FACULTY PROFILE

When Robert G. Albion graduated from Bowdoin in 1918, he had to choose between the newspaper business or a stretch at graduate work in history. "I took a look at the old boys in the city room, compared 'em with the professors mellowing at Bowdoin, and off I went to Harvard."

Albion, who was appointed Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs here last spring, says he likes that decision better every day. "The best thing about teaching history," he says, "is that you can gratify almost any interest you've got."

Professor Albion's interest is the sea. He was born in Malden but managed to grow up on Maine's Casco Bay; by World War I his seafaring ancestry was showing its effect, and Albion joined the Naval Reserve. After what he calls a "delightful" series of training eruises, Albion began to feel that he would like a little combat action, so he jumped leagues and promoted himself a commission as an infantry licutenant.

This promptly backfired. Albion was sent to Louisville, Ky. and "assigned to breaking in Hillbillies." He got so lonesome for the sight of water that he started riding a ferry back and forth across the Ohio River "just to remember what it felt like." After his discharge, Albion traveled via Harvard to the Admiralty in London, where he turned out a Ph.D thesis for another naval historian, Professor Samuel Eliot Morison.

Albion got an appointment to Princeton the same day he took his General Exams here, and soon was made an Assistant Dean in charge of Flunking. He interspersed earnest warnings to errant Prinetonians with a couple of courses in military and naval science, and eventually worked his way to a position teaching his favorite subject, maritime history.

"House and Garden"

The course was popular. Albion points out that Princeton's history departments at the time was "comparatively sadistic," and there was only one course which gave its members a chance to relax, a doddering affair on the Westward Movement known affectionately to undergraduates as "House and Garden." Alboin felt there was room for another course which catered to the gentlemanly set. So did the gentlemen, who came out for it in large numbers. They called his course "Boats," and appeared for it bleary-eyed on Monday mornings at 8:40. "We had a hell of a good time," says Albion. Eventually he found the conflict between flunking students as a dean and nursing them as a professor a little strenuous, and he threw a tough hour quiz at his group of boatmen. There were dark muttering from the white-shoe crowd, and a subsequent undergraduate musical appeared with verses warning to "beware of perfidious Albion."

During the last war, Albion went to work writing the administrative history of the Navy, "following in Sam Morison's wake, a usual." Albion covered 50,000 miles, interviewed Admirals by their West Indian swimming pools, accumulated a squad of Wave secretaries, and filled 120 typescript volumes. He found the heat of Washington uncondusive to the writing up of all this material, however, and talked the Navy into moving the Waves up to his home city of Portland, Me. The stimulation of the salt air increased his productivity considerably and he shortly expects to bring out the first of his volumes.

Albion is glad to be back at Harvard. He likes the climate, the students, and being near home. He likes the leeway given him in teaching his new course, History 168, which is also rapidly becoming known as "Boats." He likes the evidence that the enrollment of his course is growing in a geometric progression. But he thinks Mrs. Albion is most happy about the switch. "She wen't have to go south of Boston anymore."