Riots Highlighted Past Weekends

Like the outcome of the game or the condition of one's roommate on Sunday morning, what will happen in Harvard Square during Yale weekends is a difficult thing to predict.

There have been riots, but only sometimes: students filled the Square for two hours in 1950, but they earned a commendation for good behavior by staying in their rooms two years later.

The disturbance twelve years ago followed a 1949 season-one of Harvard's worst-that was capped with frustration when fans in New Haven found the Yale Bowl's steel goalposts impossible to tear down, and had to content themselves with throwing sod around on the field.

But back on home ground in 1950, they accomplished what Cambridge police termed "the biggest Square disturbance since the war." It started at 11:10 p.m. on the Friday before the game and by the time it was over one student was charged with pushing a policeman into the path of an oncoming bus, another with drunkenness; an estimated 3,500 Harvard men had participated.

A few days before the 1952 game a local liquor dealer looked back on the fun and predicted big sales for the coming weekend. "If it's warm," he exulted, "they'll buy beer. If it's cold, they'll buy the hard stuff."

It was windy, and sales must have been low: the Square had one of the dullest weekends in years. On the following Monday Cambridge City Councilor Edward J. Sullivan, who had demanded that the University pay for its students' exuberance in 1950, proposed a resolution commending Harvard for the tranquillity. "The students," he commented this time, "behaved very well."

The liquor salesman could only have sighed with regret in 1954. Although a thousand relatively docile students filled the Yard and part of Massachusetts Avenue during a rally on the Friday night before the game, alcoholic beverages were

banned from the Stadium during the contest and on Sunday morning the Eliot House watchman could claim "I heard only one "Boola Boola" all night."

The 1956 weekend marked a new high point of peace and quiet for the Cambridge Police Department, and another low one for Yale Weekend rioting. The hand tried to hold a rally the night before the game, but apathy resigned as more policeman attended than students. "The riot," declared the CRIMSON, "was a flop."

The weekend was more unusual than it was wild when, two years later, rodents were the only rioters around Harvard. A few Yalies let several rats loose on the field during the game; at least one of the pets permanently eluded angry officials. On the evening of the game no Harvard men seemed to show any enthusiasm as three other visitors from New Haven were assaulted by two actors from a play showing in Boston.

In 1960, during the most recent Yale weekend in Cambridge, Harvard men were perhaps saving their collective energies for the diploma riots later that year. The only mass action occurred when 1,000 people signed cards in the Square showing support for Negro students in recently integrated New Orleans schools