Cambridge Tourists Pose Weird Queries

The information booth in the Square is ready for the summer's expected upsurge in wacky requests, William P. Fitzgerald, local answer-man reported yesterday that the was giving the green and white booth its spring housecleaning, and rummaging through his reference library.

Spring Queries

The booth keeps its usual hours of 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day during the summer. But the 64-years-old Fitzgerald estimates an increase of 1000 inquiries a day from summer visitors. And the questions are always more insane than at any other time of the year.

A traveler from Italy asked Fitzgerald last summer where "the retired silent film actors Pols Nrgri Larena lives." He explained in broken English that he would like to deliver a poem be had written for her. Flizgerald discouraged the fan with the news that it was a 3000-mile walk to where his movie ideal lived.

"I'm the President of Harvard," said one man with a funny look in his eye. "Will you direct me to my office?" Fitzgerald asked him where he lived. When the men replied. "Danvors," Fitzgerald called the asylum there. The little men in white soon came to bring the escaped "President" back home.

Fitzgerald gets a lot of queries about local traveling. Some demanding journeyman once taxed him to the utmost. "I'm going to California," he casually remarked. "Will you be good enough to recommend a cheap, respectable hotel where 1 can glay over in Chicago?" Fitzgerald replied. "Any place not run by a Harvard graduate."

"Conant" Stumps Him

Over 70 percent of the summer tourists' questions are about Harvard. Fitzgerald, however, has steeled himself to the regular query: Where is Harvard? He now merely points across the street in stony silence.