Biographies


George Nicholas Buffington

Nick Buffington photoGeorge Nicholas Buffington, cowboy, lawyer, and author, died on November 9, 2013, at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was 87.

Nick, as he was known, was born in Evanston, Illinois, to Sarah Louise Buffington and George Nicholas Buffington, the second of three children. An enthusiastic Western-style horseback rider from the age of 4, Nick also attended the last vestiges of the Farm School System - in which education was taught to Grades 1-4 in one-room country schoolhouses. Restless and dyslexic, long before dyslexia was commonly understood, Nick attended five additional Midwestern schools before his parents sent him East, hoping that by age 15 he was ready to buckle down for a serious education. It was 1941, and Nick spent one year plus summer school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Nick's greatest recollection of his time at Andover - besides his numerous escapades, including getting his first tattoo - was when Headmaster Claude Fuess interrupted class to announce the beginning of World War II, saying "Gentlemen, the age of the playboy is over." Eager to join the military--which Nick equated with excitement--and having been academically unsuccessful at Andover, he then entered Preparatory School for the Naval Academy and West Point. The discipline didn't suit Nick there either, and he next found himself at the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Within 2 months his misadventures got him kicked out of that school as well. Finally, having spent family vacations in Arizona and New Mexico, Nick's exasperated parents sent him West in a last-ditch effort to encourage him to finish high school. He attended the Judson School in Phoenix, where he fell in love with rodeoing and the dude wrangler life at Squaw Peak Ranch. Book learning took a definite back seat to bronc riding, calf roping, team tying, and dreaming of someday having his own ranch in Silver City, New Mexico. Some of these experiences would be captured over a half century later in his first novel, Virgin Spring.

At age 17, with parental permission, Nick joined the U. S. Navy from 1944-1946. He spent half the time in school training to be an Aviation Radioman-Gunner in TBM Avenger torpedo bombers in the Navy Air Corps. By the time he was set with his PBM squadron in Corpus Christi, Texas, World War II ended. For Nick it was a tremendous disappointment that he was never able to see "action."

While in the Navy, Nick had uncharacteristically taken up reading, particularly "The Rise and Fall of Jesse James" and "The Complete Book of Shakespeare." He also enjoyed creating racy short stories to entertain his Navy buddies in the bunks at night. But now, with both the war and his teenage years over, it was time to get serious. He moved into a boarding house on Mt. Auburn Street in Cambridge and attended The New Preparatory School. Also know as Benchimol's, it was a "cram school" where in a year and a half he made up about 3 years' worth of high school. When Nick applied to Harvard, he discovered that the Dean of Admissions was the same history teacher who had kicked him out of Andover. Harvard Dean Wilbur Bender declared, "Nick Buffington will be admitted over my dead body!" Nonetheless, Nick entered Harvard College in 1947. By the second year he was on the Honor Roll, and by the third year had accelerated to graduate with the Class of 1950. If he had finished his thesis, he would have graduated Cum Laude; however, by this time Nick was married with two children under the age of 2. Instead, he went to Harvard Law School, finishing successfully with the Class of 1953. Nick belonged to the Owl Club, and he remained a member of the Harvard Club of New York City for over 50 years.

G. N. Buffington, Esq., began his career as an attorney specializing in Federal tax matters. His first 4 years he became licensed to practice law at firms in both Boston and Washington, DC. From 1957-1961 Nick was hired by the great Russell Train to work in international tax areas on the staff of what is now called the Office of Tax Legislative Counsel at the United States Treasury Department. He also collaborated with his colleague Stanley Surrey, Assistant Treasury Secretary, designing tax reform proposals, many of which were later implemented by Ronald Reagan in the 1986 Tax Reform Act. Nick is quoted as saying, "Best job I ever had." He then became licensed in a third jurisdiction, practicing law at a firm in New York City and spending 7 years as Tax Counsel and Assistant Treasurer at International Paper Company. In 1970 he opened a Boston office of North American Mortgage Investors, where he was Trustee and Secretary. The following year, Nick returned to Washington, DC, where he became Executive Vice President and General Counsel at the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts. His final years of employment were as Of Counsel at the law firms of Fulbright & Jaworski and Lane & Edson.

