The following week, we had to go to a class at the Indoor Athletic Building where we learned how to fit the harness under our arms and let ourselves down in case of a fire. One guy panicked.

In the largest class in the history of Harvard, more than half the class was veterans. Army khakis became very popular. Professor Sam Beer always wore a green Army trench coat. A lot of students, including professors, carried their books in green bags slung over the shoulder.

Professor Samuel Eliot Morison, who had replicated the voyage of Columbus, occasionally walked the length of the Widener Reading Room in leather-heeled riding boots.

You had to wear a jacket and a tie to eat beneath the moose and elk mounted on the paneled walls of the Harvard Union. One day at lunch, I chatted with a decent fellow, who later that day in the Yard, did not acknowledge my greeting. People didn't do that in Elizabeth, N.J.

The next week, I walked utterly undone out of the examination for exemption from English A, and I met a fellow who incredibly announced that he had already finished. He was smoking on the steps of the New Lecture Hall.

When I commented about one impenetrable question, he said:

"Yeah, that was the Grand Inquisitor. You didn't remember?"

"The Grand Inquisitor," I said. "Of course."

Sanders Theatre to Soldiers Field

It was the first year of General Education in a Free Society. In

Nat Sci 5, a verbal type such as myself learned about Mendel and the fruit flies. Sunday nights some of us gathered to prepare the maps of Europe to be handed in every Monday for History 1. Professor Percy Bridgman won the Nobel Prize in physics that year.

From freshman football, I remember banging repeatedly against a tall, immovable tackle with a modest demeanor who made the varsity and played in 1947, 1948 and 1949. He had a red crew cut and had been captain at some school called St. Marks. His name was Doug Bradlee.

At those grinding practice sessions in the late afternoon behind the stadium at Soldiers Field, I also met Oscar dePriest and Frank Jones, two of the four Negroes--as some said then--out of a class of 1,645.

The competition for The Crimson seemed to be an endless endeavor.

And even though the Committee on the Whole Man recommended Harvard students stop competing so fiercely and be Renaissance Men, we had our own personal competition to determine who grew the biggest bags under his eyes.

Before being elected, one of us who was experienced with initiation ceremonies drank mineral oil and avoided falling down drunk.