Hewlett Wins Heptagonals with Ease; Crimson Finishes Second Behind Navy

Amazing Walt Hewlett won the Heptagonal cross-country meet in record time yesterday in New York, but that's only half the story.

The Crimson's Dave Allen took second place, Captain Bill Crain finished eighth, and all told the lightly regarded Harvard squad compiled a score of 51, low enough to win the team title in any of the past three years.

This year, however, was a different story as powerful Navy, the pre-meet favorite, placed five runners in the top ten for a fantastic total of 33.

"That Navy score makes the Heps look like a dual meet," Harvard coach Bill McCurdy said afterwards.

But the Crimson's second-place finish was big news too. Harvard had been picked to finish fourth behind the Middies, Army, and Brown, and many observers had predicted that Hewlett would repeat his nightmarish performance of a year ago when he was favored to win and finished 26th.

The prognosticators were wrong on both counts. Brown, with a score of 90, and Army, with a total of 109, were far behind the Crimson in team scoring.

And Hewlett showed the skeptics too. Weeks in advance, Walt had mapped out his strategy for this meet to go out fast and hang on. He stuck to the masterplan today and made the rest of the field look like a bunch of schoolboys.

Hewlett settled in front of the pack after the first mile and started to pull away on the first uphill grade. From that point, he increased his lead every step of the way, crossing the finish line in 25:03.3, 56 seconds ahead of Allen.

The time shattered the Heptagonal record by almost a half a minute and was the fastest over run by a collegian on the revered Van Cortlandt Park course.

Allen's showing was also of sags, proportions. He broke away from the pack of Navy runners during the third mile and finished in 25:59, a full 1:30 faster than he had run the course earlier this season against Penn and Columbia.

Crain went out fast in an all-out effort to break up the Midshipman huddle of runners, and finished a respectable eighth. It was the third year that Bill finished in the top ten in the Hops.

Rounding out the Crimson scoring were Jon Chaffee, 19th, and Roger Smith, 21st.

The Crimson's finish gave it the Ive League championship, decided since last year on the order of finish of Ivy teams in the Heptagonals. It's the first league title for Harvard since the league's first year, 1956.