To the Editor:

I roomed with Bernie Sanders, the presidential candidate, at the University of Chicago in 1963, and he was not the wild man you describe (“Outsider Went Mainstream, but Message Changed Little,” front page, July 4).

At that time, 21 years old and about to enter his senior year at Chicago, Bernie Sanders was more serious than most undergraduates, even undergraduates at Chicago, who were and are more serious than most others.

He was serious about political reform, supported the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and called himself a democratic socialist. He was reading Erich Fromm’s “Escape From Freedom,” a psychoanalyst’s evaluation of why insecure and frightened people embrace totalitarianism.

He had a steady girlfriend, and they went to the beach on weekends in his jalopy. He did not touch drugs or alcohol. He had a Brooklyn accent. He was unusually earnest, moralistic, intelligent and keen in argumentation, but not self-promoting. He had friends.