After graduation, reflection
Harvard’s 361st Commencement continued well into the later afternoon, with graduates, alums, family, friends, and faculty joining in the festivities. Radcliffe grad, Class of 1944 The oldest Radcliffe class represented at Commencement was 1944 — 15 years more recent than the Class of 1929, represented by 103-year-old George Barner of Kennebunk, Maine. In the shade of a tent behind Hollis Hall at lunchtime, Frances Downing Vaughan ’44 was aware of the disparity. “I’m only 90,” she said. Vaughan lives in Cambridge, within walking distance of her alma mater. “I can’t think of a greater place to grow old in,” she said. Vaughan remembers a wartime college era when Harvard boys were scarce and you met them at social gatherings called “jolly-ups.” At Radcliffe, she remembers the 10 p.m. curfews and the standard fashion of “socks and shoes, sweaters and pearls.” A longtime poet — “I was a writer by age 7” — Vaughan is at work...