They recall their halcyon Harvard Square days

Striped bell bottoms at the mod boutique Truc — what a find in ’66

I took great interest in “Harvard Square was never what it used to be” (Ideas, April 2), David Scharfenberg’s article about the new book “Harvard Square: A Love Story.”

The other day, I was thinking about the boutique Truc, where, in 1966, as a young acting student at Boston University’s College of Fine Arts, I bought my first pair of striped bell bottoms and a pair of dangling earrings, items that at the time were hardly seen anywhere else. What a thrill to find such things as we kids tried to make our way through those tumultuous times. The store was in the forefront of the style revolution in town, when Joan Baez and Geoff Muldaur and the rest of the Kweskin gang were afoot in Cambridge.

Harvard Square was a great place in an exhilarating and evolving time. No mobile phones, just experience right in front of you. But culture is plastic, it changes. I’m just so sad it’s changed toward the corporate, the online, and the not-so-upclose and personal. I’m glad I was there. I miss it.

LISA GRAY MILLIMET

Camden, Maine

Between her and her grandmother, a keenly felt generation gap

Here’s another view of Harvard Square: My grandmother, a Polish immigrant, lived in East Cambridge as a young wife and mother, around 1915. For an outing, she and friends would pack a picnic and take the kids on a long walk along the Charles, roughly from the Longfellow Bridge to the Larz Anderson Bridge. But they stayed on the grass by the river and never went near the Square. She said the shopkeepers didn’t like immigrants and the “Harvard boys” would terrify them.

I loved hanging out in the Square of the 1970s and ’80s. I lived on the Somerville line and waitressed at a cheap Mexican restaurant on the second floor of a building around the corner from Charlie’s Kitchen. But my grandmother always thought I was crazy to do so, even all those years later.

JANE URBAN

Shutesbury