"It was the immediacy of peace," James H. Powell '49. "Social programs hadn't really started up yet."

Just before the class entered, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the same time, the Cold War was beginning to unfold, and Americans did not yet know if the world would be a safe place.

From Battlefields to Football Fields

They worked hard and they played hard. The '49ers were a group that cared deeply about their academics, their politics--and their sports.

Social life revolved around the playing field. And for the Class of '49, the Crimson did not often disappoint.

The basketball team made it to the NCAA championship in 1946 for the first time, and the football team did not lose a single game in the first year after the war.

Winning the Harvard-Yale game in '45 and '48 were highlights of the class's experience at Harvard. The Game, which was one of the major social events of the year, invariably sold out, slowing traffic to a standstill for blocks around the Stadium.

One graduate, remembering the excitement of The Game in the late 1940s, says he was "shocked and amazed" to see that there were empty seats in the Stadium at the 1998 game.

For a class of such disparate ages, athletics was one of the few things that brought them all together.

Intramural sports were also extremely competitive with high rates of participation and fan turnout.

When Kirkland House ended the 1948-49 school year with the best intramural sports record and was awarded the Straus cup, their victory was a major coup.

All for One and One for All

In a class with so many divisive factors, members say that there was no real sense of class spirit. Yet there were not really any tensions either. "The group mixed well," Read says.

"We perhaps didn't have some of the unity that began in the class of '50," Richard recalls. "They were more homogenous, they didn't have quite the same diversity in their origins."

Yet, if that unity did not exist for the Class, its members were able to experience Harvard spirit through their Houses. There, members of the Class formed their closest friendships--some of which have lasted until the present day.

This is in part due to the fact that those who entered Harvard in '45 or '46 never lived in Yard as all other first-year students did. Instead, because of the Navy officers still on campus, they moved directly into their Houses. The four years spent together, instead of only three, helped foster House spirit.

Additionally, as the enrollment numbers began to drop post-war, the already overcrowded dorms began to open a little and allow the students who had been commuting to live on campus with their classmates.