It's a long walk between Pforzheimer and Mather Houses, but that was just part of the winding road that took Leigh G. Hafrey '73 from undergraduate at Wesleyan to co-master of Mather House, where he serves with wife and college sweetheart Sandra A. Naddaff '75.

Hafrey arrived in the United States from Austria in 1967, finishing his final two years of high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. When it came time to think about college, he was lost.

"I applied to four different schools without having visited any of them," he says. "I didn't have a clue."

Hafrey eventually settled on Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. After two years, Hafrey realized Wesleyan was not for him, and he transferred to Harvard for the last two years of college.

At Harvard, Hafrey lived in Pforzheimer (then North) House, where he met Naddaff, a first-year. He says living in North--then affiliated with Radcliffe College--reflected social currents of the time.

"There was a kind of social fervor about integrating the Houses," he says, although House life was not very dynamic.

Instead Hafrey, an English concentrator interested in the social sciences, made academic work a priority in his life.

"I didn't participate in many activities, and I regret that," he says. "It's clear now that at least half of what you come to Harvard for is the other people."

Nevertheless, the budding romance that began in 1971 with Naddaff would grow strong across the distance between Cambridge and New Haven, where Hafrey attended Yale University and earned a Ph.D. in 1978.

At Yale, Hafrey served as a non-resident tutor of comparative literature. Filling this role, he says, heightened his interest in Harvard's House system.

"By then, I realized the Houses [at Harvard] and the Colleges [at Yale] were a very important part of the universities," Hafrey says.

Meanwhile, Leigh and Hafrey maintained their long-distance relationship, which, after 13 years, culminated in their 1984 marriage.

But with Naddaff working as an assistant professor at Harvard and Hafrey recently hired at The New York Times as a staff editor for the book review section, the couple were forced to endure a long-distance separation for three more years.

At The Times, Hafrey edited book reviews and essays, a post that fit well with his goal of becoming a writer.

"I thought it was very interesting," Hafrey recalls. "You got this broad gauge of what people were thinking at the time."