Legacy: The Prodigal Grandson

Not every member of the Fly Club and Hasty Pudding Social Club can be spotted on campus in a red lumberjack-plaid jacket, but Desmond S. Fitzgerald ’04 looks right at home. Despite a distinguished lineage—his grandfather, Robert G. Stone Jr. ’47, served on the Harvard Corporation for 27 years and was its Senior Fellow from 1995 through 2002—Fitzgerald has always felt free to blaze his own path.

He was admitted to Harvard off the waitlist, and took a year off before enrolling in 2000. Once through the door, even the chairman of the Harvard Corporation couldn’t give Fitzgerald an edge in the housing lottery. After being exiled to Pennypacker as a first-year, Fitzgerald was shipped off to the Quad last year in Pforzheimer house, and now resides in Jordan.

On his year off, while his grandfather was completing a multi-billion dollar fundraising campaign, Fitzgerald was cutting and buying fish in Portland, Maine. “I think if you’re going to have a job, you should have a real job and earn real money,” he says.

Fitzgerald has been upwardly mobile in his free time since then, working as a draftsman for a South Boston architecture firm last summer and attending night school to learn computer assisted design. In high school, he’d had an interest in studying endangered species, but self-deprecatingly admits that based on his performance in chemistry, one teacher suggested he focus on the humanities. Now a History of Art and Architecture concentrator, he’s decided that he eventually would like to be an architect, “economy and war permitting.”

Fitzgerald says he doesn’t feel burdened by his heritage—he isn’t even much of an expert on the Corporation. “We talk about Harvard, but not really about what he was doing in his job,” he says of his grandfather.

Fitzgerald’s background couldn’t have hurt his chances at getting into Harvard, although his acceptances at nine other colleges suggest he probably didn’t need the tip factor. He was never particularly Harvard-focused: he hadn’t spent a significant amount of time on campus before he showed up for the First-year Outdoor Program, and his family never pressured him to go. “My family wanted me to go to a good college, a respectable place,” he says. “They didn’t define any one college.”