Education: The Barbless Hook

For four decades, Ten Thousand Men of Harvard—or a goodly number of them—have actually sat down and read the annual appeal for contributions to the Harvard Fund. It might contain a richly allusive essay on how Thoreau would have viewed the college hierarchy, or some gentle musings on the anti-Harvard attitude of Harvard’s Henry Adams, or even reflections on the upstream migration of the alewives, persistent saltwater fish that find their way to Massachusetts streams each spring. These unlikely enclosures come from a man with an unlikely blend of talents: David McCord—poet, essayist and professional fund raiser—who retires this week after 37 years as executive director of the Harvard Fund Council.

Often praised as an adroit practitioner of the soft sell, Fund Raiser McCord, 64, prefers to think of himself as a man “fishing with a barbless hook.” He says his technique “does not stem from any personal bias, but simply out of my unshakable belief in the philosophy of using civilized language for a civil purpose’ According to McCord, college fund raisers should “act as though we were an extension of, and not simply a blunt instrument for, our alma mater.”

700,000 Words a Year. David McCord has been a worthy extension of his university in more than one field. While working as a fund raiser, he has written or edited 21 books, has had several one-man shows of his watercolors. His What Cheer is the classic anthology of British and American humorous verse, and his own poems are in more than 100 anthologies. In light verse McCord has waged a furious mock battle for the “lost positive”—

Sheveled and couth and kempt, pecunious, ane

His image trades upon the perceptive brain.

In more serious poetry he often returns to Harvard:

“Is that you, John Harvard?” I said to his statue.

“Aye—that’s me,” said John

And after you’re gone.”

Harvard has honored McCord with a scholarship in his name and, in 1956, its first honorary Doctor of Humane Letters.

But McCord’s own rewards have always been poetry, or an afternoon passed in intelligent conversation, or a long night turning out well-honed prose—as impeccably polished for an answer to a griping alumnus as for an essay on the woods of New Hampshire. McCord estimates that his yearly prose output has averaged 700,000 words,”or seven novels of the old style.” His old-style rule is that “a letter always deserves a letter.”

Oo-too-koo. To small donors, he commends the utility of the Unalakleet Eskimo language, in which the one word oo-too-koo means “small and I wish it were bigger.” One Harvardman wrote during the Depression to explain in a flurry of metallic puns his inability to donate: “I am an aluminum of two colleges besides Harvard, and can not pay antimony to all three.” McCord’s answer was a simple “Iron stand you.” To the 35% of Harvard alumni who had never heeded his call, McCord one year hopefully anticipated the day when he could write to them a couplet he originally composed as an Epitaph for a Waiter:

By and by

God caught his eye.

McCord’s graceful prose has generally succeeded in catching alumni. His essay on the alewives, enclosed in a letter for the 1960 alumni fund, inspired 1,100 alumni who had already donated to send in second checks totaling more than $37,000 McCord’s grand total over the years: $15,319,872.26.

Except for five early years on the Boston Evening Transcript, McCord has been at Harvard ever since he graduated in 1921. He says that in retirement, “Chinese, Greek, Debussy, tobacco, trout are the things I want to investigate—in that order.”