A.B., M.A., Th.B., Ph.D., S.T.M.

Last week a huge-framed, six-foot scholar marched up to the platform of Manhattan's General Theological Seminary to receive the degree of Master of Sacred Theology. He was Edward Rochie Hardy Jr., 26. and the degree was the fifth for New York City's most famed prodigy.

Son of a New York University insurance lecturer and an able bacteriologist mother who had four academic degrees of her own, he matriculated in N. Y. U. at 5. At 10 he passed Harvard's entrance examinations, but waited until he was 12 to enter Columbia. He got a Phi Beta Kappa key at 14, an A. B. at 15, an M. A. at 15, a Th. B. (Bachelor of Theology) from General Seminary at 18, a Columbia Ph. D. at 20. Two years ago he was ordained an Episcopal priest, assigned to a small parish in outlying Astoria. His Columbia classmates remember "Ed" Hardy as a shy, big-featured, lumbering fellow who attended every class meeting and otherwise tried hard to be "regular." His professors remember him as a student with a photographic mind who learned everything 100% right the first time. Prodigy Hardy has traveled abroad almost every summer since childhood. He can discuss theology in 17 languages. Scholarly friends treasure his letters in Latin, filled with doggerel and idiomatic anecdote. But most of his intimates have been non-scholars who at first did not know or care about his prodigiousness, later liked him in spite of it. He automatically corrects conversational misstatements, but so diffidently that no one minds. Unlike most prodigies. "Ed" Hardy does not bemoan a lost youth. Says he: "If I had it to do over, I would be a prodigy again. It gave me a head start and, you see. my family never let me think of myself as unusual."

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