The President's Lady

Thirty-odd years ago Nathan Pusey was a junior at Harvard College and spent the summer working at a good outdoor job in Iowa. The rural household had seven children and no room for its new hired hand, so Pusey was sent to live down the road at the Woodwards'.

Their daughter Ann, then 13, graduated from Bryn Mawr eight years later, married Pusey, and is now 17 Quincy Street's first lady. She majored in philosophy at Bryn Mawr, and quotes President Pusey as often childing her that "I've never met anyone who got less out of a major than you did." The President, however, is wrong, for one Webster definition of philosophy proves his error: "Calmness of temper and judgment befitting a philosopher."

Senator McCarthy

When the Puseys were in Appleton, Wisconsin, and Senator McCarthy had launched a bitter broadside at the newly-appointed President of Harvard Mrs. Pusey probably needed all the equanimity she could garner. The junior senator from Wisconsin was never one to give up a grudge, nor Pusey one to run away from a fight; and the Senator's flow of rheum continued. "At first," Mrs. Pusey recalls, "Senator McCarthy wasn't interested in the President of Lawrence College. But the President of Harvard, he knew, was someone who would get him national coverage." She recollects having met McCarthy only once, a youngish, nondescript man on a railroad train parlor car to Chicago.

Mrs. Roosevelt

A few years later, Eleanor Roosevelt had lunch with Mrs. Pusey and the Harvard Dames at 17 Quincy Street. One of the maids tripped a few feet away from Mrs. Roosevelt while carrying a wooden salad bowl, catapulting its contents not far from her lap. Mrs. Pusey's reaction, a tersely graceful comment: "The salad, really and truly, is tossed."

When Mrs. Pusey moved to Cambridge, she gave up her vacations at the "clear, cold, and beautiful" lake near the Woodward home in Iowa, and now spends summers with her family in Mt. Desert, Maine, enjoying mountain climbing and sailing with friends. An eight foot pram, built in the basement of 17 Quincy Street, and a battered kayak which was given to Nathan, Jr., are the only family-owned boats.

Certain adjustments were necessary when her family moved from Lawrence to Harvard, but Mrs. Pusey asserts that "I have no generalizations to offer about the Mid-West and the East. There are differences, none of them shocking, and most of them superficial. I think it may be easier for a youngster who wants to study to do so here, without having to hide it. And the old prep school myth--what they used to call 'lack of serious-mindedness'--doesn't seem to be true."

Only One Regret

After five years at Harvard, Mrs. Pusey expresses only one regret. At Lawrence, where she worked extensively in the College's extracurricular activities, Mrs. Pusey could sit at her kitchen window and greet any student who passed--by his first name. Here, she has been able to know only a handful of undergraduates, and says that seeing students "is the thing I miss most of all."

One of the few opportunities Mrs. Pusey has to meet students is at breakfast after the early service at Christ Church, but even then the President always has to rush off" to learn the Old Testament lesson for the service at Memorial Church. "This fall," she continues, "a student asked us down to his House for dinner. He had quite a meal planned and wanted to cook it over the fireplace. It sounded tempting, but we just didn't have the time."

Time has become even more scarce since A Program for Harvard College began. Mrs. Pusey is included in many of the fund-raising trips, and observes: "It's important to interest wives in the Program. It is not like a five dollar contribution, where the husband can make up his own mind."

When Mrs. Pusey moved into 17 Quincy Street five years ago, the living room bookshelves were empty, and this drew an admonition from a chatty friend. "My dear," she told her, "you don't know what a bad impression it makes for the President of Harvard to have empty bookcases."

Since then, Mrs. Pusey has done a fine job of filling the bookcases and, more important, the exacting position of Harvard University's first lady.