Mr. X Goes to Dartmouth

The Editor wants to find out what Dartmouth is going to do at Harvard during the game weekend, so he decides that someone goes to Hanover and finds out. But the Editor wants to do it in a subtle way, that will make the Crimsons look cute and maybe make the Dartmouths look pretty dull.

The Editor keeps talking and tells me he's had special press cards printed, and he's been corresponding with the Daily Dartmouth on the deal, only they don't know he's the Editor of the Harvard CRIMSON.

I listen, thinking move and more of how big and tough they are at Dartmouth, and remembering stories of how they paint Harvard people green for being spies.

That's just what the Editor is asking me to do--be a spy. He's been working on this thing for a couple of months, sending phoney letters from an outfit called the North American Photograph Service to Tom Gerber, Editor-in-Chief of the Dartmouth Daily.

NAPS span the continent, says the press card the Editor hands me, and it says that we've got offices in New York, Montreal, Seattle, and a helluva lot of other big cities.

New York Letters

How come you send letters from New York when you're in Cambridge?" I ask him, and he tells me that New York is a big city, with a lot of people who will do anything for a buck.

I try to talk my way out of this espionage business by telling the Editor that I wear Chipp suits, button-down shirts, and club ties, sport a crew cut, and talk with a broad-A, and anyone who does all those things surely comes from Harvard, and even the people at Dartmouth would spot me a mile off.

The Editor smiles and says he will fix that. And he does. He gets me a grey pin-striped suit, double-breasted, with shoulders that I can grab in my fist and make look like a football. The Editor doesn't forget anything. He finds me a tie that leaves me as flat as warm beer, and then insists I put a ruptured duck in the lapel of the suit, and find a shirt that isn't button-down. The hat I wear looks like something out of the Front Page.

D-Day comes, and the photographer who goes with me. I have never seen before, and he doesn't say much as we get into the car that is very dusty and has New York plates. He is wearing a Legion button, I notice.

Onion on Breath

Just before we get to Dartmouth, the photog suggests we add more realism, so we go to a hamburger stand, and order three hamburgers, with thick slices of onion. The waitress does not like us. To make it seem that we are New York slickers, we chew gum when we pull into Hanover, and also to seem like polite Joes who don't like to have people breathing our enjoy breath.

Our room is okay at the Hanover Inn, and the first thing we decide to do is go over and see the boys at the Daily Dartmouth. This is a tricky moment, and I wonder when they grab us right off, how we going to let our friends at Harvard know we are prisoners, so they can come rescue us.

But everything turns out okay. The Editor Tom Gerber is very impressed with a New York-writer-photog team. He asks how the trip from New York was and we say tough. He laughs, and kind of asks if there is anything he can do for us.

I know there is much he can do, like to tell us whether the Daily Dartmouth is putting out a phoney issue, but one must be subtle about spying.

"What about the veterans?" I ask him.

And he tells me that they have quite a few. He says they are lucky because most are married and don't have the same pressures on them that unmarried students do. That's what he said.

The first few hours go along okay, and we make a lot of talk, making ourselves politely offensive.

Then I get down to business and ask him about pranks, and hold my breath. I put it to him this way: "Mr. Gerber, there are not so many veterans, at colleges these days, and you have many young freshmen, what do they consider the collegiate fun?"

Wear Porkies

So Gerber tells me that the freshmen have to wear funny green porkies and then they have a crazy fight with the sophomores, and if the freshmen win, they don't have to wear the little hats any more. But the freshmen had tough luck this year. They lost to the sophomores. Seniors wear single breasted green coats with their class numbers sewn over the breast. The whole outfit looks something like the band at the New Ritz uses.

Then another guy, named Larry Bellows, joined our conference, and he's the Editor of the Jack-O-Lantern, which he claims is the best slick in the biz. 'What do you think of the Lampoon?" we ask him, trying not to show any enthusiasm.

The guy turns up his nose fast, and says, "Look, they're has beens. The only people we consider competition is the Yale Record."

All the time I'm remembering that the Editor wants to run a story on pranks.

"How about some snake bite?" asks Larry. A nice guy, because snake bite turns out to be White Horse Scotch. We all sit around, and I tell the boys a few sexy stories, and they sit on the edge of their chairs, because they have it rough up in Hanover. There just aren't any broads to play with. This talk about how good I am with the broads makes me a real fine guy, although they can't go for the ruptured duck I wear, it is easy to see.

Reveal Plans

Then as I tell them how much I like Hanover and Dartmouth, and how much fun it would be to go to Harvard with them, and wear a green tie, and cheer for the Big Green, they start to tell me what their plans for pranks are. This is what I'm waiting for.

The next morning the photographer got up at four to take pictures of a bunch of the outing club boys going to fight fires. This we did to show that NAPS doesn't nap. Later we made an appointment to see a Dean, but we never kept it.

Up there is Dartmouth, when the bell rings for classes ending, it plays everything from Mr. Five by Five to the Ave Maria. I heard them both. Those students are all as big and as tough-looking as ham-and-egger pugs, and they go in for checkered shirts, and G.I. fatigue pants.

It got under my skin the way the Dartmouths kept saying what fruits the Harvards are.

In the daylight, too, that grey suit looked worse. "Oh, you, sharpy," someone yelled. I don't like it, but I've got to keep cool, or they might find out I'm from Harvard, and that wouldn't be good. Now that we know what the pranks are and have pictures and everything.