John Harvard Didn't Sleep Here
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JHJ-58-66.final 6/17/04 1:34 PM Page 64 JOHN HARVARD’S JOURNAL foreign-born students adjust to campus life) side, La Vida has a Spanish slang dictionary, book is not meant solely for Harvard’s and Latinas Unidas (for Latin American useful facts about Spanish-speaking coun- Latinos. “We want this guide to educate women) to La O (La Organización de tries (including travel opportunities and people about the diversity of Latinos,” puertoriqueños en Harvard) and CAUSA grants), and information about on- and o≠- Bravo says. “It caters to everyone—espe- (Cuban American Undergraduate Student campus social events, restaurants, clubs— cially to those interested in Latino or Association), Latino students have a plethora and dance classes. Latin American culture, but we want of resources to speak to their individual Montauk attributes her interest in everyone to flip through its pages.” Adds identities and interests. The inch-thick guide Latino life to growing up in Berkeley: Montauk, “Latino life in Boston is very also o≠ers interviews with Harvard notables; “How could a person living in a place di≠erent from what it’s like in New York essays, fiction, and poetry centered around where a third of the population is Latino City, California, or Miami. Boston resi- the theme of Hispanic identity; and photo es- not be interested in Latino culture?” she dents might find our book useful for says from Mexico, Boston’s Jamaica Plain, asks. Despite its Hispanic name, she and finding their way around their own com- and Berkeley, California. On the practical La Vida’s other creators assert that their munities.” rebecca o’brien common assumption that the suite of this year’s Harvard Scholar arrived at John Harvard Didn’t rooms was once John Harvard’s own. Cambridge she believed she had moved Sleep Here On the fellowships circuit at Harvard, into the original suite. “I was so intimi- rumors even stretch to detail the suite’s dated,” says Sophia K. Domokos ’03, whose For three-quarters of a century, the furniture. Imagine sitting at John Har- name is currently painted in white curling Harvard rooms at Emmanuel College, vard’s ancient writing desk or reading in script above the doorway. Cambridge, have hosted graduates of the his favorite armchair! Generally forgotten The Harvard suite sits on the first floor New England university named for one of is the fact that the scholarship was found- of the aptly named Brick Building, just be- the college’s alumni who received his de- ed by American Harvardians to honor an yond the seventeenth-century Front gree from Cambridge in 1632. The scholar- entirely di≠erent Englishman—distant re- Court designed by Christopher Wren. ship that brings them is renowned for its lation and Harvard graduate Lionel de Jer- Both graduate students and undergrads generous funding and lack of formal acade- sey Harvard ’15, who died just three years live here, in rooms similar in layout and mic requirements—a “year of grace” to re- after graduation while serving in the size to the Harvard suite, although only cover from a taxing undergraduate career. British army during World War I and who the Harvard Scholar has the luxury of That John Harvard, about whom so little is never lived at Emmanuel. A framed draw- being a lone occupant. The Brick Building known, once studied and lived at Em- ing of the suite on one of its walls notes, does o≠er a few modern amenities—elec- manuel has only intensified craving for bi- vaguely, that “John Harvard lived in a set tricity to plug in laptops, televisions, and ographical detail and, not surprisingly, has much like this one at Emmanuel” but, as is mini-fridges, as well as Internet access— inspired a few leaps of historical imagina- often the case with legend, ambiguity but bathrooms are not among them. A tion. The most beguiling has been the merely feeds it—so much so that when common morning sight is towel-clad stu- dents darting across to a neighbor- ing dorm, built in the 1960s. Historic digs: Lionel de Jersey Harvard The Harvard suite has four Scholar Sophia Domokos ’03 in her rooms in total: two bedrooms (one sitting room at Emmanuel College originally a “gyp,” or college ser- vant, room), a tiny room that cur- rently serves as a kitchenette, and a spacious sitting room awash in deep crimson fabrics and encased in oak-paneled walls. Windows on opposite sides of the suite face Em- manuel’s two ponds, each framed by flowering gardens and home to the College’s most beloved resi- dents—about two dozen ducks— whose quacking, Domokos sighs good-naturedly, sometimes keeps her awake. But the location has other benefits as well. “One of the things I like most about this room is that it’s