Harvard University - Red Book Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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and soon afterwards Chief Randall of the Univer- sity Police. 50, waving a fond goodhy t0 Whit- man, and staying just long enough to see another false alarm sent in from Barnard, the crowd dis- persed. Meanwhile several hundred other men rioted on the front steps of the Lampoon building, and Leverett House greeted the blackout with a iimillenium bancii that played hymns as Leverett men shouted that the world was coming to an end. The lights went back on about 7230 pm. and things soon returned to normal. They remained normal until Friday when an even bigger riot took place in the Square. Esti- mates of the number of rioters ran as high as 3500. Paddy wagons shuttled back and forth with full loads, as Yale and Harvard joined forces to battle the police. But the cops, and Dean Bender, had the last word. Over a dozen men spent the night in jail, and a week later Bender fired two men and put over twenty on probation for their shares in the two riots. The police treatment seemed more in keeping with the severity of crime than the Dealfs, but there was no denying that Bendeijs action had put an end to the rioting season for some time. As Christmas drew near two undergraduate bodies crossed swords with oihcialdom. The first case was a short second run of the great rules con- troversy which had churned April and May of 1950 into a froth. But where the spring fight had been between the undergraduate organizations for whom the rules were being made and the Council which was trying to make them, the winter con- troversy Was between the Deans7 OHice and the Council, now the champion of more liberal rules. In December Dean Watson sent to the Council for

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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.

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comment his proposed set of rules, based in large part on the Council proposals of late last spring. The Council balked and sent back a list of some dozen recommended changes, which in every case would have made the rules more liberal. Watson received these proposals in late December; at the end of January he issued a little printed booklet, Rules for Undergraduate Organizations. Neither he nor the Faculty Commlttee on Undergraduate Activities had accepted any of the Council,s pro- posed changes, nor had he thought it would be fruitful to carry the discussions much further at this time. The undergraduate groups now had their rules. The newly-elected Council debated the subject and decided to drop the objections to all but two or three of the rules. Then the case was closed. It was just as well, though the Deans, Oche action had been unnecessarily abrupt; the struggle between liberal and restrictive principles, in the places where it had not been resolved, had reached a stalemate. Radcliffe ordered one of the Crimsorfs Annex correspond- ents, Deborah Labenow ,51, to quit the paper The other clash was much brisket.