A Harvard Man Reminisces

Sitting in the students' section above the 35-yard line, Tom Myles admits he's not much of a football fan. Like most of those attending The Game at Harvard Stadium on November 23, he is content rooting for the home team.

But, while Mr. Myles is hardpressed to give tailback Eion Hu's number (33), he will tell you with the most earnest of looks that Harvard saved his life.

Thomas Myles, who graduated from the College in 1937 and the Law School in 1940, left Harvard at a time when nations were being ravaged by the Second World War. After training at Fort Benning, he was sent to serve in the Pacific theater.

"I was a second lieutenant infantry and I arrived in New Guinea at a replacement camp for officers, 400 or 500 officers waiting assignment," Myles begins. "I was asked to come up to interview. There were two big long lines for interviews, and they moved very slowly, because they were asking these guys so many questions to get into the counter-intelligence corps."

"When I get up to the top, [the interviewer] picks up my card --all the information's on it. He reads aloud, 'Myles, Thomas M., Harvard. Are you interested? You're in,' he says. 'Pick up your orders tomorrow morning. You're going to MacArthur's headquarters to counter-intelligence school'--and that saved my life. My life wasn't worth a nickel, not a nickel in the infantry before the invasions."

Second Lieutenant Myles believed then, as he does now, that the Harvard name secured him a place in the counter-intelligence corps, that a Harvard education saved him from ever having to carry a gun over the top.

And so it is that he returns to Harvard in even years to cheer on his alma mater out of loyalty and gratitude. Sportily dressed in a blue felt baseball cap and gray tweed coat, he admires a catch that advances the Crimson upfield, then later admonishes a drunken student for talking during the band's halftime performance.

Thomas M. Myles takes his listener back to a time when The Game earned its pomp and circumstance, when the stadium was full and bleachers were erected in its open end.

The '96 version of The Game posted an attendance figure of 24,470, more than 10,000 short of its capacity with portable stands.

Sixty years removed from his college days, Thomas Myles still remembers what it was like to live in a newly-built Eliot House. He recalls the "biddies" who made his bed, the separate menus for every meal and the waitstaff that served them. He talks nostalgically of architecture and wood carvings.

Myles knows he led a spoiled youth and feels duty-bound to attend The Game when it is played in Cambridge.

Today, Mr. Myles says he is concerned about Harvard's lack of school spirit.

"We all went to the football games," Myles says. "It was the start of a wonderful weekend. You need balance in your lives."

"The Harvard-Yale Game was a social event," he says. "When we played in New Haven, you should have seen the special trains lined up at the station. You should have seen the mink coats, the fur coats. Everybody came--from Washington, New York. Oh God, was it a big thing."

At age 81, Thomas Myles considers himself lucky--lucky to have survived the war, lucky to still attend the pregame festivities his class holds in the Weld boathouse, but luckiest of all to call himself a Harvard man.

Shira A. Springer '97 is assistant sports editor of The Crimson.