Orphans' Selling Campaign Ends With Arrest in Yard

Two out-of-state "orphans" selling magazines were arrested Saturday on a charge of trespassing and soliciting in the Yard dormitories. Hauled away to the Cambridge jail, one of the youths lamented, "We weren't soliciting, just making friends."

Hitting Quincy House, Perkins, Matthews, Holworthy, Greenough, and Thayer Halls, the orphans were so persuasive that at one point they sent a prospective customer running through the halls looking for fellow buyers. In Thayer Middle alone the salesmen collected almost $50.

Freshmen and proctors agree on the main points of the boys' sales talks, but report flatly contradictory versions of the details.

In Holworthy Hall, where they were eventually seized, the youths said they were from orphanages in Jacksonville, Fla., and Little Rock, Ark., and were trying to win a $500 prize offered by a subscription company to anyone able to sell a certain number of magazines. According to a freshman in the dorms, the boys claimed their contest deadline was 4:30 that afternoon.

But that morning, they had told Freshmen in Thayer Hall that all subscriptions must be turned in by 1 p.m. Students in Greenough were informed Wednesday that the deadline was Friday night.

Asked in Greenough to produce draft cards, the youths retorted that orphans do not need them, although one of them admitted Saturday that he had a card in his hotel room.

The boy with the draft card had told Freshmen he was 19. He told the police he was 22. In the same dorm he said that he had previously been working at three cents a week to pay off the orphanage, now in Indiana, for the money it had spent raising him.

Calling three days later on Thayer Hall, the youths mentioned a conference for orphans they were attending, adding that they had already won the subscription contest but were penalized for being late and therefore had to bring in extra money.

The eventual arrest of the salesmen was brought about when a Holworthy boy, in an effort to find someone to share the cost of a subscription, burst into his proctor's room. The proctor immediately summoned the Yard policemen, who after questioning the boys called Cambridge police. The orphans were taken away to jail at about 6:15 Saturday, but were almost immediately bailed out by an agent of the subscription company, who maintained that all the magazines purchased will be delivered.