Oldest Graduates

The oldest graduates of Harvard and Radcliffe present on Commencement Day were 90-year-old Frances Downing Vaughan ’44 of Cambridge, and 103-year-old Donald F. Brown ’30 of Stow, Massachusetts. The oldest class representative to attend was 103-year-old George Barner ’29 of Kennebunk, Maine. All were recognized at the afternoon ceremony. Vaughan, a poet who was named First Poet Laureate at the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement, where she has taken classes and taught, said that she loved Cambridge and that the day had been wonderful. “I do miss people I’ve seen here before who are not here now,” she said in an interview. “There is something about the continuity with the past that keeps us going.”

According to University records, the oldest alumni also include: Edith M. Van Saun ’29, 105, of Sykesville, Maryland; Ruth Leavitt Fergenson ’28, 104, of Rockville, Maryland; Rawson L. Wood ’30, 103, of Center Harbor, New Hampshire; Elliott C. Carter ’30, 103, of New York City; Bertha O. Fineberg ’31, 103, of Gloucester, Massachusetts; Sara White Goldberg ’29, 103, of Haverford, Pennsylvania; Frances Pass Adelson ’30, 103, of Brookline, Massachusetts; Evelyn Sigel Baer ’30, 102, of Montpelier, Vermont; Mary Anglemyer ’31, 102, of Medford, New Jersey; and Erhart R. Muller ’32, 102, of Harvard, Massachusetts.