The Unofficial Book
of
Harvard Trivia
OMIA VINCIT RISUS
Preface
A college with a 350-year history accumulates a considerable amount of data. In trying to select a collection of facts suitable for a book of trivia, the author had to decide what he was not looking for.
You will not find questions about the size of Harvard's endowment or the date of some president's installation. Such facts are important, and perhaps even interesting to a person with an odd turn of mind, but they are not appropriate fodder for this book.
For the essence of a trivial fact is that it begs to be passed on. It should bring a grin to the reader's face, perhaps a touch of astonishment, and the desire to share it with someone else. Trivia is the provender of conversation. It is doubtful that people buy a book of trivia in order to test themselves, but rather to be diverted.
It is one thing to say, "I feel this way when pornography is around; this hurts me." It is quite another to say, "This is what it does to men's values and feelings, this is what it makes them do." The personal is political, feminism kept repeating. Fair enough. But where was men's personal reality in these theorists' equations? When would men get their chance to say, "This is what we feel and think"?
With that in mind, rigorous efforts were made to weed out indispensable facts. The author does not claim to be infallible, however. If the reader manages to identify an inexplicably vital entry, he should alert the author posthaste.
Happily, in the life of an august institution such as Harvard, irrelevancies crop up every day. If enough additional details of a petty nature are brought to the author's attention by solicitous readers, we may generate a second volume of Harvard trivia.
In the meantime, enjoy!
[below are excerpts from some of the chapters of the book; answers are at the bottom]
History
1. If you know the answers to the following questions, then you know how tenuous is the connection between John Harvard and the school that bears his name:
a) Where was John Harvard when the college was founded?
b) How many years did he live in the Massachusetts Bay Colony?
c) Did he make his bequest to the college in writing?
d) How long had the college been open when he died?
2. President Dunster (1640-1654) was once called back from a social visit in Concord on urgent business. He solemnly emptied his horn of gunpowder in a trail through Harvard Yard and touched it off with a live coal. What was he doing?
3. Harvard's fifth president, John Rogers, was installed in August 1683. Late that year, he noticed that the next commencement, scheduled for July 2, would coincide with a total solar eclipse, and had the ceremony moved up a day. Commencement was held July 1. What happened the next day?
4. The minutes of an 1850 Harvard Medical School faculty meeting noted that Dr. John W. Webster was not in attendance, that his professional associates "respectfully took note of action by the civil authorities," and that they had voted to fill the vacancy that existed "in Dr. Webster's absence." What's the story here?
5. True or False: Stanford University was founded when Leland Stanford, wanting to make a large bequest, was kept waiting in President Eliot's outer office too long and stormed off to establish his own school.
Alumni
1. What member of the class of 1743, perhaps the American Revolution's most brilliant orator, was killed by a bolt of lightning in 1783?
2. What member of the class of 1936 accidentally shot and killed his wife in 1951, reportedly while playing William Tell and trying to shoot a champagne glass off her head?
3. Which 1959 graduate received co-authorship credit for the screenplay to the Beatles animated feature film "The Yellow Submarine"?
4. After working for the Atomic Energy Commission in Los Alamos, this 1947 grad (a magna cum laude in mathematics at the age of 18) issued his first record album on a privately manufactured LP in 1953. He made 400 copies at a cost of $15, and the record eventually sold 350,000 copies. What is his name?
5. After graduating from Harvard Medical School, this man was a post-doctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. At least, that's what they decided to call him: "Part of my deal with them was that I would not have to go to the lab." Who was this person, and what was he really doing at the Salk Institute?
6. Which two Harvard graduates starred almost entirely alone together in a 1981 cult classic film, the first movie in which either had ever appeared?
7. Which member of the class of 1969 has appeared in movies with Laurence Olivier, Sissy Spacek, Jim Carrey, Javier Bardem, Will Smith, Faye Dunaway, and Harrison Ford?
8. Which 1967 honors graduate portrayed the mad Dr. Lizardo in "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension" and Roberta Muldoon, the transsexual football player in "The World According to Garp"?