Disenchanted with the practice of law, which he felt had become greedy and no longer collegial, Nick retired to Santa Fe, New Mexico. There he wrote four books of fiction: Virgin Spring - A Southwest Story of Romance and Adventure (published in 2001); Apache Casino (which was published in 2006 and won the 2007 New Mexico Book Award); The Patriarch - A Novel of Corruption and Terrorism, Love and Loss (published in 2007 and awarded Editor's Choice); and High Tide (still to be edited).

Nick was a voracious reader and crossword puzzler, as well as a guitarist, lifeguard-certified swimmer, and sailor - most often off Cape Cod, where for many decades the Buffington family had a home on Quissett Harbor. He was also a skier, runner, tennis player, and excellent figure skater - from the 1950s to 1970 he was a member of the Washington Figure Skating Club and the Skating Club of New York City at Madison Square Garden.

A long-time compassionate liberal, Nick was politically engaged with informed opinions, which he expressed honestly and directly. His sharp mind, youthful outlook, and boundless energy kept him always interesting, and his great sense of humor frequently acknowledged life's absurdities. His third wife and soul-mate, Pamela, was blessed to share many decades of love and adventure with such an endlessly intriguing character.

Nick Buffington was married in 1947 to Alice Hathaway Hall, with whom he had three children: George, Anne, and John. In 1965, he married Patricia Jean Richards, with whom he had son Michael. Both his previous marriages ended in divorce. In 1972, in New York City, Nick met and promptly married Pamela Cady Schaeffer, the love of his life for 41 years. Along with his wife Pamela, of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Nick is survived by his four children: George Buffington, of San Francisco, California; Anne Buffington, of Little Falls, New York, and Brewster, Massachusetts; John Buffington, of Princeton, Massachusetts; and Michael Buffington, of Rio Rancho, New Mexico. In addition, he leaves four grandchildren: Camille and Adam Kardash, Jessica Buffington, and Luke Buffington, as well as several nieces and nephews. Nick is also survived by his older sister Anne Cole, of Lincoln and Sippewissett, Massachusetts, and Delray Beach, Florida; and younger sister Drucilla Buffington, of Arlington, Massachusetts, and Delray Beach, Florida.

Written by Pamela C. S. Buffington





Harold C. Martin PhD '55

Born in 1917, my father grew up in the black dirt country of lower New York State in a poor family made poorer by the Great Depression. The family cultivated celery and onions on a rented farm and sold the produce at Hunts Point Market in New York City. His father, the son of an itinerant lumberjack, grew up moving from camp to camp and never went beyond fourth grade. His mother came from a more stable family and had completed primary school. She evidently understood the value of higher education, though her husband opposed college because it meant his sons wouldn’t be available to work on the farm, the family’s sole sustenance. However, my father’s older brother defied their father and went to college on a sports scholarship, thus paving the way for my father. An outstanding high school student, my father enrolled at 16 in Hartwick College, a newly established Lutheran institution in Oneonta, New York. Throughout his four years there, he worked nearly 40 hours a week, waiting on tables at boarding houses in exchange for room and board and earning tuition money by stoking coal furnaces of local residents. He graduated in 1937.

Only 20 years old and with few prospects, he got a job teaching high school in Adams, New York, near the Canadian border. With a little money in his pocket after the first year, he debated about whether to take a trip somewhere in the larger world he had seen little of or to continue studying. He chose what he considered the less frivolous course and began earning a master’s degree in English at the University of Michigan summer school. The decision was fateful; there he met my mother, a West Virginian seven years older than he. They married in 1939, each with a newly minted master’s degree in English and a combined savings of $200. They set up housekeeping in Goshen, New York, where my father was by then teaching at the high school from which he had graduated six years before. Within a few years, he was made principal. Although as a father and a teacher he was exempted from the draft, he enlisted in the Navy late in World War II and taught remedial English to cadets seeking admission to the U.S. Naval Academy.

My father once said, rather more reflectively than usual, that he had been “greedy for success.” In 1948, with the support of the GI Bill and my mother, who was herself deeply devoted to his success, he moved to Cambridge, leaving her and his three children behind. He first enrolled in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, but he soon switched to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences as a doctoral candidate in comparative literature. Even though the GI Bill paid all of his tuition and a small stipend that he supplemented by teaching freshmen English composition, to save money he lived with a roommate in a graduate student dormitory and sent his laundry home twice a month; postage was cheaper than professional cleaning.

