I was graduating from college, and we are only about 30 days from the 60th reunion that I am not going to attend. But that’s not important.

What is important, as I look at the 466 page Harvard and Radcliffe Class of 1964 Sixtieth Anniversary Report is a statistic that I find interesting. If you can believe what you read, there were 1509 members of the combined graduating classes, and of the 1509, 1052 are still alive. That means that, in a country where the average life span is now registered at just over 76 years (ouch!), over 70 percent of the Harvard/Radcliffe class of 1964, individuals now (with exceptions, of course) 81-82 years old, remain alive.

We can speculate as to why that is, but that is not my purpose here. It is just to lay out an interesting, and I think relevant, fact.

But let’s move the clock back 60 years (and maybe I have said some of this – maybe all of this – before). Final exams. I have a vague feeling that I didn’t have final exams the semester before graduation. Do I remember that correctly? Why was that? Did no one have final exams? Did I have some, but not all, final exams? I just don’t remember.

What I do remember is that we had a week or more between the end of classes and graduation day, and my roommate Doug and I decided to hit the road, rather than just hang around Boston. We took a trip to Montreal and Quebec (that would be my first time in Canada, I believe, other than driving Detroit to Buffalo between St. Louis and Boston), and we got there by hitch-hiking. We just left Kirkland House, wearing sport jackets to look respectable (in retrospect, why we thought that made us look respectable I don’t know), carried a small amount of baggage (I don’t remember how much – maybe we each only a green Harvard book bag), and stuck out our thumbs.

The trip was fine. None of the people who picked us up turned out to be an axe murderer. The Canadians, after a little conversation, let us into the country, although we were on foot and didn’t know how we were going to get from the small border crossing in (I think) Vermont to Montreal. We played tourist in Montreal, although I have no real memory of what we did, other than we visited Doug’s grandfather, who lived at the time outside of Montreal in a nursing home, or a seniors home, and was 100+ (which then seemed old). And we met a women friend of his who had participated in the Oklahoma land rush.

I remember hitchhiking to Quebec City from Montreal turned out to be difficult because no one wanted to pick us up and the rain kept falling, and I remember hitchhiking from Quebec back to Boston was almost a disaster because there was virtually no traffic on the road we were on and we were about to become Canadian citizens when a car with a Massachusetts license plate appeared out of nowhere and drove us back not only to Cambridge, but to Kirkland House.

Then came graduation itself. My parents, my sister and my grandmother all came from St. Louis for the festivities, although I don’t remember how much time I spent with them. I recall being awakened at a terrible hour (maybe 6 a.m.) on graduation day (that was maybe 3 hours after I went to bed) with horns and drums and being given a ridiculously short amount of time to get into the courtyard and to be marched to Memorial Church for some kind of religious-ish service (I bet that doesn’t happen any more).

I remember the weather was perfect and the speech by a former president of Costa Rica, whom no one ever heard of, was as dull as can be. But the concert for the graduation and reunion classes with the Boston Pops conducted by Leonard Bernstein (he was at Harvard for his 25th reunion) at Symphony Hall was a real treat.

And that’s what I remember. Was anyone there for their 60th reunion? I don’t know. I remember there were some old timers there for their 50th and that seemed extraordinary at the time. And of course anyone there for their 60th would have been a member of the class of 1904, and that seems downright ridiculous.

After graduation, I drove with my family for a few days in Washington DC. It was my third or fourth time here, and I remember a lot about those earlier visits. About the visit with my family, I remember not a thing.