In the 50 years since their graduation, members of the Harvard Class of 1944 have largely met their own expectations of financial success and family comfort.

A poll of 327 of Harvard's 1944 graduates reveals that members of class are most typically political moderates, living in a suburb and still married.

"I was not too surprised," says A. Leroy Atherton '44-'43, who conducted the poll with classmate Richard P. Kleeman '44. "If anything surprised me, it was the degree of unanimity on some issues."

The poll includes no women, since Radcliffe was a separate institution at the time.

The war was the defining moment in many peoples' lives, Atherton says, and it made them more focused on their studies when they returned.

"It was certainly a very early defining event," Kleeman says.

It also shaped their political stances, especially in foreign relations, Atherton says.

"One thing I found encouraging was the quite overwhelming emphasis on the need for the U.S. to maintain a place on the world stage," he says.

Where They Came From

A poll of the Classes of 1943 and 1944 conducted by the yearbook at graduation found a largely middle-class student body intending to enter the professional world after the war.

Though most expected military service directly after college, approximately 15 percent wished to be doctors, with significant numbers planning to become engineers, financiers or manufacturing executives.

Approximately half the surveyed classes attended private schools, and half had family incomes between $5,000 and $7,500, according to the yearbook poll.

The yearbook poll also showed seniors who favored classical music on the radio (65 percent), preferred strong liquor over beer or non-alcoholic beverages (86 percent), and studied less because of the war (66 percent).

They also liked mandatory calisthenics instituted for the war: only 25 percent termed them a "waste of time."

Some of these personal preferences have changed little over the last half-century, according to this year's survey. Sixty-eight percent of the class still exercise, and 80 percent still drink alcoholic beverages.