from The Wall Street Journal Monday, November 6, 1995

"Turning 50 in 1950: Harvard Men Reflect on Lives Between the Wars"

By ELLEN GRAHAM
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
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It was a time to exhale, a hard-won breather between history's worst war and
the full-blown perils of the nuclear age. And for the men of Harvard, class
of 1921, to be 50 years old in midcentury America was above all a time to
take stock.

Their entries in the now-dusty pages of their 25th and 30th class reunion
books, published in 1946 and 1951, include the usual curricula vitae. But
these volumes also capture with surprising candor their yearnings, their
griefs and triumphs, false starts and wrong turns.

They were bankers and lawyers and captains of industry -- but also
missionaries, miners, headmasters and social workers. They wore scratchy
wool suits and fedoras, drank Cutty Sark and sailed to Europe on the French
Line. With their "fine helpmates," as one described his wife, they raised
broods of children who in turn would spawn the baby-boom generation. Most of
the 655 members of the class were born in 1900, and by 1950, 89 had died.
However, most had cheated the odds: At birth, their life expectancy was a
mere 46.6 years. One had succumbed while still at Harvard to "the terrible
influenza epidemic which reached Cambridge in the last month of the first
World War and was responsible for many deaths at the Stillman Infirmary."

Some saw action in both world wars, but only four died in combat.
Businessman Sidney Matz of New York, confiding in 1946 that he'd been
"bitten by the flying bug," died later that year when the plane he was
piloting crashed near Seattle. Marlin Olmstead had died of heart failure at
age 31 while strolling out to exercise his polo ponies.

Together, their stories offer a snapshot of a generation steeped in the 19th
century values of duty, thrift and hard work. They were enterprising
can-doers more than Organization Men, and their early careers were full of
Depression-hastened business reversals. "Gradually from office boy without
pay I did work up to be a full-fledged vice president and director of the
company," recalls Sherman Damon of Chestnut Hill, Mass. "But in 1933, the
boss announced we were no more."

Yet by 1950, most were securely established -- "just rolling along," as one
puts it -- giving scant thought to retirement and savoring what then seemed
to be America's boundless and God-given progress and prosperity. During a
posting in Paris after the liberation, Alden MacIntyre of Boston got a
firsthand look at the French bureaucracy, "and an appalling sight it was,"
he reports. In America, by contrast, he is "overwhelmed ... by the energy,
imagination and resourcefulness which abound on every hand ..." Opportunity
was such that many had felt no rush to settle into humdrum adult
obligations. After college, Norman Hatch was a hobo in the Dakota wheat
country, where, he says, "one joined the I.W.W. or got thrown off the
freights." He wound up teaching Latin at Phillips Exeter Academy, and notes,
"It is sometimes difficult to remain a good Republican, but one can always
try."

In their day, on-the-job seasoning was as important as a Harvard diploma.
Serge Daniloff counted his cum laude degree "quite useless," in that it
landed him a machine-shop apprenticeship at $18.60 a week. Another man, the
head of a wool and hide business, learned it "from the ground up ... I went
down into our cellars and worked for about a year before I was allowed to
set foot in the office." Birthright, however, swiftly wafted some to the
top. Alan Kirschbaum of Elkins Park, Pa., attributed his rise in nine years
to the presidency of a $5 million company "100% to one factor -- it was my
father's business."

Warren Goodell's entry into the farm-loan business in Urbana, Ill.,
coincided with "a long and heartbreaking downward slide for middle-western
agriculture," when corn sold for 12 cents a bushel and was burned for fuel.
After his father's bank failed in 1931, he writes, "my duty seemed to be to
stay on to salvage what we could for our clients." He figured that in five
years he'd "be free and still young enough to start again." But it took 15
years before the war restored agricultural prosperity to the point where
liquidation could be completed, and the bank "repaid its depositors 100%."

By middle age, others were grumbling about routine jobs, however
remunerative. A government engineer reports, "I am now in the Miscellaneous
Section ... whatever someone else doesn't care to do." A plant manager
regrets abandoning "belles-lettres," saying that instead he'd "dug himself
in a deep rut ... trying to amass a million bucks." Another, recalling how
alluring his chosen field once seemed, now confesses, "My job seems
endless."

Not everyone buckled under to the conformity of the times. Powers Hapgood
worked as a coal miner and organizer for the United Mine Workers and the
CIO. He and his writer wife, Mary, were once jailed in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.,
for inciting a riot, but were found not guilty. Of Mr. Hapgood, who was the
Socialist candidate for governor of Indiana in 1932 and who died in 1949,
the class secretary writes: "Controversy was his forte almost to the end."
Mr. Hapgood's widow later ran several times as the Socialist candidate for
vice president of the U.S.

