It was a Tuesday morning in the fall of 1939 when five-year-old John H. McArthur of Burnaby, British Columbia, walked into his first grade classroom for the first time.

A few hours later, Canada entered World War II, and McArthur and his classmates were sent home from school.

The memory of that day--and of the sense of bewilderment at the world and the powerlessness over the future that accompanied it--left a lasting impression on the young boy who exactly 40 years later would be named dean of the Harvard Business School.

"If I had been born just a few years earlier, I could have ended up fighting in that war. I might have died or had a leg blown off," says McArthur, now 59.

But he didn't. Too young for World War II and too old for Vietnam, McArthur was lucky. In fact, luck--in the sense of being in the right place at the right time--has played a defining role in the life of John McArthur.

Since that autumn morning more than half a century ago, little in McArthur's life has been planned. Had it been, it is unlikely the former schoolboy from Canada would today enjoy the understated elegance of the first floor corner office of the Business School's Morgan Hall.

From that office, McArthur plays a critical, if often behind-the-scenes role on campus, exercising what observers say is the power to determine the success or failure of the University's upcoming $2 billion capital campaign and President Neil L. Rudenstine's efforts at increased Interfaculty cooperation.

Growing up in the 1930s and 1940s in a small town on the outskirts of Vancouver, the three McArthur children did not know luxury. Their father worked as a grain inspector for the Canadian government. Their mother stayed home to raise the family.

John, the oldest child, spent his weekends and vacations from high school working in a local sawmill, where he hoped to gain full time employment after his graduation. But luck wouldn't allow it.

"Between grade 12 and grade 13, one of the family members in the family that owned this place called me in and talked to me about going to university, which I hadn't thought about doing," McArthur recalls.

Reclusive playing a crucial part in the fate of the capital campaign

McArthur says he didn't take the offer seriously until several months later. It was then, on the day after Christmas, that his boss--a Jewish immigrant who had fled the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia--came around to the McArthur home with gifts for the holidays.

"The guy came to the front door and my father came out with me and he wouldn't come in and he said, 'Has John talked to you about our conversation in August about going to university?'" McArthur recalls. "And my father said, 'The boy never talks to me about anything.'"

McArthur enrolled at the University of British Columbia, where he majored in forestry and where, following the completion of his junior year, he married his eighth grade sweetheart.

"The two of us went in to see the dean of this place and I said, 'I've got a big problem, because my wife isn't interested in the Queen Charlotte Islands or the Yukon, or anywhere where there'd be logging," McArthur says. "[The dean] used to call himself 'we,' and he said, 'We think you should go to Harvard Business School,' which I didn't know about at all."

McArthur applied and was admitted to the Stanford, Wharton, MIT and Harvard business schools. He says he ruled out Stanford because he had grown up on the West Coast and felt it was time to explore a new place, and he ruled out Wharton because no one in British Columbia had heard of it.