BELOW THE CAMBRIDGE DEADLINE

Shadows of the Cambridge under-world are reported to have cast their sinister menace over the traffic box in Harvard Square night before last. The unseen peril came in the from of a threatening missive from "Feagan's gang" delivered by a "tool" in the guise of a Cambridge schoolgirl. One of the city's most beloved officers, the friend of children and Harvard Square merchants, was informed point-blank that he was going to be "bumped off" last night, probably in cold blood. The unfriendly import of the note precipitated a furore in Cambridge police circles, possibly second only to a Harvard student riot scare. Photographic copies of the note, the fingerprints of the child on the paper, an exhaustive investigation of police archives for possible data on "Feagan's gang", formed part of the attempt to trace the criminals to their lair. The Boston Globe gets excited and suggests a crime in front page headlines.

Patrons of the University Theatre were probably not on hand last night to see Feagan and his pals "bump off" their victim. They know that "Flash" the famous movie canine, got "Feagan's gang" on the University screen all during the first part of the week, and that the desperadoes of "The Dreamland Cafe Below the Deadline" in the picture "Shadows of the Underworld" could not possibly injure the genial traffic officer.

If the Cambridge police force is to be submitted to such nervous strains as this, it is certainly time that something is done about the effect of criminal motion pictures on juveniles. If the screen influences little Cambridge schoolgirls to threaten the city's nicest policeman, it might cause impressionable little boys to set up a Cambridge underworld and "burn down" traffic officers in Harvard Square right before Harvard undergraduates.