The Last Negroes at Harvard by Kent Garrett

Author:Kent Garrett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

Lance Morrow, 1959

Lance Morrow remembered the drinking too. “We were drinking buddies,” he wrote me. “We had a hell of a good time together, were reckless and heedless.” They once went out late at night on the frozen Charles River and “finished a bottle of Jim Beam bourbon and then went back to my suite at Dunster House and got out a .22 rifle I kept there and amused ourselves by firing it into the logs in the fireplace.” Another night Lance was awakened by “a shower of window glass” as an empty quart beer bottle smashed through his window. Travis, who, Lance remembered, “had a very good throwing arm,” had chucked the bottle up from the street four floors below as he called up, “Hey, Morrow, let’s go over to Cronin’s.” And that’s what they did. When they were both working in New York City in the midsixties, they were still putting it away. Lance opined in an email to me, “To be brutal about it, it was alcohol that killed him. He might have had a stroke even if he had not been a heavy drinker and smoker. But I doubt it. It was very serious, very destructive drinking. He was strong as an ox, but eventually it caught up with him.”

Travis drank a lot at Harvard, and both John and Lance believed that he had some afflictions that ate at his peace of mind, but Travis had also studied hard (he graduated cum laude), made friends, gotten involved with civil rights and student council, laughed and fooled around and learned. Harvard was a good place for him—as Lance summed it up, “It was a very congenial universe to him.” And despite his poisonous relationship with alcohol, Travis didn’t spiral into a decline, but rather kept working and loving and living it up until the end.

Not so for Charlie Frazier.

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