MEETING TONIGHT SOUNDS CALL FOR ALL CANDIDATES

Competitions for four departments of the Crimson will open with a meeting at 7 o'clock tonight in the Crimson Building, 14 Plympton Street. Candidates will be drawn from the Sophomore Class for the News Department and the Photographic Department, from the Freshman and Sophomore Classes for the Business Department and from the Junior Class for the Editorial Department. All competitions will be nine weeks long.

The following article on the Crimson News competition was written by R. H. Field '26, former president of the Crimson.

The difficulty of the CRIMSON news competition has been well advertised. It has ben called the hardest of college competitions, and it probably is. At any rate, the editors take rather a pride in thinking so and saying so. The incipient candidate is deluded with no fond fairy tales; he is not told that it really isn't so hard after all when you actually get into it. He is warned that he is selling his soul and body into a nine weeks' bondage; yet he comes out just the same, and is idiot enough to tell his roommates, at the rare times when he sees them, that he likes it.

Why Do They Do It?

Why do people try for the CRIMSON anyway? And having tried, why do they keep on trying once they learn the difficulties and pitfalls that await them? They try, in the first place, for any number of reasons. They may be brought out by a hangover of the preparatory school notion of being a Big Man around College. They may find that curricular work does not demand enough of their time to keep them busy. They may be bored. They may just wander in because they have found the habit of wandering. But once he has started, one of two things happens to the CRIMSON candidate. He may drop in after two or three days, tell the Managing Editor that his studies are getting a bit harder, and he won't have time for the CRIMSON, shake hands and departs. Or he may cancel his social engagements for the next nine weeks, say good-bye to his roommate, and start working. Surprisingly few, once they have passed the first few trying days, ever quit. They keep on trying until they either make the board or get cut; and if they get cut, they are more than likely to come out for the next competition. Why?

Newspaper Thrills

The answer probably lies in the contagious thrill which all newspaper work holds. Most of us, at one time or another, after deciding that after all we didn't want to be a policeman or drive the rear end of a hook and ladder truck, evolve the theory that we are natural born newspaper men. And there is a bit of the journalist in many of us. A CRIMSON competition helps to show how much.

The CRIMSON candidate serves no apprenticeship of disagreeable routine. He has no soiled laundry to count, no water to carry. He starts his competition Tuesday night, and Wednesday morning he is a full-fledged reporter. The writer, when he had been a candidate for the CRIMSON less than 24 hours was interviewing George M. Cohan in his dressing-room in a Boston theatre. And Mr. Cohan had no idea that he wasn't a veteran of many such interviews. Or if he did, he politely made no comment about it.

A day or two later came an interview with Senator Underwood, and a few days thereafter, one with Jane Cowl. In each case the lowly candidate was a representative of the Harvard CRIMSON, the University daily, the only daily paper in a city of over 100,000 (Advt.). He was on an equal footing with veteran newspaper, men from the metropolitan papers, and he was treated with as much consideration.

Much of the work is not as unusual as that I have described, but even in