BROOKS HOUSE OFFERS EVERYTHING FROM LOUNGES TO DAY NURSERIES

Indifference has long been coupled with he name of Harvard, but paradoxically bore is in a corner of the Yard a building whose reputation for community service is nation wide. Starting as a religious memorial for a famous Boston bishop, it has in peacetime taught old men cribbage and young men wrestling; now in wartime, it is providing ping-pong tables for service men, lounges for their wives, and a nursery for their children.

For Phillips Brooks House has the reputation around Cambridge of realizing any bright idea which nobody else will take the trouble to try. Upstairs there is a housing office that will find a room for any service man stationed at Harvard, to say nothing of his wife. An officers' club is kept stocked with easy chairs and magazines; entertainment ranges from Paris to an organ.

There to a symphony orchestra which rehearses downstairs, a jazz band that makes life miserable one flight up. The undergraduate Student Council has its offices there; so does the local draft board. Service may not yet be cradle to grave, but it is well on its way.

And all this is only supplementary to the main purpose of P.B.H., which has been the direction of undergraduate social service work in the community. As many as 425 students have been working in settlement houses all over Boston under its direction, engaged in such activities as tutoring the Jamaica Negro Mothers' Club in Music, conducting hikes into the country, and showing school boys how to dissect frogs.

Students have formed their own undergraduate faculty, inviting high school students to come to their rooms for free instruction in elementary subjects and 12 per cent of the tutees end up in college. A Speakers Committee attempts to fill requests for experts on everything from China to checkers, and in addition can provide magicians and musicians at will.

But all these activities have now become overshadowed by the war. P.B.H.'s War Service Committee is the center of blood and bond drives around the college; it sponsors police forces, fire fighters, and ARP wardens. And, in line with its traditional policy of experimentation, Brooks House is now hard at work at its newest project. "contacting" all undergraduates who leave college for the Armed Services, keeping track of their location. readdressing mail, procuring them invitations from families of Harvard men, and keeping them in touch with what is going on in Cambridge.

Such projects are nothing new to P.B.H., which is used to being the laboratory for novelties and reforms. Back in 1935 it made its most outstanding success, when if attempted to provide a much needed social center for communicators. Everyone was soon satisfied, except P.B.H. for the non-resident students became so under foot that work was at a standstill. The House issued an ultimatum; the University was forced into action, and the present day separate commuter's hall was establishment.