Harvard in Films
1. Who played "Amos Judd," a star polo and crew athlete at Harvard, in 1922?
2. Who played Oliver Barrett III in "Love Story"?
3. In the film "Holiday," what fact about Cary Grant's character is said to ensure he will never win Katherine Hepburn?
4. In which 1941 film is Errol Flynn admonished with the words "A Harvard man ought to know how to be gentle"?
5. In which film does the hero say he loves Ingmar Bergman, only to have a woman ridicule him by saying "I mean I loved it when I was at Radcliffe" but all that Kierkegaard stuff bores her now?
Sports
1. Starting as a varsity end his senior year season (1947), this boy scored one touchdown in the first game and broke a leg in practice a few days later. A sympathetic coach sent him in during the final moments of the Yale game so he could get his letter -- which neither of his older brothers had won while at Harvard. Who was he?
2. F.W. Thayer, class of 1878 and captain of the baseball team for three years, invented what article that revolutionized the game?
3. Coach Jean Louis Danguy was famous for his instruction, "You hold heem like a bird and not so tight you keel heem and not so loose he fly away." To what "heem" was M. Danguy referring?
4. Pop Warner, coach of the Carlisle Indians, fooled a few opponents in 1908 by sewing half-leather, football-shaped pads on the elbows of the jerseys of his halfbacks and ends. Nobody could tell who had the ball. How did Harvard coach Percy Haughton handle this problem after a furious Syracuse coach tipped him off before the Harvard-Carlisle game?
5. In the April 16, 1927 game against Bates College, a batter slapped a line drive up the sleeve of pitcher Roy "Spike" Booth, '27. How did the umpire call the play?
6. When Harvard faced defending Eastern Intercollegiate boxing champion University of Syracuse in 1933-34, what psych-out maneuver did 115-pound Tommy Curtin employ?
7. Who won the 1968 Harvard-Yale Game?
Student Life
1. Would Harvard students ever have been taught that the sun revolves around the earth?
2. Seventeenth-century morning bever, or breakfast, consisted of two items for which the Harvard student was charged about a halfpenny. What were they?
3. In the late 1960s, the master of Adams House was said to have seen a boy and a girl coming out of the boy's room one morning, a clear violation of parietal rules. How did this administrator deftly handle the situation?
4. For the first fifty years of Harvard's existence, a student could be fined if he were caught using what language in the Yard?
The Women
1. Which member of the class of 1904 published her autobiography in the "Ladies Home Journal" during her sophomore and junior years for a fee of $3,000?
2. What was known to Radcliffe students in the 1950s as "the Charred Body Book"?
3. For the final exam in one of William James's courses, this 1898 graduate wrote in her test booklet, "Dear Prof. James: I am so sorry but I really do not feel like an examination paper in philosophy today," and walked out into the fresh spring morning. Who was she?
4. When asked when she didn't consistently adopt the female viewpoint in her work, which 1951 graduate replied, "I want to distance myself from my books. That's one of the reasons I write science fiction. I like to write about aliens. Men are aliens, too. I like the alien point of view"
5. Which Radcliffe graduate's first film role had her acting opposite Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty?
Dropouts and Special Students
1. His father, uncle, and older brother attended Harvard, and he entered in the same class as John Kennedy. His sophomore year he dropped Banjo Club to join the Young Communist League, writing in his journal, "As an individual, what do I count for? In the YCL I have the Comintern behind me." He left school in his junior year. Who is he?
2. This son of four generations of Harvard alumni dropped out twice. The first time he cut midterms to take out a dancer named Marilyn Miller and the whole chorus of her show, "Passing Show of 1912," to dinner. Readmitted, he received honors in biology, mathematics, and physics, but left school a second time because memorization bored him. What is his name?
3. His freshman year, this boy acquired a pet alligator named Champagne Charlie whom he kept frequently drunk on wine. Charlie eventually succumbed to alcoholism and was stuffed and hung up in his owner's room. Who was his owner?
4. After one year at Princeton marked by poor scholastic standing and an incident of drunken vandalism, a gold prospecting expedition in the Spanish Honduras, service as a sailor on a Norwegian ship to Buenos Aires, a suicide attempt, a marriage and a son, this twenty-six-year-old came to Cambridge as a special student with the goal of becoming "an artist or nothing." Name him.
5. Entering in the same class as future Talking Heads guitarist and keyboard player Jerry Harrison, this coed began singing at the Second Fret after her freshman year and left school a year later. Three years after that she was headlining at Max's Kansas City in New York. Who is she?
