This month in Harvard history

March 16, 1951 – Nieman Fellows produce an issue of “The Harvard Crimson” in which (among other things) the veteran journalists hand out “Oscars” (from the “Harvard Square Academy”) to stellar professors, list the best and worst books they have ever read, grouse over Cambridge snow removal and parking, and editorialize on Harvard, pro and con. The issue also includes a specially commissioned “Li’l Abner”comic strip by cartoonist Al Capp.

March 16, 1953 – At the Business School, Professor John McLean’s class in advanced production problems becomes the first to use one of the new classrooms in Aldrich Hall, slated for official dedication on June 12. Dean Donald K. David shows up to give introductory remarks, contrasting the new facility with the single basement room in Lawrence Hall that he knew as a Business School student after World War I. (Lawrence was lost to fire in May 1970 on a site now occupied by the Science Center.)

March 21, 1953 – Responding to the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, educational radio station WGBH-FM broadcasts two and a half hours of taped reflections from 12 Harvard professors and research associates covering everything from the medical aspects of Stalin’s final illness to the implications of his passing for U.S. foreign policy.

– From the Harvard Historical Calendar, a database compiled by Marvin Hightower