Photograph by Stu Rosner

Myra Mayman

"Here, we start chemical reactions," says Myra Mayman, director of the Office for the Arts at Harvard and Radcliffe. "Our job is lighting the Bunsen burner under the beaker." Mayman has tended that flame as head of the office since 1973; in the decade prior, she did something new every year. That included working in admissions for her alma mater, Bryn Mawr (she majored in German, which Mayman jokingly says "has been extremely helpful ever since"); living in Puerto Rico; taking a four-month cross-country camping trip; raising funds for the Boston Symphony Orchestra; earning a master's in comparative literature at Columbia ("I hated the whole thing"); and rusticating in a cowherd's cottage next to a farm 20 miles south of Oxford, where she read a lot ("It was a very happy year"). One secret of her staying power: "I actually love the arts," she says. "If you want to refresh yourself, go to a museum." Mayman also refreshes herself with bicycling, cross-country skiing, and weekends at the 1790 farmhouse that she shares with her husband, lawyer Alexander Bernhard, LL.B. '64. On Beacon Hill, they occupy a narrow townhouse on a narrow street: "as close as you can get on dry land to being in a submarine. It's very, very orderly, because it has to be." Mayman presides over the Signet Society's associate members, and from 1984 to 1988 was master of Cabot House--an unusual appointment for a single woman. The Cabot phase was "quite hilarious, a real flyer," she says. Her own artistic creations? "I used to do little cartoony drawings," she recalls, then starts chuckling. "I used to do a lot of things. Now, I just shuffle papers!"

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