Twirler Comes Out of Retirement To Join Crimson Band Saturday

Stan DePinto, the mascot who grew into a full-time twirler, came out of his voluntary semi-retirement Saturday afternoon to lead the Harvard Band in its pre-game and half-time drills.

No one had to press DePinto too hard to get him back into the uniform which he has worn since 1936, when at the age of 12, Bill Tabler, then the drum major for the Band, saw him doing figure eights with a piece of pipe and promptly decided to teach him the fine art of twirling.

No one is certain about the proper sequence of events, but his mother, "Mrs. D," the Dunster Dining Hall Supervisor, remembers that she and her husband felt nothing would come of these lessons. So they decided to neither encourage nor discourage him.

During the next years the Band used him mainly as a mascot, along with its regular twirlers, but after the war, Bill Reinhart, then drum major for the Band, accosted DePinto as he was walking across the Square one day, and "pressured" him into accepting the position of full-time twirler. From 1946 until 1954, when he went into his retirement, DePinto twirled at every home game and most of the away games.

Last season, the Band approached DePinto and induced him to give up his retirement for the Yale game, with the argument that all the old Band grads came back for this game.

His mother says that he will never retire because he loves the Band too much, but DePinto himself, outwardly less of the sentimentalist, says, "Heck, if I'm going to sit there and watch, I might as well be on the field with them."