Faculty Profile

"I have never let myself be bored whether it was cocoa planting, boat building, soldiering, or climbing the Himalayas."

This is the reflection of Frederick L. Stagg '17, Research Fellow in Physical Anthropology, who is currently engaged in a study of the relation between a man's physical build and his career. Working closely with Earnest Hooton, Professor of Anthropology, Stagg has been doing research work on body types based on nude photographs of undergraduates who attended Harvard from 1876 to 1912. Dr. Dudley A. Sargent, who headed physical training at Harvard for forty years, took the photographs and kept a complete medical record, including physical measurements and biographical data. Stagg has been spending most of his time correlating this material with facts about the post-college lives of the graduates being studied.

Biographical data on Stagg's own life shows that his world travels and wide experiences would make it difficult to categorize him according to career or life-time activities--the two important factors in his study. Although he is an English subject, Stagg was born in South America and spent his boyhood on his family's Ecuadoran cocoa plantation, second largest in the world. His grandfather had come to South America as a British naval officer who was ordered to protect his expire's interest there after the defeat of Napoleon.

While at Harvard, Stagg concentrated in foreign languages and literatures and took several anthropology courses under Hooton, who was just beginning his teaching career. Stagg was a cartoonist for the Lampoon when Robert Sherwood and John Marquand were writing for it. He helped Sherwood produce a Pudding show, but the cast disbanded when the United States entered World War I, and there was no Pudding musical.

Stagg enlisted as a private in the British Army and received a commission eight months later. After the war, he traveled in India, studying plantation management by living with cocoa and rubber planters. He returned to Ecuador in 1919 to manage his family's plantation. Later he founded the first meat packing business in Ecuador. During the inter-war period, Stagg traveled so frequently that he can boast, "I have never spent more than two consecutive years on the same continent during the past forty years." His travels took him to China, India, Japan, Polynesia, Galapagos Islands, and Europe.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Stagg was in Leh, the ancient capital of Tibet. He quickly went to London to join his regiment, the "Devil's Own" (Inns of Court) Squadron, which was recruited chiefly among lawyers, but he was too old for active service. The Foreign Office sent him instead to Havana as Honorary Attache, under Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes. He was in Cuba for a year and spent the rest of the war in Bogata, assigned to "confidential operations."

Stagg joined his old instructor, Hooton, in 1946. Since then he has been able to interview the one-third of the 2,361 subjects of his study who are still alive. In addition, he has spent thousands of hours looking over alumni records, class reports, biographical works, and University archives. Results of his findings will appear in scientific publications and book form next year.