In the House
They run wild in the dining hall, they scream in the courtyards in the middle of the afternoon. They are the children raised in upperclass Houses, providing students with a pleasant reminder that outside lectures, sections and labs, real life goes on.
A Harvard child’s life is anything but ordinary. While a number of Harvard tutors raise babies and very young children in the house, many move out as they grow up. The ones that stay are usually the offspring of Masters and Allston Burr Senior Tutors.
Greg Bossert entered House life at the age of 13, in 1975, when his father, Arnold Professor of Science William H. Bossert ’59 and mother Mary Lee Bossert became Masters of Lowell in 1975, and moved out in 1980, at 18. Living in Lowell until he left for Carleton College, Greg today has a romantic image of Harvard House life. “The house itself, the Masters’ residence, was magical, with secret doors and a dozen fireplaces and a library perfectly suited for a good British mystery murder,” he says. “Christmas time, with the surrounding courtyards filled with snow and the enormous staircase decorated with holly, was wonderful and is a cherished memory.”
Larisa Heimert, daughter of the late Cabot Professor of American Literature Alan E. Heimert ’49, who served as Eliot House Master from 1968-1991, and his wife Associate Master Arlene G. Heimert ’59, spent her whole childhood in the Eliot Masters’ residence, from when she was born in 1972 until 1985. She is now an editor at Yale University Press. Like Bossert, she remembers the excitement of House life. “It was a huge playground in a lot of ways,” she says. “The Masters’ lodgings were enormous and we had wonderful times as children exploring the steam tunnels under the University and sneaking up into the tower at night.” But for Heimert, her parents’ responsibilities as Masters often disrupted the nuclear family. “It certainly made for an odd family life,” she says. “My parents felt—rightly—that it was their responsibility to eat in the dining hall on weeknights with students and members of the Senior Common Room.” Heimert says the “endless parade of people, parties and meetings” sometimes felt intrusive for her as a child, making the Masters’ residence “feel quite public and less like a home.”
Bossert says the “sheer volume of people passing through could be overwhelming, and [there were] times when the sounds of partying—mostly from Winthrop House, as I recall—kept me awake, but for the most part the students were an expected and welcome part of day-to-day life.”
Considerably older than Heimert during his years in Lowell House, Bossert adjusted more easily. “Strange though it seemed at first,” he explains, “having two or three hundred people milling about on the first floor eating brownies became normal, even negligible, after the first few months.” The duties of House Masters require constant attention. William Bossert jokes that he used his children as “slave labor for entertainment” at weekly teas. For Greg, helping out at the teas “was hard work, hard even for me and my sister, without the burden of actually doing the Mastering...And it was hard to escape when it became too much, or too busy.”
Bossert and Heimert also recall being intimidated by students in the Houses. “I didn’t have much meaningful interaction with students, even though we ate in the dining hall almost every night of the week. I do remember that they all looked tremendously sophisticated and mature,” Heimert says. She says it was not until years later, when she enrolled as an undergraduate at Princeton, that it dawned on her that the Harvard students of her youth were perhaps not that advanced. “I realized that I was not remotely sophisticated or mature,” she says.
Bossert says he felt the divide between students and resident children more keenly, recalling “a frustrating sense of superiority [coming] from the masses—more felt during my less-secure high school days—or just plain disregard of us non-students as some sort of incidental infrastructure.” But he soon grew confident in his role as a permanent member of the House community, adopting “an attitude of ‘yeah, but you are in my House’—which is very much how it felt,” Bossert says. “Once the line between student and resident was broken, it never seemed to be an issue at all.” His father says the children’s transition to House life was eased by the fact that they continued attending public school in Belmont.
“The Square was the cool place to be anyway, so it was not hard to convince friends to visit,” Bossert says. “And Belmont as a town is very closely connected to the universities in Cambridge, so strange as my life was, there wasn’t as big a culture gap as one might think.”
Both Bossert and Heimert remember the fun of entertaining famous guests in the Masters’ Residence. Bossert fondly recalls serving tea to labor leader Cesar Chavez, pointing actor Robert Redford to the bathroom and watching his father (“in a tux and bare feet”) chat with Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart over a bowl of Cajun crawdads. Heimert says that often famous figure skaters stayed in Eliot House during the Evening With Champions benefit show.
Heimer says the intellectual aura of the Harvard community that surrounded her childhood seems much more impressive today than when she was eight. “I wish I could say that my strongest memories of childhood consist of meeting the great luminaries of Harvard and basking in their wisdom,” she says. “I suppose there was some of that, but mostly I remember horsing around with my brother in the elevator…and trying to trap him in the basement…and of course I remember that the dining hall food was terrible.”
Neither Bossert nor Heimert claim they ever truly experienced “normal” family life. Heimert boarded at Phillips Exeter after she turned 13, then went directly to Princeton. Bossert lived in Austria with his family for a year prior to his parents’ appointment as Masters. After his graduation from Carleton, he returned to the free room and board of Lowell House for several years, during which time he held down a day job while playing in a rock band. (He now lives in Germany.) His younger sister Sarah, who also grew up in Lowell, graduated from Harvard College in 1985 and lived in Quincy House. To make his daughter’s Harvard experience as normal as possible, William Bossert packed up his car as if the family were going to take a long road trip—and drove around the block to drop her off in Quincy. Though the former Master insists that he and his daughter maintained separate lives at the College, he notes that Sarah and her friends “did use the free laundry facilities in the Lowell Masters’ Residence.”
Would Bossert and Heimert raise their children in Harvard Houses today if given the opportunity? “If it meant living there myself, surely!” Bossert answers promptly. But then he pauses to reflect. “I’d have to be convinced that Harvard valued the House system in the way my parents and my whole family did, as a community in which learning happened,” he adds. Heimert equivocates: “I think it would be very important to set clear boundaries between the public aspects of the job and home life.”