Yesterday's News
From the pages of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin and Harvard Magazine

1922

Harvard Athletic Association members Fred W. Moore ’93 and Frank S. Knapp purchase the capital stock of Leavitt & Peirce Inc., the Cambridge smoke shop and pool and billiard parlor which for 39 years has been “the unofficial ‘headquarters for Harvard men.’” The store will continue to allow football and baseball players free use of the pool tables during their respective seasons—and freshmen still won’t be allowed to play billiards, by order of the upperclass clientele.

1952

Summer-school enrollment at Harvard and other universities slumps 20 to 30 percent, in part, suggests the Alumni Bulletin, because the Selective Service has ruled that nine months of schooling a year will maintain a student’s status for deferment purposes.

1957

The first joint commissioning ceremony of Harvard navy, army, and air force ROTC units occurs in Sever Quadrangle.

1962

The Bulletin reprints an excerpt from a letter in the recent Yale Alumni Magazine criticizing that university for honoring John F. Kennedy ’40: “My Yale degree can no longer call forth my full pride, now that a similar honor is held, unearned, by a pathetic product of Harvard who regards individual human freedoms in this nation as mere hindrances to his determined experiments toward a planned socialist state.”

1967

Institute of Politics scholars studying the draft system recommend higher pay for draftees and enlistees, abolition of special deferments for students and teachers, and a lottery to determine “who should serve when not all serve.”

1972

Women for the first time top the winners’ lists in alumni election results. Marina von Neumann Whitman ’56 joins the Board of Overseers with 23,652 votes. Muriel Sutherland Snowden ’38 becomes an Alumni Association director with 24,034 votes, the most ever cast for a nominee in either race.

1997

In accordance with Harvard’s nondiscrimination policy, the University’s Board of Ministry recommends that same-sex blessing or commitment ceremonies be permitted in Memorial Church.