Forgive me if I start in a seemingly irrelevant way; there’s a reason for it. As a sophomore at Harvard, in Robert Hillyer’s advanced creative writing course, I wrote a play that I decided to produce myself (no one else wanted to) under the auspices of the United War Relief. It was 1943, in mid-world war, and the subject was appropriate. German officers were holding ten young Yugoslav girls as love slaves in a camp, until one of them managed to bump off a couple of the Nazi swine, whereupon all the girls lost their lives, but their honor was restored. Good for the war effort as the play was, my chief point in directing it and acting one of the two German soldiers was to cast ten of the prettiest Radcliffe girls I could find and then date as many of them as possible.

But the sponsoring United War Relief people were not all that forthcoming with the pittances required. To prod them, and to help with other production problems, I needed a production manager, and found one in Claude Fredericks. Claude was, like me, a bit of a loner; but, unlike me, he was not a Harvard student. Rather, he was a gifted autodidact who indirectly benefited from Harvard’s cultural opportunities without indenturing himself to its curricula.

I liked Claude, and he seemed to like me, but I was too self-absorbed to find out much about him. I knew he came from Springfield, Missouri, had