What’s Going on Here?

Who, what, where, when, and why….we’d appreciate any information that will help us identify what’s going on in this photograph plucked from the archives of Baker Library.

Please contact us at bulletin@hbs.edu, or HBS Alumni Bulletin, Teele Hall 361, Soldiers Field, Boston, MA 02163.

We’ll update you on what we have learned in the next issue. Thank you!

Last issue’s LAST LOOK: Thanks to Floyd Bradley (MBA ’75), Vern Brown (MBA ’74), Laurence Golding (MBA ’84), and Olivier Manuel (MBA ’03) who, along with former Harvard Magazine editor John Bethell, identified this madcap scene as the Adams House Raft Race. Harvard professor Robert Kiely says this race of jerry-rigged craft was already in place when he became master of Adams House in 1973. Lore has it that athletically challenged Adams House decided to create a “sport” in which losing (or sinking) would be deemed more original and creative than winning. Harvard’s grad schools, along with MIT and BU, eventually joined the College’s fun. Kiely recalls that after a student was conked on the head with a bottle and fell into the Charles, the race was ended in the mid-1980s by University officials who decided the event had become too rowdy.

Reports Golding, “This annual event took place in the spring, usually early May, and involved a transit of the waters between the Weeks and Larz Anderson bridges (and back) in craft that were entirely homemade. That means wood, beer kegs, Dole pineapple store displays, inflatable bananas tied together, or what have you. I remember one zealot even floating down the river lashed to a cross. The river wasn’t so clean in those days. I estimate from the hair that this is the late 1970s. I still have in my possession a T-shirt from the 1984 race.”