The Class Read Online Free PDF Page A

moccasins, rep ties, and a term's supply of

button-down and tab-collar shirts. in short, his school uniforms.
    As usual, father and son did not speak much to each other. Too many centuries of Eliots had gone through this same rite of passage to make conversation necessary.
    They parked by the gate closest to Massachusetts Hall
    (some of whose earlier occupants had been George Washington's soldiers). Andrew- ran into the Yard and rushed up to Wig
    G-21 to enlist the aid of his former prep school buddies in hauling his gear. Then, as they were toting barge and
     
     
     
    lifting bale, he found himself momentarily standing alone with his father. Mr. Eliot took the occasion to impart a bit of worldly advice.
    "Son," he began, "I would be very grateful if you did your best not to flunk out of here. For though there are innumerable seéondary schools in this great land of ours, there is only one Harvard." -
    Andrew gratefully acknowledged this astute paternal
    counsel, shook his father's hand, and raced off to the dorm. His two roommates had already begun to help him unpack. Unpack his liquor, that is. They were toasting their reunion after a summer of self-styled debauchery in Europe.
    "Hey, you guys," he protested, "you could at least have asked me. Besides, we've got to go register."
    "Come off it, Eliot," said Dickie Newall as he took another swig. "We walked past there just a while ago and there's a line around the goddamn block." -
    "Yeah," Michael Wigglesworth - affirmed, "all the weenies want to get there first. The race, as we well know, is not always to the swift." -
    "I think it is at Harvard," Andrew politely suggested.
    "But in any case, it isn't to the smashed. I m going over."
    "I knew it." Newall sniggered. "Old Eliot, my man, you've got the makings of a first-class wonk."
    Andrew persisted, undaunted by this preppie persiflage.
    "I'm going, guys."
    "Go on," Newall said, dismissing him with a haughty wave.
    "If you hurry back we'll save you some of your Haig & Haig. By the way, where's the rest of it?" -
    And so Andrew Eliot marched through Harvard Yard to join the long, winding thread of humanity-and ultimately to
    - be woven into the multicolored fabric called The Class

of '58.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    B
    y now The Class was all in Cambridge, though it would take several hours more for the last of them to be officially enrolled. -
    Inside the cavernous hail, beneath a giant stained-glass window, stood the future leaders of the world. Nobel Prize winners, tycoons of industry, brain surgeons, and a few dozen insurance salesmen.
    First they were handed large manila envelopes with all the forms to be signed (in quadruplicate for the Financial Office,
    quintuplicate for the Registrar, and, inexplicably, sextuplicate for the Health Department). For all this paperwork they sat side by side at narrow tables that stretched forever and seemed to meet only in infinity. Among the questionnaires to be completed was one for Phillips Brooks House, part of which asked for religious affiliation (response was optional). -
    Though none of them was particularly pious, Andrew Eliot, Danny Rossi, and Ted Lambros marked the boxes next to Episcopal, Catholic, and Greek Orthodox, respectively. Jason
    Gilbert, on the other hand, indicated that he had no religious
    affiliation whatsoever.
    After the official registration, they had to run an
    endless gauntlet - of wild, paper-waving proselytizers, all vociferously urging Harvard's now-official freshmen to join the Young Democrats, Republicans, Liberals, Conservatives, mountain -
    climbers, scuba divers, and so on. -
    Countless irrepressible student- hucksters noisily cajoled them to subscribe to the Crimson ("Cambridge's oniy breakfast-table daily"), the Advocate ("so you can say you read these guys before they got their Pulitzers"), and the Lampoon ("if you work it out, it comes to about a penny a

laugh"). In short, none but the most determined misers or abject paupers