Vice President Albert A. Gore, who graduated from Harvard College in 1969 with an honors degree in government, rarely talks about his life at the nation's most prestigious university in public, perhaps because of the elite image a Harvard education evokes.

The capsule biography on Gore's Web site skips his Harvard education altogether, going straight from his adolescence in Carthage, Tenn. to his experiences in Vietnam. It does, however, mention his short stint at divinity school.

Friends, teachers and colleagues who knew Gore during his four years at Harvard describe the Dunster House resident as a through-and-through Southerner, caught, like many of his peers at the time, between personal, parental and societal considerations.

A quiet and studious undergraduate, Gore spent his weekends playing card games with his friends and courting his future wife.

And other than a foray into student politics during his first year, the affable Gore avoided both political organizations and political discussions for the rest of his time.

Less than three months after graduating, Gore enlisted in the Army, much to the delight of his father, a U.S. Senator from Tennessee. The decision surprised his friends, who said that Gore had always opposed the war.

At school, though, life was quiet, and Gore's manner was open and down-to-earth, his friends say.

"He was extremely Southern oriented. He was definitely from Tennessee. I think you would have known he was from the South," says Robert A. Somerby '69, a Gore blockmate.