Main Menu · Search ·Current Issue ·Contact ·Archives ·Centennial ·Letters to the Editor ·FAQs
For more alumni web resources, check out Harvard Gateways, the Harvard Alumni Association's website
Nonagenarians in Quantity
The seventieth reunion brought 19 members of the class of 1927 to Cambridge for events beginning Tuesday and ending Friday of Commencement week. Highlights included a Pops concert in Symphony Hall (John Finnegan '47 conducted "Fair Harvard"), a bus tour of Salem witch country, and the showing of a film of the class's tenth reunion in 1937.
William Hutchison, Warren professor of the history of religion in America and the Commencement caller, whose job it is to form the procession into Tercentenary Theater on Commencement morning, marshals the unruly with a variety of coaxing exhortations, anecdotes, gentlemanly threats, and mimicry (he does a pretty good FDR). Of the twenty-fifth reunion class, who stood just where instructed, he said approvingly, "They're unusually docile." For the seventieth reunioners, Hutchison employed not blandishment, but another useful tactic, the reminder of past peccadilloes. Some members of the class, Hutchison recalled, came out of their dorms late Class Day night in 1927, scantily clad, "and baptized themselves in the [Yard] fountains." Step lively now, please.
Plummer professor of Christian morals Peter J. Gomes did not speak of sin when meeting with the class at a welcoming reception. Instead, he asked them, "To what do you attribute your longevity?" And the answer came back: "Time."