Lining 'Em Up

Long lines of Freshmen waiting a turn at the Union's more or less palatable offerings are hardly anything new. During their first few weeks in the Yard, eagerness, hunger, sheer boredom, or some more nebulous force usually impels Freshmen Union-ward just at the hour when the great dining hall first opens its maw. A short period of acclimation, as a rule, yields wisdom of a sort and customers begin to appear in a regular flow from opening to closing hour. But this year with the orientation past, the lines remain.

Possible solutions to the evil (if it is an evil) can be conjured up almost at will. A dust-covered fourth serving table apparently lies ready to be rushed into the breach it filled while the Union was in the Navy's hands-but saving a few minutes of waiting time hardly justifies sinking the dining hall's budget into a morass of red ink or filling the Freshmen's only large common room with extra tables. An even more obvious remedy would merely involve extending the Union's serving hours for fifteen or thirty minutes at each meal. But actually such a move would be no solution at all, for, although the Union theoretically closes upwards of half an hour before its sister dining halls at both lunch and dinner, the announced early closing hour seems to be but a myth, since the doors remain open long after the curfew.

A third answer, one which seems on the surface most reasonable, has already been firmly rejected by the parties involved. Mixed in among the throngs of Unionized Freshmen are an assortment of upperclassmen-partly old Housemen exiled to Claverly, Dudley, and the like; partly members of the Class of 1950 enjoying their second year in the Yard. Naturally all these men cannot be transferred bodily from the Union, and the former group (whose number hovers somewhere over the three hundred mark) could quite easily be absorbed in House dining halls. Splitting the entire number into seven segments of less than fifty men, and giving each cluster the option of taking meals in one particular House would hardly be a burden to dining halls where the very lines themselves disappear for minutes at a time.

But in the path of such an easy road to relief stands an almost immovable roadblock-the seven Housemasters. For these gentlemen, jealous of the sanctity of their several dining halls, last year threw up their collective hands in dismay at the thought of admitting a mere 23 outsiders apiece to such sacred precincts. Now the prospect of more than twice that number of invaders would be doubly hard for the Housemasters to swallow. And until these men relax a little the unhoused upperclassman can but stand and wait.