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Class of 1914. His beginnings were as alien to the usual necessities of vote-getting as his ancestry was. He grew up in an oak-paneled, 15-room red brick house high in Chestnut Hill, a fashionable Boston suburb. The place has a greenhouse, a swimming pool, tennis court, a gardener's cottage, a barn. Today Lev Saltonstall's mother—a matriarch of 76 and reputedly the richest woman in Massachusetts—still lives there. Leverett lives next door, in a plainer frame house that needs a new coat of grey paint. As a boy, Lev rode ponies and played in the fields with his neighbor, Jimmy Lowell. Lowell, one of the Lowells, and a fellow Harvardman, is still Saltonstall's best friend and neighbor. Lev went to Boston's Noble and Greenough private day school, then on to Harvard.
Saltonstall worked doggedly in college, achieved a B average in law school (his Phi Beta Kappa key is honorary, 1939). He also worked hard to make his clumsy frame athletic. Everyone else at crew turnouts rowed three hours in the afternoon; Lev doggedly rowed an additional two each morning. By his junior year he was a sub on the varsity; in his senior year he captained the Jayvee crew that won the Henley Grand Challenge in Eng land. But the high spot of his athletic career was his triumph over Princeton's great hockey star, Hobey Baker. Salton stall came on the ice late to score the winning goal, ending 38 minutes of extra play — longest deadlock in Harvard's hockey history. He graduated in 1914—a great Harvard class, whose other luminaries include Harvard's President James Bryant Conant, Diplomat Sumner Welles, Richman Junius Morgan, Producer Vinton Freedley, Writer Gilbert Seldes. Saltonstall who made the exclusive Porcellian Club, never forgets his Harvard heritage. His Chestnut Hill telephone and an automobile license carry the numerals 1914. On his class's 25th reunion (he was class marshal) he reassembled his old crew for a workout, contributed a biography for the class yearbook in the heavily casual, cozy manner of a J. P. Marquand hero:
"My life has been that of a typical beantown Bostonian. After college . . . three years of law school, tempered in the last year by a marriage which neither of us regretted. Plattsburg and a first lieutenancy . . . France for six months, but no actual conflict except ' those following strenuous evenings in Bordeaux. . . ."
He married pretty Alice Woesselhoeft, belle of his dancing school. He fell in love with her at 14 and hardly looked at any one else thereafter. They have three boys and two girls. His three oldest children are at war. Lev Jr. (Harvard '39), is newly commissioned in the Airborne Engineers. Emily is a WAVE radioman, 2nd Class. Peter, 22, left Harvard as a sophomore to join the Marines. He got malaria at Guadalcanal, recuperated in Australia, and is now back in action as a platoon sergeant. Peter sends his dad $50 a month.