Laundries Search Pockets, Find Gold Teeth, Lipstick

Harvard men may keep their grey flannels well pressed, but the job keeps half a dozen pocket-cleaners in Square valeterias on edge.

Keys, coins, and dirty combs no longer faze these battered operatives; and if undergraduates would only stop loading their suits with such items as false teeth, gold fillings, and diamond breeches, spring would probably last all year round, they declare.

As it is, one local laundry not long age had to deal with a married student who left in his pocket a love letter, not to his wife. He called sometime later, frantically begging the proprietor to find the billet doux before the clothes were delivered. Searching every suit in the shop, they found it.

Absent-minded professors, too, come in for their share of anecdotes. One brought in his laundry, and, an hour later called, begging that his false teeth, which had been included in the package, be brought to Logan Airport, where he was waiting to catch a plane. The savant enjoyed a comfortable dinner in Washington.

The kind and amount of certain items found in pockets reflect conditions in the outside world, say the cleaners. During the war, quantities of sugar would perpetually fall on the floor when pockets were turned inside-out, and once a cleaner discovered, in a colonel's tunic, confidential information about troop movements.