As with his move to Cambridge, Duehay struggled with academics at first, but soon learned the ropes. Duehay also kept himself busy with tutoring programs at the Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA)—a community service organization with which he is still very active, pushing the Class of 1955 to donate over $1 million to PBHA at the Class’s 50th reunion.

And Duehay also assumed the presidency of the chess club as an undergraduate.

“In retrospect I don’t think I was very good, but I thought I was at the time,” Duehay says, while still insisting that his experience with strategy games did prove valuable.

“The way I look at issues and problems and organize what I’m going to do, in terms of decision-making, is quite methodical, and was influenced by chess playing,” Duehay says.

Still, Duehay says that he was one of the “less venturesome” students, and it was not until his senior year that he chose to pursue a more substantial leadership role, seeking out a spot on the Harvard Alumni Association’s permanent Class Committee for his House.

He says it was his first real campaign and his transition into electoral politics.

“For some unaccountable reason I decided that I would like to be the permanent representative for my Class Committee for Adams House,” Duehay says. “I had not been terribly involved in House activities in Adams House. Nevertheless, I decided I would run for office, and I got a list of the seniors, decided who I didn’t know very well, and went around and knocked on their doors and met most of them.”

Duehay says that he was not well known to many of his classmates, including those who ended up on the committee with him.

“Our paths, as undergraduates, were not that parallel,” says Little, the Class Secretary for the Class of 1955, who will also be Duehay’s roommate in Winthrop during the reunion. “Other than knowing he was on the chess team, I didn’t know that much.”

Stanley N. Katz ’55, now a professor at Princeton, also says that he knew little about Duehay until he began working with him in recent years to organize the fund-raising drive for PBHA. Yet after Harvard, Duehay would begin to make a name for himself as a public figure.

TAKING THE KING

Following graduation, Duehay pursued his passion for education, which would eventually lead him into a political career.

He earned his Masters of Arts in Teaching and in 1968 he received a doctorate in education. In addition, he served as a teacher in the Belmont school district, and eventually became an assistant dean at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

In 1963, he was elected to the Cambridge School Committee. But his political life did not really begin heating up until the early 1970s, when he decided to run for the City Council under the wing of the liberal Cambridge Civic Association (CCA).

Duehay says that he wanted to run for one of the nine spots on the City Council in 1971 because he was frustrated with the appointment of Cambridge’s school superintendent, and wanted to oust him from office. On the School Committee, he did not have the power to overturn the appointment, but he felt that if the CCA got a majority on the council, they could eventually replace the superintendent.