Appearances can be deceptive
The death and loss of a child is the ultimate devastating tragedy and make parental bereavement difficult to resolve.
A lady in a faded gingham dress and her husband, dressed in homespun threadbare suit, disembarked a train in Boston, and walked without an appointment into the President’s office of Harvard University, a private Ivy league research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, established in 1636 by clergyman John Harvard.
They were stopped by the secretary who took one look at them and decided such backwoods, country hicks had no business at Harvard and probably didn’t even deserve to be in Cambridge. She frowned “We want to see the president,” the man said softly. “ He’ll be busy all day,” the secretary snapped. “We’ll wait,” the lady replied.
After several hours, being ignored by the secretary, and not discouraged by the long wait, the secretary grew frustrated and finally decided to disturb the president, even though it was a chore she always regretted to do. “ May be if they just see you for a few minutes, they’ll leave,” she told him and agreed to see them and signed in exasperation as he detested gingham dresses and homespun suits cluttering up his outer office. The president, stern-faced with dignity, strutted toward the couple.
The lady told him “ We had a son that attended Harvard for one year. He loved Harvard. He was happy here. But about a year ago, he was accidently killed. And my husband and I would like to erect a memorial to him, somewhere in the campus.” The president however, wasn’t touched, but was shocked.
“Madam” he said gruffly “we can’t put up a statue for every person who attended Harvard and died. If we did, this place would look like a cemetery.”
“Oh, no,” the lady explained, “We don’t want to erect a statue. We thought we would like to give a building to Harvard.”
The president rolled his eyes and said “ A building! Do you have any eartly idea how much a building costs? We have over seven and a half million dollars in the physical plant at Harvard.” For a moment the lady was silent. The president was pleased thinking that he could certainly get rid of them now.
The lady turned to her husband and said quietly, “ Is that all it costs to start a University? Why don’t we just start our own?” her husband nodded, leaving the president’s face wilted in confusion and bewilderment.
Mr and Mrs Leland Stanford walked away, travelling to Palo Alto, California, where they established the University that bears their name, a memorial to a son that Harvard no longer cared about.
Even a snubbing by the president of the reputed Harvard University can have life changing result.
The account of their visit with Charles W Eliot at Harvard is actually recounted by Eliot himself in a letter sent to David Starr Jordan (Stanford’s first president) on 1919 Jun 26.
Harvard’s president, rebuffed by their offer of money for the University to be given in memory of their son, Leland Jr, and so the couple went west and founded Leland Stanford Junior University. Leland Stanford Junior was just short of his 16th birthday when he died of typhoid fever in Florence, Italy on March 13, 1884. He had not spent a year at Harvard before his death, nor was he “accidently killed.” Following Leland Junior’s death, Leland and Jane Stanford found an institution in his name that would serve the “children of California.”