Fred Lee Glimp, a colleague has said, is "naturally cussed." He is willing to admit that, back in 1946, he was.

He read in Life Magazine about Harvard's struggle to deal with thousands of applications from returning veterans. Somehow that attracted him. "If it was so hard to get into, it was worth trying," he remembers telling himself.

There may have been other, commoner reasons for being impressed with Harvard and wanting to get into it. But none of them were enough to make Glimp go to any great trouble. He had asked the Army Air Corps to drop him off, on his return from the service, on the East Coast, so he could take a look at Harvard and get interviewed there. The Corps left him on the West Coast instead. So he went back to Boise (before the Army, he had never been outside of Idaho), got a job, sent Harvard an application and-forgot about the interview.

Sitting in Cambridge, all John Monro could say about Glimp's folder at first was "maybe." Glimp was just another veteran--and the criteria for admitting veterans were still uncertain. His application didn't exactly cry for attention. "My record wasn't exciting," Glimp recalls. "Neither was I." His lack of an interview also hurt him.

What Monro saw in the forms Glimp submitted he can't really explain; it must have been more than Glimp's being rural and mid-Western, though that was something Harvard wanted. For whatever reason, he put the folder aside and read it again--and again. Then, with some misgivings, he recommended that the College accept the man who would 20 years later succeed him as its Dean.

Glimp spent the first few months wondering if it had all been a mistake. He was taking the equivalent of three Gen Ed courses and Gov 1, but it seemed like too much. His exams marks were low. Finally Monro called him in and practically ordered him to change two of his courses.

"I was furious," Glimp remembers. "It was just the way I had pictured Harvard, an old Yankee insulting young Idaho." But he did it, and got scared, and worked harder, just making it through his freshman year.

Though he worked at a number of odd jobs (including chauffering President Conant) and played baseball, his marks began to inch higher. He made Phi Beta Kappa, got a magna on his Economics thesis and won a Fulbright.

The University renewed Glimp's scholarship when he got back from England, somewhat to his surprise. He spent the next three years tutoring and researching a dissertation on Schumpter. He also married into the Boston Irish. By 1954, he was well on his way to a doctoral degree in Economics. But he wasn't happy about it.

"I was 28 and I had never really worked," he says. "I was sick of being on a dole." Whatever the reason, he was tired of being just a graduate student. One day he stopped F. Skiddy von Stade Jr. '38 (dean of freshmen) in the Yard and asked about an administrative job. Von Stade sent him to Wilbur J. Bender '27, dean of admissions.

To Bender, the veterans of the late '40's-who came from more diverse backgrounds and received more financial aid than other undergraduates--seemed, for many reasons, the best possible student body for Harvard. He suggested joining the admissions and financial aid offices and became their first dean in the hope of recruiting that kind of student body.

He picked young assistants because he was sure his kind of admissions office would be a perfect testing ground for their administrative skills and interest in students. Monro was hired by Bender in 1946, when all this was still an idea; eight years later, Monro was in charge of financial aid. And that year, with the same instinct, Bender hired Glimp.

Many of the folders which Glimp read had been drawn in by Bender's efforts to recruit in high schools and in regions where Harvard had never been very active, and to offer more financial aid there than Harvard had ever done before. They came from poorer urban neighborhoods, from foreign countries--and from the mid-West.

Glimp was fascinated. He was soon named director of freshman scholarships, a post in which he had to read about half the applications for every class. For this half he developed an important loyalty. "There is something about the freshmen on scholarships," he says, "not that they're more interesting--that's unfair to the rest. But they add variety to the class, somehow hold it together."

By 1960, Glimp had worked so hard and so well that there was no more logical successor to Dean Bender. "Everyone said that no one could take Bender's place," a colleague remembers. "Glimp did."