Harvard University - Red Book Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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ricd with him and his girl to the game. There being; no reason to expect a Harvard win he placed the emphasis on the pageantry, and the display of skills Gnostly hy the other teami, and the party atmosphere. He cheered with no less visible enthusiasm but there was always a little voice say- ing iiwell, arelft you having a lusty, collegiate time, you gay blade, you! There was nothing unsound about this theory: it simply served to concentrate attention on the all-important, non- athletie side of football. The football season was as much fun as ever. No one thinks of the Houses as new any more; in fact it is hard to remember that they date back only to the early thirties. That is why it seemed so surprising when Lowell House celebrated its twentieth anniversary in October. There were speeches and a punch iinot wholly without appeal:7 and the House,s first master, Julian Coolidge 95, Was present. People complain that the Houses have no hold on their members, that they are as yet little more than eating and sleeping places, but this is hardly surprising When you consider that Lowell,s first Housemaster can still be expected to drop around for a dinner. Year in and year out, the Lampoongs best eHorts have been devoted to its tso to speaki extra- curricular splurges: its various iiawardsia the prizes of which are almost invariably stolen from the Crimson, and its historic pranks. Year in and year out, too, the actual Lampoons have been, if not as dull as dishwater, at least as dull as yester- day,s punch; and copies of the magazine have scarcely ever attracted any notice: Last fall, how- Corridor conversation.

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ation between the University and Cambridge police. The University announced a giant registration drive and set up parking lots across the river near the Business School. More men than ever before registered talmost 2500 for the whole Universityl and many used the distant cross-river lots. But no matter how registered he is and no matter how bestickered his car, no normal man is going to drive across the river and walk back when he can nudge his way into a slot on Fender Alley. And no normal man cares much about the occasional fines tmaximum 353 which he pays, sometimes, on his tickets. 50 life Went on much as beforeee a lazy, good-natured battle between the tagging cop and the parking student. The cops took the philo- sophical attitude, recognized a perennial human frailty, and played the game. Beside the benevo- lent uncle the University seemed like a puritan- nical grandmother. No doubt there will be an- other tisolution,7 next year, and no doubt cops and parkers will continue to settle the matter in their own way. Now that the football ticket distribution system has been stabilized for several years, the entre- preneurs have had a chance to develop their sys- tems too. A casual stroller down Quincy Street early on any fall morning could see the usual row of beady-eyed, l'Julging-pocketed, little men waiting for the doors to open, and any innocent student Who arrived at the HAA olhces about 9:15 21.111. and found himself, say, 50th in line would find that the 49 men in line ahead of him were getting at least a thousand tickets. Huge syndicates were formed and it was often necessary to spend the night outside the Union in order to get anywhere near the best seats available. The Council urged an investigation but there was really nothing wrong with the system except that men fourth and fifth in line, so near and yet so far, occasionally suf- fered from palpitations. The beady-eyed men were simply carrying a good principle to its logical extreme. If the ticket system was becoming firmly estab- lished, so was the attitude the Harvard man car-

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t uW'ish the hell theytd hurry up and start this race? ever, the pace quickened for a few exciting weeks, and for a time an issue of the magazine actually drew headlines from across the nation. The source of all this unprecedented publicity was an issue called the ltPontoonTea parody of college tthumorl, magazines elsewhere in the country. There was an ample selection of the staple two- line jokes, and some not unfunny though rather elementary stories about ttthe boys around the frat house? and to top it off two full pages of dirty cartoons photographically reproduced from! other college gagmags. The Crimson called the thon- toonll a not particularly funny imitation of its unintentionally much unfunnier originals and questioned whether the issue would be allowed in the mails. Then, to fill some space, the paper ran a letter allegedly from ttA Radcliffe Motherit who deplored the publishing of such filth and demand- ed that the ttPontoon,7 be banned. The case Would probably have ended there had not this review appeared on a football Saturday; some girl, presumably exhilarated by the brisk and zestful air of a perfect fall morning, phoned the police, informed them that she was an irate Rad- cliffe mother, and called for blood. The police, ever sensitive to the feelings of American mother- hood, located a copy of the ttPontoon, leered at a few of the cartoons, and ordered all copies to be brought in and obliterated from the face of the fresh clean earth. Then suit was brought against the :Poon for obscenity etc. and particularly for lldistributing obscene matter through minorsl, tthe minors being the tencler-souled urchins who had been selling the magazine on the bridge over to the football gamel. The case bounced around sev- eral courts during the next two months, passed through the hands of at least one District Attorney up for re-election, and garnered the Lampoon a good deal of front page space in the local press before it was settled with a $100 fme. After this episode the T0071, returned to its old ways; and in February, it stole a bust from the Crimson and presented it to Elizabeth Taylor as a special award. Things were back to normal. The Yale football game always has a tonic effect on Harvard, and the week preceding it is usually not unriotous, but rarely has there been such an active Yale game week as last fall. Like all the best parties, it began earlye-Sunday night in fact. Around supper time an engineer at the Prattgs Junction power station, fifty miles away, pulled a wrong switch and plunged all of Cambrillge into darkness. The response at Harvard was immediate. Large crowds set off for the Radcliffe quadrangle. Once arrived they began the traditional clockwise circuit of the main dormitories, paying their warm- est attention to Moors and Cabot. While the mob of almost a thousand chanted uWe want in,, and llSlip it to 7em, Harvard? several men broke into Moors and set off a tire alarm; about hfty breached the Cabot defenses and ran riot for a few minutes inside the building. Then the fire trucks arrived, Yearbook men caught Puritan taking down Union Jubilee committee signs.