product of middle-class comfort. And although his collegiate career has led him to oversee the work of 1000 volunteers in 38 committees, Romano remains most comfortable plotting and executing one-on-one community work with the children of Boston's housing projects and tenements.

At times it is an uneasy tension. Tempering Romano's success has been a trail of controversy at PBHA, in which political division tore apart an executive board--and Romano's administration. Some of his ideological opponents question Romano's ability to accept error, to justify his moral conviction against intellectual opposition. Yet friend and foe agree that Romano has grown used to placing integrity over diplomacy.

Romano joined PBHA at the height of a programming expansion spurred by Reagan-era funding cuts in local service agencies. As a sophomore, he took responsibility for the agency's fledgling fundraising operations, helping account for 75 percent of its gifts in fiscal year 1987 and 80 percent in 1988. That same year he co-founded a service program targeted at the children of Asian refugees in Boston. For four years he was a big brother to a child of Cambridge's housing projects.

But midway through Romano's tenure, the PBHA executive board splintered in a bitter debate over a staff member's attempted diversion of $150 to the campaign of Cambridge politician and PBHA alumnus, Kenneth E. Reeves '72. The conflict soon expanded into a test for Romano's boundless optimism and even his occasionally ponderous confidence.

Accusations of wrongdoing paralyzed the board and Romano, who believed that the payment was improper, became factionalized and isolated for what he says was the first time of his life. He lost control of the administration and failed to find a path out of the crisis.