This physical separation from the College added another layer of isolation between the veterans and non-veterans. Even the veterans in the Houses barely got to know their compatriots.
"We in the Houses certainly didn't see very much of them," Harriman says. "Maybe they all got together on their own, I don't know."
"I really didn't know the older veterans very well," Woolverton remembers. "I only knew three or four people...who were married."
"We had very little occasion to meet with them at all," Blinken says.
But just as hard as bringing your family to Harvard is leaving it behind. Lt. Colonel Oscar C. Bridgeman '50 married a Trinidadian woman while he was stationed there during the war. She stayed behind while he came back to go to school.
Without having his wife here, he says, he was able to get out into the community more than he would have.
"I tried to get to know everyone," he reminisces. Nonetheless, he longed for the wife, who was half-a-world away.
Bridgeman's predicament was not unique. In December of 1946, military commanders decided to allow marriages between American G.I.'s and German women--a decision that angered many Radcliffe students.
"They haven't got anything we don't have," said Jean DeBeer '48 at the time.
Changing of the Guard
"The war was the big leveler," Zurier says.
After the diversity brought in by the veterans, the College--and most other Ivy League universities--never returned to their "old boy" atmosphere.
"There was a beginning of opening up that has resulted in the acceptance of minority groups with a real purpose behind the policy," Woolverton says.
And while Woolverton says he believes the post-war flood of veterans helped to make the diversified Harvard of today, the influx undeniably altered the College and its undergraduates in the post-war period. And even 50 years later, the undergraduate enrollment of the Class of 1950 stands as the high water mark for the College, proving the sheer force of numbers would be the impetus for change.