"R-i-i-ne-hart!"

A clump of sagging commuters were clustered around their gate, waiting for it to open, after the theatre a few nights ago when a long-drawn-out cry "R-i-i-ne-hart!" rang out across the upper level of Grand Central Terminal and reverberated all about. Most of them were startled and appeared puzzled. One man remarked to his wife that it was funny, he had heard the cry bawled across the midnight darkness of a boulevard in Paris last summer.

Ordinarily, in a crowd of this size several people could have given the explanation. It is, as a great many know, a traditional Harvard cry, common in the Yard at Cambridge, especially of a balmy spring night, and one which undergraduates and alumni have shouted for years in railroad terminals, on streets, in theatres, at night clubs--in Paris, Japan, Cairo, and probably Tasmania. The cry in the Grand Central, which served to set us on one of our investigations, undoubtedly issued from an exuberant Harvard man about to board a Boston train.

We had once been told a story of the origin of the tradition, one which seems to be accepted by the Harvard students of today. It was that about 1900 an eccentric fellow named Rinehart moved into Gray's Hall and that he became a friendless and lonely student. He envied the other fellows whose friends were always yelling up at their rooms and (so the story went) he took to standing below his own window and singing out his own name in a sad pretence that he was popular too. Other students took up the oft reiterated call, shouted it back and forth, and finally it became a byword for Harvard men--like the "Hello Bill" of the Elks, but more high-toned.

That was the story we heard, but it turns out to have been nearly all wrong. The real facts, we have it on excellent authority, are these: About the beginning of the present century a student named Rinehart--John Brice Gordon Rinehart--was living on the top floor of Gray's Hall. He wasn't eccentric and friendless but, to all appearances, a rather normal underclassman. One night a fellow student called to him from the Yard, "O, R-i-i-ne-hart!" in a hoarse bass voice, and kept up the cry for many minutes. Other boys were calling other friends from the Yard, as he was, but there was something in the pitch and the volume of the voice which attracted attention. Someone in derision mocked it from a window and in a few minutes "O R-i-i-ne-hart!" was being bellowed back and forth from a score or two throats. The next night cry was taken up again, and on the next night, and thereafter; and now thirty years later it still is shouted and probably always will be. "O Rinehart" was heard much at the Paris Exposition shortly after it was first sounded in Cambridge.

No one seems to know the student who first called "O Rinehart," and few know about Rinehart himself. It seems, however, that after graduation he began the practice of law in New York, becoming interested in politics. In 1916 he was sued for a large amount by an elderly woman who declared he had misused securities she had turned over to him. In connection with this he spent a short while in jail. Afterward, he tried to reenter politics, but unsuccessfully. When the war started he joined the army, being stationed in Georgia, where he was judge advocate of his outfit. He has been seen little in New York since the war and is presumed to live now at a small town in Pennsylvania, his birthplace. He is about fifty-five. The New Yorker.