6. Because he attended for only the 1920-21 school year, this fellow called himself a "quarter-bred Harvard alumnus." As he put it, he "had to drop out to earn a living," and in a few years, while working at Doubleday, he discovered "my field -- the minor idiocies of humanity." What was his name?
7. A certain Harvard dropout died at the age of 26. Presumably on his prior instructions, a friend named Phil Kaufman (who had once served time on a drugs conviction at Terminal Island with Charles Manson) stole his body from a baggage ramp at Los Angeles Airport and burned it in the Mojave Desert. What man ordered his own desert cremation?
8. For what offense was William Randolph Hearts expelled?
ANSWERS
History
1. a) In England
b) One
c) Probably not; Samuel Eliot Morison suggests he made the bequest orally, on his deathbed.
d) A week to ten days
2. Some students had been fooling with black magic and convinced themselves they had raised the Devil, so the president improvised an exorcism to restore calm
3. Rogers died of a sudden illness just as the sun was emerging from its eclipse.
4. Dr. Webster, class of 1811, had just been hanged for murdering Dr. George Parkman, class of 1809, while both were on the medical school faculty.
5. False. Mr. and Mrs. Stanford visited Eliot in 1884 while canvassing a number of college administrators on the logistics of founding a college in their son's memory. In answer to her question, President Eliot told Mrs. Stanford one should not attempt it with an endowment of less than $5,000,000. She looked grave, but after a moment her husband said, "Well, Jane, we could manage that, couldn't we?"
Alumni
1. James Otis
2. William S. Burroughs
3. Erich Segal
4. Tom Lehrer
5. Michael Crichton '64, MD '69. He was writing his textbook, Five Patients: The Hospital Explained, which has since been translated into twenty languages. (He had already published the Edgar Award-winning thriller called A Case of Need under the pen name Jeffery Hudson)
6. Andre Gregory '56 and Wallace Shawn '65, in "My Dinner With Andre"
7. Tommy Lee Jones.
8. John Lithgow
Harvard in Films
1. Rudolph Valentino, "The Young Rajah"
2. Ray Milland
3. "He doesn't even belong to the Harvard Club."
4. "Dive Bomber" (He's learning how to fly a plane, honest.)
5. "Manhattan," with Woody Allen and Diane Keaton
Sports
1. Robert F. Kennedy
2. The catcher's mask
3. A fencing foil
4. Since the home team supplied the ball, he had it painted crimson, to match the Harvard jerseys. Harvard was Carlisle's only loss that year, 17-0.
5. The batter was called out, and a near-riot ensued.
6. Delaying his entrance for the weigh-in, he came in wearing an undershirt that had belonged to heavyweight champ Primo Carnera and huge, thick-lensed, hornrimmed glasses. "I was afraid I might be overweight," he said to the coach before a waiting crowd. Removing the glasses, he pretended to grope his way to the scales, where he said, "O, Dear! I am a HAWF pound under." The Syracuse team almost had apoplexy trying to be polite and not laugh. The "poor consumptive" Curtin knocked his concerned opponent off his feet five seconds into the first round.
7. Harvard, of course: 29-29
Student Life
1. It's possible, during the first twenty years of the college's existence, before the first English description of the theories of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler was published in 1656.
2. A hunk of bread and a pot of beer
3. Without skipping a beat, he said, "Good morning, gentlemen."
4. English
The Women
1. Helen Keller
2. A ledger in which Radcliffe students recorded the name of any overnight (female) guests so that -- theoretically -- bodies could be identified in the event of a fire.
3. Gertrude Stein. William James sent her a postcard the following day which read, "Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel. I often feel like that myself."
4. Ursula K. LeGuin
5. Stockard Channing, class of 1965, in "The Fortune"
Dropouts and Special Students
1. Pete Seeger
2. R. Buckminster Fuller
3. William Randolph Hearst
4. Eugene O'Neill
5. Bonnie Raitt
6. Ogden Nash
7. Gram Parsons, a Florida native who is credited as the inventor of country-rock, whose International Submarine Band released their first album, "Safe at Home," during the year he was a student at Harvard, and who was later a member of the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers. He would be eulogized in song by Emmylou Harris, the Eagles, Poco, and the Rolling Stones.
8. His junior year he sent each of his instructors a large package which contained a chamber pot with the recipient's name ornamentally lettered on the inside bottom.