The Class

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They glanced at one another like tigers taking measure of a menacing new rival.

But in this kind of jungle you could never be sure where the real danger lurked.

It was Monday, September 20, 1954. Eleven hundred sixty-two of the best and brightest young men in the world were lined up outside that monstrous Victorian Gothic structure known as Memorial Hall. To register as members of the future Harvard Class of ’58.

Running the sartorial spectrum from Brooks Brothers to hand-me-downs, they were variously impatient, terrified, blasé, and numb. Some had traveled thousands of miles, others a few blocks. Yet all knew that they were now merely at the beginning of the greatest journey of their lives.

Shadrach Tubman, son of the president of Liberia, flew from Monrovia via Paris to New York’s Idlewild Airport, whence he was driven to Boston in his Embassy’s limousine.

John D. Rockefeller, IV, unpretentiously took the train up from Manhattan and splurged on a taxi from South Station to the Yard.

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