Word: shirt
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After spending nearly four years at the oldest university in the nation, it took a raggedy auto mechanic’s shirt, once worn by a man named Joe, to teach me the importance of tradition. Like most Harvard students, I was too harried to notice the countless gates bearing inscriptions from the University’s past or to pay much attention to its ivy-covered walls. I trudged on to my next class, my next meeting, my next rehearsal...
...editor, I trusted their explanations. After all, we rely on Tradition at Harvard—routinely boasting of the oldest this or the first that. It’s the foolproof response for anyone who dares to question the Way Things Are. But as I prepared to pass the shirt on to a new owner, I decided it was time to pinpoint its origin once...
...intended it to be a quick-hit quest, beginning with the person who had given the shirt to me and tracing it backwards from owner to owner as fast as I could. Since it was probably only four or five years old, the project wouldn’t take long...
With each reply I received, however, I discovered the history of the shirt was far more complicated than I had realized. Within a few days I’d followed it back to 1994, and I still hadn’t tracked down the original owner...
Suddenly, my search was about much more than a lousy old shirt. I was unearthing my own little piece of Harvard history. I sent frantic e-mails to Rome, Los Angeles, Beijing and Boston. Half of the responses turned out to be dead ends. But four days and more than 40 e-mails later, I finally struck gold...