Rooms for Ladies

The afternoon before the Yale game, Pumley all but leapt off the Massachusetts Avenue bridge. He had been in high spirits the week before--his girl was coming in from Smith, his tuxedo was in shape, his tickets were high on the forty. But when he tried to find a place for her to stay, he came to grief. At hotels and tourist homes in Boston and around the Square, he either got brush-offs or exorbitant prices. When the hour of her arrival at South Station found him with nothing better for her than a park bench, Pumley was thinking seriously of the Bridge.

Not everybody who imports a woman for a major weekend like Yale or Crimson Key meets the same end as Pumley. But the haphazard rooming scheme for out-of town dates causes many headaches and unnecessary waste of time. If one files a reservation weeks in advance and can afford it, he might get a room at one of the hotels. Otherwise, he can seek out the tourist homes on the PBH housing list, or try to convince a hospitable Radcliffe girl to take in a houseguest.

Both alternatives, however, fail to fill the demand. The Housing Office lists but a handful of weekend tourist homes, most of which fill up weeks in advance. Bound by the fire laws, Radcliffe dormitories can only assign guests the beds of girls who have left for the weekend--and big social weekends are hardly the time for a mass exodus from Radcliffe. If they wish to avoid the trials of Pumley, students must try the outlying suburbs or high priced hotels.

Other schools seem to handle the problem quite well. At Yale, for example, a student agency digs up rooms, quotes prices, and gives students letters of introduction to tourist homes. Of course, the female importing business at New Haven is on a considerably larger scale. The College needs only a temporary agency to operate before the major social weekends.

The best place for such an agency would be Phillips Brooks House. The Service Agency could obtain, file, and dispense rooms there much like BSO and play tickets. Operating periodically, this agency would save a good deal of pavement pounding, and unnecessary expense on the part of undergraduates who like their women from distant places.