Uncle Tom's Cabana

Thomas F. McGann, Instructor in History and tutor at Kirkland House, has a face which is hard to forget. His placid expression, underlined by a black mustache gives him the appearance of a benign dictator. Having spent several years in Argentina before and during Person's regime, McGann might give the impression that he would in the role to a T. Yet most of his friends know him as "Uncle Tom." Perhaps it's because he likes to run sessions like a high level cocktail party-often in a student's room-with the waft of sherry in the air and popcorn crackling over a file. Or it may be his willingness to talk about his four children with just as much interest as on Latin American diplomacy. At any rate, McGann always enjoys chatting with students, although he is in the most feverish period of his academic career.

"I guess I lead about five lives," McGann says, with a smile of white teeth under his black mustache. As a member of the finance committee in Bellingham (his home town), an officer in the Naval Reserve, a tutor, an instructor, and a father, he rarely finds time for vacation--save for the antics of his kids. "Oh boy, it's fierce at night," he muses, "but marvelous to see them grow up. I remember my six-year-old turned to me at dinner one night and said, 'Daddy, when I'm forty years old, you'll be dead'. It took me a few minutes to prove even to myself that he might be wrong."

Marrying a Radcliffe girl in 1943, McGann left for Peru, where he became a Naval Observer and later in Buenos Aires, an Assistant Naval Attache. His fascination for Latin America did not develop at the University, however, where he majored in modern European history. After his junior year, a classmate urged him to join a snake-catching safari on the Amazon River. Glancing at the primitive spears in the corner of his room, he remarks, "After driving sixty miles up and over the Andes, we took a forty-foot mahogany canoc down the river, shooting at random crocodiles. . . I didn't bring any snakes back but I picked up a tiny marmoset monkey. On the train from New York, in the dining car, I had him inside my coat. And the waiter, who had just set a fruit salad on the table, suddenly saw a long hairy arm reach out from my chest and clutch a grape. He gaped in horror and almost upset somebody else's dinner. . . At college, he developed a taste for beer and would sit on top of a can, reach down the opening with his arm, and after three handfuls of beer he was falling all over the place."

At the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, McGann worked on the background of Argentine U.S. relations from an Argentine cultural point of view. In 1949, he made his most recent trip to Argentina on a travelling fellowship, after which he participated in a broadcast which appeared in Argentine papers and brought public denunciation from Peron.

This incident is the closest that McGann has been to active political and diplomatic involvement with Person. He feels that foreign service work is too hectic for a family life, and he is content to work from the scholarly angle. On his window sill are several boxes filled with notes for a book he plans to write.

Working with Professor Clarence H. Haring, the only other Harvard teacher in the field, McGann hopes to introduce a General Education course on Latin America. "I am sure there is a lot of latent interest in the area," he points out, "it just needs a little stirring up." JONATHAN O. SWAN