"[During the war,] rich kids from Nob Hill wallowed in boot camp mud along with poor townies from Southie. Fortune 500 heirs bled to death wedged into foxholes with scions of first-generation steelworkers," Rogers says.

And veterans brought their experiences back to the Square.

Rogers says he thought that the common experience of the war gave people a sense of a common cause for action. He described people as being "all together like a huge, ungainly, raucous, angry, barely post-adolescent family of 4,000 boys from anywhere and everywhere. Class evaporated."

Rogers says that all of these elements contributed to an environment with much less tension between Cambridge residents and Harvard Students than there had been in the past.

The Changing Ivory Tower

Graduates say that although the College was not as developed as it is today, the Square was in many ways a safer and more hospitable environment.

"Bikes were not stolen. The dining rooms served meals directly into depressions on metal trays but older women came in to clean rooms," Webb says.

For students, the Square was a welcome relief from Harvard's daily grind, and many grew fond of the area.

Rogers remembers the characters he met attending Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) concerts in Sanders Theatre.

"If you could tolerate and be tolerated by the little old Cambridge ladies who thought it terribly impolite to express emotion of any sort in response to, say, Shostakovich's 6th or Beethoven's 9th, it was a blast," Rogers says.

And like Cambridge today, members of the Class of '49 remember the Square always bustling and changing.

"We were in a hurry," Rogers says. "We did everything hard-studying, drinking, brawling, loving...It's a little bit like the sidewalk cafes of the Village or the Left Bank-a sense of laid-back bustle, a lot of humanity passing by, hanging out, taking it in. It's alive."