Tramp ships and turntables

John McLaughlin looks out of place at a campus radio station. McLaughlin is 72 years old, with white hair and a gut that makes him look on the stronger side of chubby. Anywhere else, no one would give him a second glance. Wandering around the WMUC suite, though, he might as well be from another planet.

One DJ, junior journalism major Emily Thompson, figured him to be one of the homeless people who are occasionally found wandering the studios. Others know slightly more and identify him as the community member who has Friday's 6 a.m. radio show they've "heard a little bit of." Between his thick Scottish accent, his mumbling and his no-man's-land time slot (this is college), McLaughlin is a mystery to most.

They don't know, for example, that he emigrated from Scotland and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, or that he is a published scholar on Middle English literature, or that he has sailed through both the Panama and Suez Canals. He's done a lot in his seven decades, but to them he's just the Friday morning DJ.

McLaughlin is a member of a special segment of the college campus populace: He pays no tuition and neither takes nor teaches any classes — he's at the university purely for the extracurriculars.

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McLaughlin was born in Glasgow, Scotland in April 1939, five months before Britain entered World War II and about a year before the German Luftwaffe would begin bombing his city as part of its Blitzkrieg campaign. His father, Stirling, was in the British Army, one of the "desert rats" of Gen. Bernard Montgomery's Eighth Army. His mother Margaret worked nights as a cleaner. He was the sixth of eight brothers; he didn't have any sisters — "we didn't believe in ‘em," he says.

McLaughlin dropped out of school when he was 15, worked random jobs and, like every other 15-year-old, chased girls. And just like today, it was all about your clique — and McLaughlin hung with the Teddy Boys.

If the Fonz had been English, he'd have been a Teddy Boy. The UK's version of rock 'n' roll rebels, they drove fast and partied hard: There are multiple accounts of Teddy Boy riots breaking out in theaters when Blackboard Jungle and its rock 'n' roll soundtrack came to town. Instead of ripped jeans and leather jackets, though, they wore a revival of the fashions of the reign of King Edward — hence the name "Teddy." McLaughlin's trademark was a gray suit with black lapels.

"If you didn't dress fancy, if you didn't dance fancy, you didn't get the girls. And the girls are the key," he said. "Everybody knows that."

He spent his spare time boxing, a sport he picked up when he was 14 in a small gym in Glasgow. He describes it as "chess with sledgehammers," and by the time he was 16, he was Scotland's amateur boxing champion.

In 1956, after a brief but unpleasant stint in a paper mill, he entered the British Merchant Navy, doing odd jobs on tramp ships — his boats had no set itinerary; they just went where the deliveries took them. He started with a simple monthlong trip from England to Montreal, then another trip around the Mediterranean for almost six months. But his final trip, starting just after his 18th birthday, would be the longest journey of his life: He left England in November 1957 and traveled across the Atlantic, making stops in Virginia, Venezuela and Mexico before cutting through Panama and continuing to Japan, Singapore, South Africa and Egypt, among others.

He returned home in July 1958, a 19-year-old who had circumnavigated the globe.

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He never did go back to high school, and when he left the shipping business in 1958, he expected to take a job as a laborer.

"I wasn't expected to go to college," he said. But his mother had other plans.

During the war, McLaughlin's family had made a connection with a wealthy British woman whom McLaughlin only calls "Mrs. Hooper."

"During World War II, Mrs. Hooper's hairdresser knew of my mother's situation, bringing up five boys in Glasgow during the bombing," McLaughlin said. "She was fascinated and got in touch."

Mrs. Hooper, he said, wanted to "do her bit" and help his family, corresponding by letter and shipping clothes to the boys.

"She'd send boxes," McLaughlin said. "We were walking around Glasgow in fancy American T-shirts."

And then, while McLaughlin was sailing the world, his family was convincing Mrs. Hooper that he should go to college.

"They were my press agents," McLaughlin said. "And I wasn't there to defend myself."

Afterward, McLaughlin passed equivalency tests to qualify him for admission nonetheless, and crossed the Atlantic once again — this time to attend Boston University. The seafaring high school dropout had become a college man.

But after a year and half at BU, McLaughlin started to get restless. He transferred to Harvard in 1960 to take advantage of better scholarship money.

"I was scared shitless at Harvard," he said. "It was a different universe."