College Style-setter Answers Summons of Spring with Unfeverish Seersucker Draping

In the spring an ordinary man's fancy turns away from thoughts of study, but Joseph A. Dolan '49 rechannels his mind not to nylon hems but seersucker jackets, "the badge of the Harvard man."

Dolan, champing at the arrival of the Equinox, has stolen the march on New England weather and the rest of the University by being the first 1947 summer seersucker jacket in the Yard. The nattiest of his four cotton Brooks Brothers models stood between his knitted tie and North Atlantic winds yesterday, as less hardy specimens still relied on tweed and corduroy.

"My propensity for seersucker comes from my environment," Dolan opined yesterday. "I always like to be the first to get started." Like Bean Brummel, another figure distinguished by his mode of attire, Dolan prefers to set styles, not follow them.

What is more, Dolan added, seersucker coats cut a fine figure in his home town of Los Angeles, where a woman with lounging pajamas held up by the leash of a Pekinese dog attracts less attention than one of his striped coats.

Wearing a seersucker jacket, explains Dolan, first gave him a social conscience. When OPA lifted cotton controls last November, his favorite model skyrocketed from $17.50 to $22.50. He wrote to his congressman, as soon as his furnishers mailed him a bill for the increment.

With the demise of OPA in June, Dolan good naturedly acknowledged defeat. But he is convinced a method of holding the seersucker price line is to make it as popular in sultry summer Washington as it is on the banks of the Charles, grass stains or not.

While content to symbolize the College Man to the extent on his attire, his loyalties do not extend to the tonsorial limit, Dolan admitted, and he has resisted all persuasion to indulge in a crew haircut.