PZ’s Podcast: The Phoenix Club

Here is a memory I’ve kept under wraps for 40 years, and it’s not a bad one.

The success of The Social Network has put The Phoenix Club of Harvard College so boldly on the map, that if I didn’t talk about it now, the “very stones would cry out”. PZ was there.

The Phoenix Club, properly known as The Phoenix Sphinx-Kalumet., is an undergraduate Final Club of Harvard that is described in The Accidental Billionaires as “the king of the hill” in undergraduate social life.  Is it?  Was it?  Ever?  (We’re speechless.)

What it was was a delightful expression of adolescent dissent, within the great flood of late Sixties attitude. We were about humor, stingers, the bon mot, Oscar Wilde, and a required reading of Brideshead Revisited. We laughed our way through as serious a period as you could imagine. Then, the seriousness concerned the Vietnam War. Now, as fashion has changed, the seriousness concerns identity and predicate. One thing we weren’t, is serious.

PZ’s Podcast this week tells a story, a tale attached to “The Social Network”.  This story’s been dying to be told.

One other thing, and it’s painful: Why could I not talk about this chapter of my life ’til now? Was it the influence of Christian equality? Was it “class warfare”, or something like that? I did find out, soon on in the Church, that any talk of Harvard College dropped like a lead balloon. So one didn’t.

Now if the Faith can’t handle a thing like that, which is a part of you like anything else, why not? What’s wrong about ‘the way we were’ — if that’s the way you were. I often wished I’d never gone to Harvard. And The Phoenix, that delightful repository of fun and games?: Keep it big time under wraps. Like The Yardbirds, this makes me tremble.

Podcast 39 is in loving memory of Page Farnsworth Grubb, ’71.