Alumni Record Office Holds Tabs on 88,000 Grads Alive

Finding needles in the proverbial hay-stack would be light work for the dozen girls who run the Alumni Records Office in Widener, whose day-to-day tasks involve files of more than 88,000 living Harvard men and many generations of deceased graduates.

Formerly housed in the top floor of Lehman Hall, the files and lists were all moved to Widener last January "to make room for more machines in the comptrollers' office," according to Miss Catherine Patton, director of the Alumni office.

Telephone-Call Deluge

As if merely keeping up with the wanderings of myriad graduates were not enough, the office is beseiged by a constant stream of telephone calls and mail queries about Alumni, living or dead. "We average more than 30 phone calls a day," stated Miss Patton, who has been in charge of the Office since the fall of 1945.

Class reunions and reports make up a great deal of the work these days. At present six reports are in process, with the Twenty-Fifth Report of the Class of 1922 and the Fiftieth Report of 1897 the largest jobs.

Vote Counting

Another important springtime function of the office is the mailing and counting of Alumni ballots for Overseers, directors of the Alumni Association, and the Harvard Fund Council. More than 11,000 votes were cast last year in the overseers elections, all of which were handled by a special counting system in this office.

Every undergraduate begins his Alumni history long before he leaves college. At the end of his Freshman year, a card with his class standing and record enters the files. When he leaves college, he advances to a second file where his mailing address is recorded The last step for an alumnus is the decreased list which fills six cases with the names of dead alumni.