Another right brings one to the main dining room. Forty years ago, the focal point of this dark-paneled, luxuriously curtained room was the “long table”—a single dining table which faculty frequented for lunch and conversation.

THE LONG TABLE

For decades, the long table formed the heart of the Faculty Club.

“At the long table, anyone could sit if there was a space, and all conversations were open,” says mechanical engineering professor Frederick H. Abernathy.

Regulars like Abernathy came from all over the University to take their meals here at least once a week, if not every day. Occasionally, former University President Derek C. Bok and former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Henry S. Rosovsky would join them.

Dialogue at the table was vibrant and interdisciplinary; faculty members recounted their travels, discussed their scholarship, debated current events, or shared family stories. Conversation flowed easily over the clatter of cutlery and professors recall the colorful personalities that turned a routine lunch hour into a highlight of the day—from the economist John Kenneth “Ken” Galbraith relating information from FBI documents, to staff members becoming like family.

“I recall some of the managers. One of them for a long time was a very fat guy who must have weighed around 300 pounds. He had a tie clip that was a knife and fork,” Rosovsky says. “Another was a German, and quite severe.”

For lunch, patrons could choose from entrées such as “purée of potato soup with leeks” or “minced goose à la Creole,” followed by frozen pudding, assorted fruits, or cheese. One of the more peculiar dishes joined the menu because of World War II’s meat shortage: horse steak, commonly referred to as “traveler’s delight.”

“It was like—like flavored dental floss,” remembers Shinagel. “It was the most talked about thing on the menu.”

In an adjoining dining room, famous philosophy professor Willard Van Orman Quine and history professor Harry A. Wolfson once held an invitation-only table of their own.

“They would sometimes gesture for other people to join them for lunch—and that was a great honor,” professor emeritus Gerald Holton remembers.

MEMBERS ONLY

Stories about the Club such as Holton’s suggest an aura of elitism and exclusivity that professors do not deny.

“The place itself exuded an atmosphere of considerable importance and dignity,” says Holton, who was first invited to the Faculty Club as a graduate student in physics in the mid-1940s.

Indeed, the Club was built with exclusivity in mind. Armed with an anonymous $25,000 donation from now-identified Allston Burr, the Harvard Corporation set out to erect a new social space for its faculty in 1929. The building, which replaced a yellow “town-and-gown” clubhouse for the Cambridge community at large, would eventually cost just over 12 times that amount.