He cared if they tore down the building, but knew we didn't really, he knew we were just looking for something to write. "When you're born, you're melted--when I'm born, I'm hard as a brick," he told us we were leaving. And whatwere a bunch of melted-ass people doing making revolution?

A purple mat matching the curtains covered the rotten section of floor around the toilet in another apartment. The man pulled up the mat to show the splintered piece of plywood which separated the bathroom from the basement. The buzzer system in stalled after Jane Britton was murdered is already falling off the wall. "It's crazy to raise the rent--the place is a dump." He said the kitchen is full of roaches every morning.

"The building should come down. It's dangerous--it's a matter of finding new housing." The girl, a grad student, is afraid to answer her door. "But what do you except in a building like this? The service is quite good, actually."

Rain was beating down on the skylight. The smell of grass drifted up and down the stairway. The light on the landing was burning, but the man said it had taken eight weeks get it replaced. Action on a complaint of roaches had taken less time--a month and a half. "I think it helped. We haven't had so many lately."

I even hate to kill a cockroach:

"IT's TOO BAD this business happened at Harvard, but it's not the students. It's trained agitators, Communist agitators out undermine this country like they've done to everything else. Harvard was right in calling in the police to get those people out-there are people there to get an education. It's not right in a democratic society to go into secret files. It's none of their damn business-they just want to stir up trouble."

The old lady had lived in the same University Road apartment for 10 years, paying 70/month the entire time. She let us in suspiciously, but quickly warmed up, seemed glad to talk. The apartment was scrupulously clean, with cheap Renoir and Degas prints on the walls.

"They've never gone up on my rent, I don't know why. Of course that's all it's worth, it's a crummy apartment, a falling-apart building. If Harvard tore down this building I wouldn't know where to go...there just isn't the housing for most of us working people. This a lower middle-class building. Where would we go?"

"I think that if Harvard wants to tear this building down what we to wouldn't mean anything, a few isolated poverty-stricken people couldn't do anything. I don't want to move into a housing project, I'll have nightmares... but it should be clean at least, don't you think?"

SHE explained to us how important it was to keep things clean, and how difficult. She didn't really blame anybody thought, she said had no ill feeling toward Harvard. She only blamed the dirt itself, just as in Harvard's bust she didn't blame the students or the Administration, but only outside agitators. The students and her landlord both had good intentions, but only she could really keep things clean.

"The dirt just pours in here. I sometimes think I need a cleaning women--are you going to get me a cleaning woman now that I've given you all this information? This hall is the one hall that is painted, we fuss so. I called the agent and told him, if I'm going to wash the halls at 2University Road would e mind providing the mop? He said, what? I said the student next door to me will help, I can't stand to see Mrs. Wetzel mopping, she's over 70...since then the hall has been washed once a week."

"As soon as I see one cockroach I call the janitor and have the fumigator come. I even hate to kill a cockroach--they must have a purpose on this earth."

SHE worried about having to move out, and about keeping her building clean, but she didn't really believe tat any of it connected with the strike at Harvard.

"I don't know ... maybe there should be changes made. Maybe we shouldn't encourage military training to make rich men richer. There are probably things wrong with the administration, but the ill feeling is just too bad. Those kids had no right-I hope they take every damn one of them and expel them."

"Jessie Gill's a self-appointed authority-she worries about us old people. She's very well-meaning, very anti-Harvard, I guess. I don't have any anti-Harvard feeling; it's the whole country I'm worried about. Why put a fence around the U.S? That's just what they're doing with the damn ABM, it's asinine. If the bombs are coming let them come, that's what I say-why spend all that money?"