The notorious "red scares" were then in full swing. Lyman Bradley Jr. was
chairman of the German department at New York University when, in 1948, he
states, "I was suspended from the faculty having been found guilty of
contempt of Congress as board member of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee
Committee." That offense earned him three months in prison during 1950. His
reports to the class ceased thereafter.

For most, however, work proceeded at a stately pace. Business in 1950 was
still largely transacted by letter, and vacuum-tube "electronic brains" were
just laboratory marvels. Coast-to-coast television broadcasts would not come
until 1951; it would be a few years before the American people would be
transformed into a mass consumer market subject to Madison Avenue's
sophisticated wiles.

At Union Trust Co. in Pittsburgh, Leland Barry found time to organize and
conduct "a chorale group composed of about 60 employees." Another banker,
John Baldwin of Baltimore, talks about co-workers who play golf in the
afternoon and "who can if they wish come late to the office or leave early
without upsetting the wheels of progress."

There was ample time for diversion. Their hobbies included tropical fish,
stamp collecting, woodworking, fishing, card tricks, table tennis, skeet
shooting and curling. A dentist was "obsessed" with popular-magazine
writing; he'd published 250 articles. One man set off for Costa Rica to
collect rare birds, while others retreated to their workshops. "I can tear
my automobile down and put it together again, repair my clocks, shingle my
roof ... and do all the myriad jobs necessary to keep my home in good
running order," writes Edward Allen Jr. of Merck & Co. Bicycling for sport
was such an oddity that Hiram Hunn of Des Moines, Iowa, felt compelled to
tout its pleasures to his classmates. And a Massachusetts physician fond of
candlepin bowling writes: "Father Time precludes the more strenuous sports."

No wonder, then, that several mention long, unexplained periods of ill
health and trips to Saranac Lake or Tucson for recuperations. Or that
Charles Irvine could boast: "I'll bet the boys that I'm the biggest man in
the class -- five foot, eleven-and-a-half inches and 309 pounds. Any
takers?" He died in 1951.

It was a man's world, but hearth and home spurred them on. William Baldwin
of Sea Girt, N.J., observes that on behalf of his wife and son, "our daily
tasks are worth doing and the wars are worth winning." Some extol their
wives as "saints" or "civilizing" influences. Yet in a number of families,
divorce mars the vaunted "togetherness" of the era.

Their wives were of a class and a generation to have chosen homemaking over
the office (though by 1950, 34% of women were in the work force). A few took
jobs during the war, or resumed artistic pursuits once children were off at
school. And some couples were way ahead of the times: "Possibly Toni Frissel
is known to some of you," writes Francis McNeil Bacon III of his wife, whose
photographic career "has taken her to distant parts of the globe, including
two trips to the European theatre during the war, while the old man took
care of the children."

The class was not spared heartbreak. "Our marital venture has been tested
and proved," Alan Kirschbaum writes. "We lost our little boy (at age nine)
six years ago." A New York banker reveals that his eldest son's submarine
had failed to return from patrol in Japanese waters. And Theodore Greene, a
medical missionary in China whose young son died of encephalitis in 1941,
would still recall him 30 years later in the 50th reunion book as "a
promising lad."

The class, which included only a handful of blacks, is mum about a
still-segregated society. In their anti-New Deal fulminations, some sound
almost contemporary. "Unless some way can be found to stop this
ever-increasing governmental scramble for more power ... strangulation is
bound to ensue!" warns one businessman. A court clerk in Indiana talks of
having "run the gamut of viciousness" in his work; but elsewhere, crime
isn't deemed noteworthy. Many by 1950 had begun to feel their age. One tells
of his shock at being called "Pop" by a stranger. Another had retired to
California to tend an organic garden and promote a "truly natural
nutritional supplement." He says he is free of lordosis and wishes the same
for his classmates. He died in 1952.

Serge Daniloff, writing in 1951 after the sudden death of his wife, bitterly
recalls his 1946 report, when, he says, "I felt my road was pretty well
marked and that all I had to do was follow it to the end." He has lost all
such certainty.

"Interesting and worthwhile people are getting more and more difficult to
find," he writes, adding that "a good book is better than bad company." Mr.
Daniloff, who spent his career with Packard Motor Co., would outlive a
second wife and marry a third time. He gave up sports-car racing in 1964 and
riding to the hounds five years after that. He lived to be 86.

But in 1951, he consoles himself with an assertion that few of his
contemporaries would dispute: "In the final analysis, all a man is really
supposed to do is to do his own job well."