Red Books, Raw Gems
The College's class reports
by Deborah Smullyan
Please tell your classmates, in a paragraph or two, what you would like them to know about your activities, interests, family life, career, etc., concentrating on the past five years. No résumés, please, and first-person narratives only.
If you attended Harvard College—even if only for one day—you have been asked to submit to the above exercise every five years since, for publication in a typically red-covered book in advance of each reunion. Perhaps you can’t be bothered; perhaps you are loath to broadcast details of a personal nature; but if you are like many others, you revel in this regular opportunity to share your evolution and reflections with others in your class.
Commencement
& Reunion Guide:
Just what is this bond with classmates? For those who feel it, it is surprisingly strong—born in the soul of an 18-year-old, out on his or her own in the world, far from home and parents, possibly for the first time, learning to rely on a network of peers who start out as complete strangers and end up becoming a second family.
If you have ever stood and watched the alumni procession at a Harvard Commencement, you have felt a stirring sense of the cavalcade of life in its different stages; these books do the same thing in print.
My life peaked in 1981, when I won the Ms. PacMan championship in the basement of the Union—and used my prize, a gift certificate to the Spinnaker at the Hyatt, to take my mom to brunch because I couldn’t get a date. It’s been all downhill since then, but I’m sure it’ll pick up one of these days.
~Alan J. Kuperman ’85
Harvard’s class reports have been continuously published for at least 150 years. They started out as compendia of memorial tributes to fallen members of the classes, written by the class secretaries, but gradually the emphasis shifted from the dead to the living.
Harvard’s books are also unique in their genre. No other school has a formal publishing program of this kind. Yale’s “classbooks” are published at the discretion of each individual class, under the editorship of a volunteer from the ranks; Princeton alumni likewise publish their own reunion “yearbooks” with no staffing or funding from the university. At Stanford, the alumni association does pay to have submitted entries scanned as PDFs and photocopied, but there is no editing and little consistency of format in the resulting books, with many entries reproduced in the grads’ own chicken scratch.
The class reports were all-Harvard until 1973, when Radcliffe women debuted in the pages of the decennial report of the class of ’63. Radcliffe’s pre-1963 classes publish reports, too, at their own discretion and editorship, containing entries scanned and photocopied in the manner of Stanford’s books. (The first Harvard fiftieth report to embrace Cliffies, however, was that of the class of 1956; see “A Fiftieth First,” July-August 2006.)
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Photograph by Jim Harrison |
The faces behind the books (from left): Deborah Smullyan, Jason Hale, Dawn Carelli, Christine Frost, and Diane MacDonald |
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The Class Report Office (CRO) consists of five full-time, professional editors. Director Diane MacDonald worked in the office in the late 1990s, left to develop on-line materials for textbook publisher Addison-Wesley, and then returned in 2004 to take the helm. Assistant director Christine Frost stays up half the night writing historical novels (one about Dracula’s wife is now shopping for an agent). Dawn Carelli is a self-described “recovering French horn player” with a love of foreign languages, art, and flower gardens; Jason Hale moonlights as the force behind FatCity.com, a rock music Webzine; and the author of this article has written and edited obituaries in this magazine since 1993.
Remember the Depression? It and I went steady in the Hollywood of the late 1930s. During those uncomfortable times I was variously a motion picture set designer, short subjects dialogue director, freelance cartoonist and writer. All this was pretty hungry going, and so go I did—back home to Denver in 1941. There I wound up with the Remington Arms Company as (of all things) a quality control engineer writing shop manuals on the subject of “How to Make Ammunition for War and Profit.” In 1944, eager to see our product in practical, everyday use, I joined the Infantry (103d Cactus Division) as a combat artist-correspondent in the ETO. Far as I know, I never managed to shoot anybody, but they made me a staff sergeant and gave me the Combat Infantry Badge, two battle stars, the Bronze Star and Good Conduct Medal. The last of these, in all candor, was undeserved.
~William J. Barker ’37
Many alumni are surprised to learn that their submissions are edited at all. “It is a lot of work,” says MacDonald. “We turn around a high volume of content over the three-month period after each deadline, and we send the text through four cycles of editing, fact-checking, and proofreading before a book goes to press.” The truth is, a class report that made its way into print without that exhaustive process would be a woeful object: it is amazing how many people unwittingly omit the name of one of their children, or give dates implying that they married a current spouse before divorcing their former one, or misspell “Machu Picchu.”
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