Blackwell Chosen To Deliver Annual Ivy Oration Here

H. Lane Blackwell, Jr. '39, of Cambridge and Eliot House, was chosen yesterday to deliver the annual Ivy Oration in the Stadium on June 21.

Blackwell was selected yesterday by the Class Day Committee in an audition in Holden Chapel at which he and two other contestants read their projected Class Day orations. His unsuccessful competitors, who, together with Blackwell, survived a preliminary trial on April 27, were F. Anthony Butler '39 and Allen S. Manning '39.

Mimics Merriman

A member of the Eliot House Committee and winner of the Lee Wade and Boylston recitation prizes this -year, Blackwell is well known for his ability to mimic Roger B. Merriman '96, Gurney Professor of History and Political Science and Master of Eliot House.

By tradition the Ivy Oration, inaugurated in 1865, consists of a humorous survey of the graduating class's four years at Harvard. Blackwell will be following in the footsteps of such Harvard greats as Albert Bushnell Hart 80, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government, Emeritus, and George Lyman Kittredge '82, Gurney Professor of English Literature, Emeritus.

Since the site of the orations was shifted from Sanders Theatre to the Stadium in 1905, they have lost whatever serious tone they had retained up to that time. In 1910 humorist Frank Sullivan was the Ivy Orator, and was followed two years later by Robert Benchley '12.