Flotsam & Jetsam: Adams House

From our overstocked archives

Sam Smith - My college dorm was located in that corner of Harvard’s Adams House known as the Gold Coast, which once had private apartments for wealthy students. Our entry had an elegant stone and wood lobby and sumptuous suites, albeit worn down by decades of non-wealthy students. Better yet, the Gold Coast was well removed from the House offices, their prying functionaries, and the general flow of Adams House traffic. Across the street was a large Catholic Church in front of which Cambridge Mayor Eddie Sullivan would leave his car parked for every mass the Sunday before election day. Adams House also faced the bright red wooden house that served as the headquarters of the excommunicated Catholic priest, Father Feeney, known for his virulent prejudice and extreme liturgical views. Father Feeney's cadre wore priestly garb but to my eye looked more like hit men than theologians. We left them alone and they largely returned the favor, although once, when a Jewish friend was working in front of Adams House on his car with a black classmate, Feeney himself crossed the street to berate the latter, warning him that he would never become any whiter hanging around with a Jew.

The isolation of Adams House A-entry permitted a certain amount of liberty from the college's draconian parietal rules, which required that women be absent from student rooms by early evening. The ambiance and the privacy made our entry a favored center for social activities ranging from trysts to post-game parties. Two of my friends claim, although I don't recall it, that Coleman Hawkins was once among our visitors.

Adams A-36 had four decent sized bedrooms, a large, dark-paneled living room and non-functioning fireplace.

The five roommates who lived there liked each other, and though the vicissitudes of Harvard created considerable turnover, the suite kept its warmth. One prospective roommate never made it to sophomore year. Another left college permanently to end up as a Xerox executive. A third, brought in hastily when we feared an empty bed might mean the loss of the suite, also flunked out. He remained living with us for the next semester, unbeknownst to Harvard, as he started his career as an encyclopedia salesman. Judging from the calls coming in, he was not much more reliable as a purveyor of encyclopedias than he had been as a student. He did, however, lend the suite a certain character, largely as a result of a maiden aunt who would periodically, and without notice, dispatch exotic packages to us. Once a box containing scores of soap cakes from motels across America arrived at the door. On another occasion, a huge carton containing similar quantities of toilet paper appeared. We strung the toilet paper on a bamboo pole, jammed it between floor and ceiling in a corner of the room, and then built around it a pyramid of paper rolls -- a pop art construction before its time that slowly deconstructed with the passing of feces and semesters.

Outfitted with dingy, used furniture, a refrigerator stuffed in the closet next to the fireplace, and a huge abstract painting on loan from an artist who could find no other place to hang it, our living room became an attractive meeting place for friends at all hours of day and night. In fact, A-36 is probably one of the few college rooms to have been memorialized by a serious bard. Tom Whitbread, then a tutor, later a well-published poet (including in the New Yorker) and professor at the University of Texas, would visit at unpredictable hours, his arrival often smoothed by the beer that accompanied him. One early morning, after his hosts had either passed out or fallen asleep, he left a thank-you note. It read:

Terence this is stupid stuff
Smith is strewn about the floor
Dickerson is getting tough
Whitman has gone out for more
Agape has left the room
Orion lives up in the sky
I hear a thin soft voice of doom
The time has come to say good-bye.

We could be appropriately sophomoric, such as when we turned a Ronson can into a flame thrower with which to torch the sandwiches on the window sill below ours. Or when we celebrated the launching of Sputnik by using a working model based on the "electric gun" designed by proto-physicist Reilly Atkinson of Hollis Hall. Ours was a wine bottle filled with lighter fluid into which we inserted a sliced electrical cord with just two strands of wire touching each other. A cork firmly jammed into the bottle served as the space capsule. We hid behind the large sofa and at the end of the countdown put the plug into the wall. A magnificent blue explosion filled the bottle as the cork headed for the ceiling.

One of my problems was that I was getting fat. Harvard had introduced me to beer.

You could get a small glass of beer at Cronins for a dime -- a dimie. The first time I went there as a freshman, well under-aged, I joined my sister and some of her graduate student friends at a table waited on by the motherly Frannie. I looked older than I was and Frannie never asked for my ID. Thereafter, whenever I went to Cronin's I always sat at one of Frannie's booths. It was not until late in my senior year that Frannie came to the table and said apologetically, "They've got the inspectors in here and I'm gonna have to see everyone's ID -- even yours, Sam." I handed her my driver's license and watched as Frannie calculated how many years she had been conned. She looked at me with eyes worn by centuries of Irish oppression and said, "Oh Sam, oh Sam" I still feel bad about it.

By the middle of my sophomore year I was up fifty pounds over what I had weighed at high school graduation and not a gram of it firmed by anything remotely resembling exercise. My roommates designated me Fat Jolly Sam. Eventually, I would cut back on the visits to Elsie's, switch from beer to whiskey, and start lifting weights regularly at the Harvard gym.

For a once bullied, scared little kid who had never been good at sports it was a strange choice. I didn't talk about it; I just did it. Besides, the competition was not against others, but against who I had become. As I began reshaping my body, my mind changed as well. I felt more comfortable in this strange place called Harvard, less intimidated by those so successful at parading their intellectual skills, and less afraid of the future.

Pumping iron became my mental as well as physical therapy. In a few years, the boy they used to send to right field to get out him of the way would create and lead a physical fitness program for the Second Coast Guard District and a half century later would still be counting reps.

I arrived at graduation only ten pounds heavier than when I left high school. But along the way, there were some complications, the most notable being the announcement by my father, who had gone to Oxford, that he was giving me an English tailored suit, made to order by his favorite firm on Saville Row. The measurement form arrived at Adams A-36 and I turned to my companions for advice. We lacked both a math major and a tape measure but, fortified by a few beers, my roommates set about to measure me using a yard stick. All 230 pounds of me were checked, loudly disputed, and then rechecked before the form was dispatched to England. A few weeks later a letter arrived:

DEAR SIR: With reference to your esteemed order, we regret to find when going into the measurements you have given, that these do not appear to be quite in order, and we do not feel we could with confidence make up a suit. We wonder if you would be good enough to have the enclosed form completed, if possible by a local tailor, and returned to us at your earliest convenience. Your further esteemed commands shall have our best and personal attention.

With our compliments, we remain, Sir,
Yours faithfully,
JONES CHALK & DAWSON, LIMITED
D. Robinson Director

P.S. Have you a snapshot of yourself which would help?

I was measured by a local tailor and in time the suit arrived, a massive device that could withstand the worst cold of Boston or the loss of all of Her Majesty's colonies -- magnificent on Harold MacMillan no doubt, but leaving one of my friends to comment that I was the only person who could make an English tailored suit look as though it had come from that discount clothier of little repute, Robert Hall.