ABSTRACT
In September 1947, I joyously returned to Smith with full credit for the courses that I had taken during my sophomore year at Whittier. This time I was assigned to live in Chapin House, a handsome white building with Doric columns and a large front porch, located in the middle of the campus, that resembled an antebellum southern manor. Chapin’s staircase, it was said, was the inspiration for the one depicted in the movie version of Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind, where Clark Gable, cast as Rhett Butler, delivered his famous “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” farewell to Scarlett O’Hara, played by Vivian Leigh. (Margaret Mitchell was a Smith student during World War I.) I shared a suite with three girls, two of whom came from the Main Line in Philadelphia, the city that, I had no way of knowing then, would be where I would spend the most sustained period of my academic career.
