Phone Belles Ask Patience From Callers

Keep cool when you pick up that phone to dial Wellesley or Radcliffe, man. You can't tell what's going on at the other end of the line without television.

This is the advice of those female students who work off their two to three hours of required weekly service by answering the calls of Harvard men and Raging the desired parties.

First problem to be overcome by the male escort aspirant is getting through to the party. With veteran-swollen men's schools in the vicinity hiking the date rate to an all time high, one Radcliffe girl, working the evening eight to ten bells shift, said she answered the telephone at least a dozen times an hour.

Estimating the average length of the ensuing conversations at ten minutes, the operator pointed out, "As you can see, that leaves very little time in which the phone is idle."

"Business as usual" remains the motto of the belles on bells, however, for as one of them said last night, "Gosh, we know how it is when you rush downstairs only to find that the man who had called you has hung up."

Paging Time Variable

If and when the man in the market gets his connection, he can have no idea of how long he should properly wait for his prospect to be fetched. At Wellesley, the trek from the phone to the farthest room in Severance Hall covers slightly over one-eight of a mile.

Installed at Waban's Munger Hall, a new buzzer system has helped set a college record of two minutes flat.

"If a boy gets the "I'm-sorry,-but-she's-out treatment any more than three times on one girl, he might as well give up," advised a Wellesley telephone operator. 'We have 'dead-beat' lists and when a man calls up, we look up his desire's name. If his is next to it, we just hand him the standard routine."

"It saves a lot of unnecessary walking, y'know, and besides, it's amazing how many squares some of the girls know," she added.