In My 'Maidenform' Bandage . . .

The American female has long been under attack as a more scaffold for some of the century's greatest engineering achievements. She is composed of pads and bones supposedly, and is not at all what she appears to be.

The males, meanwhile, have been going through their Saturday rites of the young bulls, as blithe as you please. It is an unavoidable fact, however, that for every teaser there's an ankle strap, a taped up knee or a shoulder brace. She may be guilty, but he is no one to talk.

And of there is a Mecca for this masculine half of the great deceit it is the Medical Room of Dillon Field House, where three trainers work constantly all afternoon during the football season, putting roll after roll of adhesive on the legs of the football and soccer teams.

Eight miles of tape, 700 cans, 42,000 yards, costing $2,100 went onto the football team alone. Most of it went into ankle strapping, nearly all the rest into a knee bandage called the Duke. Often over a hundred players from the varsity and House squads would come in for processing. the three trainers would still be putting it on when players would come back in after their practices and tear it off.

The style of every ankle strap and every Duke applied in the room is basically the same. The ankle wrap has really no possible variation. At Yale they put on the Duke with the player standing, at Dillon with the player lying down, but it's the same Duke. They both are intended to protect weak ligaments.

Many of the varsity players this fall would not have been able to play without their Dukes. Jeff Coolidge, Bob Hardy, Harvey Popell, Frank Yoffe and several others were a Duke for most of the season. House players, freshmen and jayvees by the score also were them. Anyone who needed one, in short, could get one.

Joe Murphy, X-ray technician at Dillon and spokesman for the training staff, stresses the point that anyone who walks into the room gets equal attention. "If President Pusey walked in right now," he said, "he'd have to get at the end of the line." A varsity player can move to the head of the line, but no one else can pull rank.

Special precautions are taken to keep the tape from tearing the players' skin.