A Hoosicr at Harvard William E. Wilson” It was 1923, late August,- in Evansville, Indiana, where I was born. I was seventeen. On the telephone Mr. John 0. Chewning, principal of Central High School, from which I had graduated in June, was asking me if I would like to go to Har- vard. At that time, for reasons that I can no longer remember, I thought I wanted to go to Yale. But Yale was still a year or two away. My father had just been elected to Congress from the old First District of Indiana, and the family would be moving to Washington, D.C.’ I planned to enroll in one of the colleges in Washington and later transfer to Yale if my grades were good enough. Thus I would avoid the entrance examinations that only a few colleges required in those days. It was true that I had so far neglected to advise Yale Uni- versity of my intentions or any of the institutions of higher learning in Washington on my list, for that matter. But in 1923 going to college was a more casual business than it is today; in most instances one simply packed one’s bag at the last minute and went, * William E. Wilson is James A. Work professor of English emeritus, Indi- ana University, Rloomington. At times a reporter for the Evansville, Indiana, Press and New Bedford, Massachusetts, Standard and associate editor of the Baltimore Evening Sun, Wilson has also authored numerous historical works and novels. Included are The Wabash (Riurrs of America series; New York, 1940); The Angel and the Serpent: The Story of New Harmony (Bloomington, 1964); Crescent City (New York, 1947); and Every Man Is My Father (New York, 1973). According to Wilson, “A Hoosier at Harvard’ is to be the opening chapter of “an autobiography-in-progress”One brief portion of the reminiscence is adapted from an earlier essay that appeared in the “John Harvard’s Journal” section of Har- uard Magazine, LXXXIV (January-February, 19821, 72-73. I In 1923 Indiana’s First Congressional District included Gibson, Pike, Po- sey, Spencer, Vanderburgh, and Warrick counties. William Edward Wilson ( 1870- 1948), the author’s father, represented the district in the United States House of Representatives for one term, 1923-1925. He ran unsuccessfully for the same office in 1920 and 1924. INDIANA MAtiAZINE OF HISlOHY. LXXXII Ifk~ptember.19861 ’ 1986. Trusters of lndrann University 224 Indiana Magazine of History “Harvard-?” I said to Mr. Chewning. I told him then that I had never given Harvard much thought. In fact, I said, I was considering Yale. Next year, maybe. Or the year after. I tried to sound blase, but actually I was in a state of mild shock. Harvard-? Me-? Harvard and Yale were places only to dream about. No one I knew ever really went to Harvard or Yale. Hadn’t I said to Mr. Chewning, “Next year, maybe, or the year after”? But Mr. Chewning was not a man to waste time chasing rainbows. He said he was not talking about next year, he was talking about next month. Harvard classes would begin in Sep- tember. He made it sound as if my shilly-shallying might dis- rupt the schedule of a great university. He went on to explain that he had just returned from a va- cation and found a letter from Harvard on his desk offering, for the first time, admission without examinations to the two top male graduates from certain selected public high schools. He told me it was a great honor for Central of Evansville to be one of those selected. My friend Alexander Leich, who had the highest boys’ grade average in my class, was seriously considering the opportunity, Mr. Chewning said.2 He reminded me then that I stood second to Alex in rank. Now he was making me feel as if I owed an immediate decision not only to Harvard College but also to Central High School and Alexander Leich. Mr. Chewning had a very persuasive way. His favorite maxim was “A hint to the wise is sufficient.” I told him I would talk with my parents. I talked with my parents. My father was enthusiastic. The Harvard brochure projected an average cost of a freshman year at $1,500; Father’s salary as a congressman was $7,500; he said he thought one-fifth of a man’s salary to educate a son at Harvard was a bargain. (Recently, Alex Leich, who today interviews prospective Harvard students from southern Indiana, told me that the projected cost of a fresh- man year in 1985-1986 was $16,300. The 1986 World Almanac gives the salary of a member of Congress as $75,100.) My mother remarked several