Home Laundry Service

The weekly heap of dirty clothes is a problem that varying Harvard men solve in varying ways. Some carefully pack their laundry in neat cardboard cases, lug them down to the Post Office, and then spend weeks in squalor and grime waiting for the return mail. Other pile their clothes in the washbasin and alternately serub and sneeze until a dazzling brightness is attained. But most undergraduates shoulder or dispatch their wash to Cambridge laundries which charge up to $18 to fray cuffs off of shirtsleeves.

Early in the fall, the Adams and Dunster House Committees simultaneously--and independently--decided to try to clean up the laundry problem. They came up with the idea of installing coin-operated washing machines in the House basements, allowing a student to run off his week's wash for a few cents. The University had previously faded the hopes of a local capitalist who wanted to install a row of these wash-while-you-wait contraptions, stating that a profit-making scheme could not operate on University property.

The Adams and Dunster people, however, offered to buy their won machines, but Vice-President Reynolds poured cold water on the idea. The Adams House Committee persevered, arguing that local laundries would be no more injured by such House competition than they were by the flourishing Radcliffe washers, and that there was a precedent for non-profit coin-machines in the ruling which permitted the House to run coke dispensers.

The problem was wrung out at a recent House Masters' meeting after the Student Council had worked itself into a sufficient lather on the subject, and the Masters have finally tossed the whole bundle back at Mr. Reynolds. The Vice-President should stamp his mark of approval upon this idea, for if he spurns the plan to install a battery of Bendixes, one of the best proposals of late for cutting student expenses will wind up a washout.