Back in Goshen, my mother took in boarders, mainly female teachers. My brother Joel C. Martin ’65 recalls that the necessary economizing meant that our father didn’t return home often. One Thanksgiving when my father stayed in Cambridge and had his turkey dinner at the graduate commons, he recounted that he had spoken to only one person that day, a women working at the dining hall, “and she didn’t answer me.”

But he was hardly feeling sorry for himself. The intellectual atmosphere was intensely exciting, and without family distractions, he was able to apply himself completely. Although he didn’t earn his PhD until 1954, he was “absolutely astonished” when, in 1952, Harvard offered him a job as director of General Education A, the required freshman writing course, known as GenEdA. The $5,000 salary was sufficient to move his six dependents—my mother, four children (I arrived in 1952), and his mother-in-law—to Newtonville, and subsequently to Cambridge. He was 35 years old, and this was the beginning of a new life.

Although he was never given tenure and remained a lecturer in comparative literature in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences until he left in 1965 to become president of Union College in Schenectady, New York, his engagement with Harvard can only be described as passionate. Harvard was his pantheon, and he reveled in his association with it. In addition to running GenEdA, he gave courses and seminars in comparative literature and became known as a gifted and interesting lecturer, as well as a talented administrator. Among other activities, he was a faculty advisor at Adams House, sat on the admissions committee, and co-wrote books, among them a widely adopted textbook The Logic and Rhetoric of Exposition. In 1964, he and my mother were named the first House masters of Radcliffe’s North House. After leaving Union College in 1974, he went on to become president of the American Academy in Rome, then finished his career as Charles A. Dana Professor of the Humanities at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, retiring in 1982.­­­­

My parents had been already predisposed to a certain kind of child-rearing, and we children were further formed in a way perhaps typical of many offspring of Harvard faculty. We didn’t own a television; my father read aloud to us at the dinner table; family outings were trips to the public library and a few exciting weeks at Sutton Island, Maine, where Harvard owned a house; we took season tickets to the Boston Symphony Orchestra concert series at Memorial Hall; skated at the Harvard ice rink on Sunday afternoons; passed hors d’oeuvres at cocktail parties for my father’s colleagues; and argued the finer points of English grammar.

Both of my brothers went to Harvard, helped by National Merit Scholarships and summer jobs which were sufficient to allow them to live at Adams House, rather than having to live at home and commute. However, my brother, Thomas H. Martin ’63, JD ’70, was somewhat ambivalent about attending the same institution where his father taught, so told his freshman roommates that his father was in jail. This effectively cut off further questions until spring term when the truth finally came out.

My first and most memorable experiences of theater all came at Harvard: Gilbert and Sullivan at the Agassiz Theatre; Peer Gynt at the Loeb Theater; an outdoor performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Adams House courtyard; John Lithgow’s production of The Beggar’s Opera, starring my brother Joel as Macheath. As I grew older and could walk to Harvard Square by myself or with friends, I sometimes caught a ride back home with my father. The GenEdA offices were located in the basement of what was then the Freshman Union, now Barker Center. I would wait for him on a chair in the hall, where even now I remember the steamy warmth and the friendly smell of onions frying. My favorite place at Harvard remains the Yard, most memorably the way it was, and is, in summer when school is not in session.

Our Harvard tradition has continued in subsequent generations. Three of my father’s four children went to Harvard; I graduated in with an AB in 1974 and also attended the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course. Three of his grandchildren also graduated: my son William R. Evarts ’07, my daughter Mariah S. Evarts ’08, and my brother Thomas’ daughter Amanda W. Martin ’06. My brother Joel’s daughter, Abigail, was admitted but, exhibiting an independent spirit, chose Stanford instead. My husband and I were in the same class, though we didn’t know each other. He dropped out, then returned to finish his degree in 1995 when we were living in Arlington, Massachusetts. Because of this, I’ve been able to experience the College at several different time periods, each with its own set of memories.

Written by Rebecca Martin Evarts ’74, P’08, ’07