times during the family conference, with quiet dubiety, that winters in New England were very cold. (In her girlhood she had spent a winter once with an uncle and aunt in Norton, Massachusetts, where Wheaton College is located.) My Alexander L. Leich, now retired, later became vice-president and treasurer of the family wholesale drug firm, Charles Leich and Company, in Evansville. A Hoosier at Harvard 225 sister Isabelle contributed to the debate by stating flatly that she had not cared for Yale University ever since I read to her “that book about Sto~er.”:~(My dear sister was blind, and occa- sionally I read to her books that interested me-with something less than pure altruism, obviously.) After our conference at home, we conferred with the Leichs. Alex’s parents said that Alex, who was only sixteen, could go to Harvard if I went. They thought he was too young to go alone. Before I had time to make myself obnoxious by assuming an avuncular air with Alex, my parents promptly said that I, too, was too young to go to Harvard alone but I could go if Alex went. Alex and I decided to go. Within a month, incredible as it now seems in this era of lengthy applications, interviews, and examinations, Alex and I boarded at Terre Haute the Southwestern Limited of the “Big Four” or C.C.C. and St. Louis, on its one-thousand-mile race from St. Louis to Boston after we had already made a four-hour jour- ney on the C. and E. I. local on its daily one-hundred-mile smoky stagger up from Evansville.‘ Unexamined and unheralded, we were probably as unlikely a brace of innocents as ever set off to enroll as freshmen in Harvard College. Even the clothes in my “wardrobe trunk” were not alto- gether proper for the adventure. A week before our departure, I had persuaded my mother to buy for me at Strouse and Brothers store on Main Street an expensive suit cut in the height of fash- ion favored at that time by teenage males in Indiana. As I was fitted by Mr. Ed Lantz, who had masterminded my wardrobe ever since I was six years old, I had no idea how ridiculous I would look in the tight jacket and bell-bottom trousers among the equally ridiculous square, short jackets and wide trousers-known as “Oxford bags”-that had already become the vogue of colle- gians in the East. I am still embarrassed by the memory of that new suit, but not so much because of the freak it must have made of me as because of my willfulness in wanting it and my I Owen M. Johnson, Stover at Yale (Boston, 19121. The Chicago and Eastern Illinois (Missouri Pacific Kailroadl ran from Ev- ansville through Terre Haute to Chicago. It is now a part of the Louisville and Nashville system. Elmer G. Sulzer, Ghost Railroads of Indiana (Indianapolis, 1970,. 235. For a history of the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis written at about the time of Wilson’s journey to Harvard see Ared Maurice Mur- phy, “The Big Four Railroad in Indiana,” XXI (June and September, 1925). 109- 273. At that time the New York Central Kailroad owned 92 percent of the Big Four’s common stock, and the system served twelve states and two Canadian provinces. Zbid., 270. See also Alvin F. Harlow. Thr Road of the Century; The Story ofthe New York Central (New York, 1947), 373-97. 226 Indiana Magazine of History weakness in never unpacking it in Cambridge when I saw what others were wearing. Later, my parents would have to make great sacrifices to keep me at Harvard all four years, and it might have been better for my character if I had worn the outlandish suit until the bell-bottoms became frayed and shiny. Perhaps it was somewhat to my credit that I lived frugally at Harvard my first year until I had saved enough out of my spending money to buy another “best suit” to take the place of the first one. Alex and I spent our first night in Boston in the Touraine Hotel, sleepless. Neither of us had ever been alone in a city so big as Boston. The nearest approximation to a college campus that I, at least, had ever seen was the remodeled synagogue across the street from Central High that the new Methodist col- lege (now the University of Evansville) leased to house its first classes. I did not know that Harvard’s campus was called “the Yard,” and the next morning when our taxi driver called it “the Yadd,” I still did not know. His pronunciations gave Alex and me our first hint that we were going to have a problem understanding people in New England.