Campus & Community

This month in Harvard history

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Oct. 15, 1945 — Pulitzer Prize-winning History Professor Paul Herman Buck, PhD ’35, becomes Harvard’s first Provost. Under the terms of the statutory amendment approved on this day by the Board of Overseers, the Provost is also, ex officio, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (the position Buck has held since 1942).

October 1946 — In response to the postwar surge of married veterans, the University Nursery School opens new expanded quarters on Kirkland Pl. (off Kirkland St.). Consisting of two Quonset huts linked by a half Quonset, the H-shaped facility handles 90 children daily. Winnifred A. Lydon, six trained women college graduates, and a pediatrician look after the youngsters.

October 1947 — The Law School Association becomes the first alumni group to take decisive action toward creating a war memorial by launching a $100,000 drive to create a Treasure Room in Langdell Hall to preserve and exhibit the School’s celebrated collection of manuscripts and rare books on legal history. An illustrated brochure formally announces the project.

Slated for the north end of the reading-room floor, the Treasure Room will be air-conditioned and dust-free. Doorways of its memorial entrance area will contain the names of the 193 Law graduates who died in World Wars I and II.

Oct. 12, 1947 — The University News Office (Weld Hall) issues a widely used press release describing the various means by which Harvard students had worked their way through college during the past year, as revealed by the Harvard Student Employment Office. Among the College-based jobs: counting stars, feeding laboratory rats, filing photographic plates, and prying mud from fossils.