Faculty Profile

Mapping out a plan of attack on next fall's housing front is turning Dr. Elliott Perkins '23, Master of Lowell House, into a master strategist. When an undergraduate, he had an untidy roommate who owned fourteen suits and left them in fourteen heaps. Therefore, Dr. Perkins looks forward with sympathetic agony to the Spartan task of cramming 440 students into a house built for 290.

After taking over the wheel at Lowell House in 1940, Dr. Perkins piloted the good ship through the "cold and costly" years of the war. He recalls many exacting moments: The high point of his career was Commencement Day, 1944, when seniors were leaving, the class of 1919 was having a colorful spree in Lowell courtyard, and the class of 1948 was entering. He also had a hot time Christmas of that year when someone forgot to open the chimney for the burning of the Yule log at the Christmas dinner ceremonies. Through all of this, the Perkins wit made life more bearable, for the complicated problems of man in a complex House were always met by a notice in the Perkins style explaining perhaps why a striped silk shirt did not pass for a formal jacket at High Table.

Besides being a housemaster, Dr. Perkins has been head of the War Service Bureau since 1943, an essential industry for those Harvard men with invitations from their draft boards. As a lecturer in English history, he is well known to those who have taken History 42a. Dr. Perkins spent a number of years in England and did research there from 1931 to 1934. He received his doctor's degree at Harvard in 1936.

"Perk," as he is informally known, is a Harvard-man's Harvardman in the best traditions of the gentlemen and scholar. Though he has not had a foot in a stirrup in twenty years, he speaks reminiscently of his experiences on the range. The impression given by his large library of the works of distinguished Englishmen is betrayed by an equestrian symbol-a pair of tarnished spurs which hang in proud retirement above the fireplace. His nautical blood put him on Harvard's first one hundred and fifty pound crew which he captained in his senior year. But the crew's "claudication," he mournfully recalls, prevented it from getting in any of the pictures.

Like many busy men, Dr. Perkins has to seek diversion and spiritual sustenance some place "far from the madding crowd." To this end, he has, as he puts it, a retreat in the salt marshes, away from all such marks of civilization as the telephone. Thus refreshed, he is always ready to come forth and wield a salty tongue or tell a salty story about roommates, draft boards, or English kings.