A Motley Crew of Heroes and Old Friends Reunites at Harvard

They called themselves “the Great Middle Class.”

They blew onto the Harvard campus in the fall of 1946 with the same ferocity as the nor’easter that bombarded their 50th reunion last week. The class of 1950--1,645 of them; more than half World War II veterans, most of them there courtesy of the GI Bill. It is the largest class ever to attend Harvard.

“We were a motley crowd,” said former Time-Life correspondent Don Connery. “And we left in as ragtag fashion as we had arrived.”

Motley, yes, but hardly ragtag, with a list of classmates that included Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger and child development expert Dr. Robert Coles. There are also poets, professors, priests and at least one bank robber.

Sure, the nation’s colleges were jammed with vets, but the Harvard class of ’50 was unique, destined to change the school’s elitist image forever. The preppies found themselves on a level playing field with ex-GIs. The Harvard admissions wonks discovered that guys from farms and foundries could hold their own without benefit of Novocain in the lower jaw and a grounding in Latin and Greek.

My husband was among them. While recovering from a plane crash in the Philippines, he took college entrance tests and was told he qualified for Harvard--pretty heady stuff for one of eight kids whose dad ran a grocery store in Ohio. When he toted his khaki duffel into Adams House his first day, his roommate didn’t stand to shake hands. A land mine at Anzio had blown off his lower legs.

Last week, more than 400 members of the class of 1950, including several Southern Californians, took over the venerable campus houses for four days--a quaint, but daunting experience for this Cal girl.

Harvard seems to rule Boston in reunion week. Flotillas of buses with police escorts bring traffic to a standstill. All the hoopla means big buck bucks. Reunions are an industry at Harvard. The class of ’50 donated more than $50 million this year on top of the $2.6 billion raised by the capital campaign that ended in December.

In a speech to the class of 2000, TV’s Conan O’Brien (class of ‘85) warned: “You never leave Harvard; the fund-raising committee will be on your ass until the day you die. They are in Mount Auburn cemetery right now digging up the corpse of Henry Adams.”

The pageantry is exhausting for the academic hierarchy too. Soon-to-retire Harvard President Neil Rudenstine admitted, “I’m getting a little croaky” as he pumped hundreds of hands at the annual convocation of the alumni following commencement Thursday. By then, he had crafted and delivered addresses for three separate reunion classes, the baccalaureate, the board of overseers, commencement and the conferral of 11 honorary degrees, two of which went to Trojans--architect Frank Gehry and philanthropist Katherine Loker.

Was it all worth it? Agonizing over an essay for the 50th anniversary tome? Tearing the house apart to unearth the old class tie? Sloshing through the rain to live in a dwelling that O’Brien insisted “was designed by the firm that built Hitler’s bunker?” You bet. Connery summed it up best: “It was good for us and good for Harvard too. There were lectures and dances to go to and band music at every turning. But above all, there was time to chew the cud of experience. It is part of the magic of Harvard that it remains an oasis of stability, sanity and good cheer.”

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Patt Diroll’s column is published Tuesdays. She can be reached at pattdiroll@earthlink.net.