at the center of [the] Photograph by Jamison Stoltz JHJ-58-66.final 6/17/04 1:35 PM Page 65 Yesterday’s News From the pages of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin and Harvard Magazine 1919 Indignant alumni write the Gilbert Seldes, Norbert Wiener, Thur- 1979 Despite a June ruling by the Bulletin protesting the unsportsmanlike good Marshall, and Al Capp. Supreme Court that colleges can require conduct of Harvard spectators at the an- “reasonable physical qualifications” of nual Harvard-Yale baseball game, includ- 1964 At least six members of the their applicants, Harvard will abide by its ing “an organized attempt to rattle the larger Harvard-Radcliffe contingent doing plan to make all buildings accessible to Yale pitcher by means of howling voices civil-rights work in Mississippi are disabled persons by 1980 by installing and beating drums.” Yale won, 10-8. arrested and jailed during the summer. ramps and elevators. *** An “Old Grads’ Summer School” draws 1969 After the student strike, a special 1984 Harvard Stadium enjoys an more than a hundred alumni fundraisers committee of Overseers—appointed to Olympic moment as a site of quarterfinal to Cambridge for a three-day informa- study the long-range causes of the rounds in men’s soccer. At the opening tional-motivational session before the crisis and recommend appropriate ceremonies, skydivers form the Olympic kickoff of the Harvard Endowment action—writes more than 5,000 teaching rings high over the stadium; the diver Fund’s $15.25 million capital drive. members of the Harvard community who misses the playing field and lands on seeking their views on Harvard’s the roof of a 1934 The Harvard Club of Hawaii wel- future. nearby building comes President Roosevelt ’04 and the is unhurt. Harvard baseball team to its annual pic- nic, where FDR graciously dons an official gown inscribed “Big Chief” and downs one of his host’s “famous Hawaiian pineapple cocktails.” 1954 Guest speak- ers at the Summer School’s Interna- tional Seminar for European and Asian scholars and officials include James Reston, College, so people will stop by to see me, and I find myself serving tea at random times during the week,” she says. granted the holder voting rights in A most remarkable space for a make- And for good reason. “The Harvard the University Senate). If Harvard re- shift tea room, the sitting room is a verita- rooms have nothing to do with John Har- turned to participate in the M.A. exercises ble curiosity cabinet of Harvard and Em- vard,” says Janet Morris, the Emmanuel at Emmanuel in 1635, he might have manuel artifacts. Posters from Harvard’s College archivist. “There is no way he glimpsed its latest structure. But Harvard tercentennial compete for wall space with could have lived there, since the building “left no mark on the college,” as the History color photographs of Harvard and Em- would not have been finished at the time notes, so even that much remains specula- manuel crew teams, while oars, rugby he left.” A recent History of Emmanuel College tive. Just two years later, in 1637, he sailed balls, and badminton rackets perch above notes that the Brick Building was con- for New England. doorways and on bookcases. On the man- structed in 1633-34, and Harvard com- The Harvard rooms owe their present tel above the sealed fireplace, two heraldic pleted his undergraduate degree in 1632. shape to another Emmanuel man alto- panels—one bearing the Veritas shield, the He did receive his M.A. from Emmanuel in gether. When an incoming Harvard other Emmanuel’s purple lion—hang side 1635, although, as is still customary in Scholar complained about the suite’s “dis- by side. John Harvard’s armchair, if he ever Cambridge, it was conferred simply as an mal appearance” in 1930—a mere two owned one, is nowhere to be found. honor three years after the B.A. degree (it years after the scholarship had been estab- Illustration by Mark Steele Harvard Magazine 65 JHJ-58-66.final 6/17/04 1:36 PM Page 66 JOHN HARVARD’S JOURNAL lished—Emmanuel fellow Edward Wel- own savings to complete the suite. He He also valued the many “friends in bourne, an historian, undertook the hoped to recover the di≠erence from addi- America whom Harvard has made for rooms’ renovation. A famously loquacious tional funds raised in Massachusetts. “I me,” especially the students who passed tutor, Welbourne was also immensely shall write a sti≠ letter,” he fumed to Hurd through his college. Welbourne would popular among undergraduates. When a in 1931, noting that Emmanuel had at that eventually become senior tutor and then sum of $500—about $5,000 today—was point spent far more on the renovations master of Emmanuel in the 1950s, and his allocated for the work by the Harvard than had Harvard.