Flutes and flying

When H. Christopher Shibutani '85 found several thousand dollars worth of flutes and piccolos stolen from his Adams House room in September, he wasn't content to let the Harvard and Cambridge police do the detective work for him. Slubutani, the first flutist for the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, posted notices and called area pawn shops and music schools.

Within days his efforts paid off when a pawnbroker in Central Square became suspicious of a customer who tried to sell him a handmade flute for $30. It turned out to be Shibutani's, and when the thief tried to flee, he dropped most of the other equipment.

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Harvard biologists were more than a bit perturbed last fall over a dramatic radio advertisement for a thriller novel set in the Harvard bio labs, the scene of an army of cancerous germs sweeping through Cambridge.

Professors said the ad--promoting the book "Spirals," authored by William Patrick, editor of science publications at Harvard University Press--did not make it clear that the frightening scenario was only a scene from a novel, not a documentary.

"It's thoroughly outrageous," asserted the chairman of the department of Cellular and Developmental Biology. Daniel Branton, speaking for many of his colleagues. He said he was "not even sure it's obvious it's an ad."

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The Harvard band, which has practically made a career out of puerile jokes, finally went one stop too far in the fall. After playing "Live and Let Die" during a segment on the Korean airlines shooting and spelling out 'PUKE" during a sequence on the food in the Union, the band provoked official University reprobation.

Acting as Big Brother was Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III, who began reviewing the band's halftime shows to eliminate what he termed "vulgarity" and "in-group jokes." Under the new policy. Epps made small changes in the script the band followed during halftime of the Cornell game, changing a quote from "Macbeth."

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After a year of preparation, the Harvard flying club finally got off the ground this year after College officials legally freed the University of any liability for the safety of the club's 60 members. Led by Javier F. Arango '85 and Clifford T. Russell '85, the club took weekend jaunts out of a Mansfield, Mass. airport.

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Jerry Garcia in Harvard Stadium? The thought itself seems prima facie absurd, but that's what the Undergraduate Council almost pulled off last fall.

Spearheaded by Dudley House Representative David Vendler '84, the council proposed a springtime Grateful Dead concert in the stadium, and lined up both support from the student body and financial backing for the enterprise.

But Epps quashed the proposal in December, citing concerns over the reliability of the financing of the event and the effect it would have on the stadium. The council then pulled together and invited nouveau stars R.E.M. to play at the indoor track in the spring, and the gig went off without a hitch, although the council lost more than $1000.

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From its beginnings in the 18th century when a group of undergraduates met for dinner over a roasted pig and decided to form a social fraternity, the Porcellian Club had never elected a Black member. But after 192 years, that tradition changed last fall.

After the five week "punching season" of cocktail parties and dinners, the "Pork," the oldest and most exclusive of Harvard's final clubs, elected William Bette Jr. '86, an Adams House sophomore. "You can't separate being Black from being the first [Black] person in the Porcellien Club," Batts remarked. "I'd like to thick, for my own sanity, that I was elected for reasons other than being Black."

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As academic discoveries go, this was only an "almost" after all. In February, Peter J. Seng, an 'English professor at Connecticut College, announced the discovery in Harvard's Houghton Library of a long-forgotten, unpublished poem by William Wordsworth.

Seng's plans to publish the poem, however, were derailed in April, after a Cornell professor wrote him a letter informing him that he had already handled and was aware of the poem.

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Joel I. Goodfader resuscitated the Harvard International Review, a monthly journal on international politics. As one of the editors, he lined up major figures to contribute to the review, including Atlanta Mayer Andrew. Young, Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, and Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez. Staff members said he was an inspiration.

Joel Goodfader was also not a student.

When the rest of the staff and the College found out, heads--or rather Goodfader's head--rolled. Positions on University publications are only open to Harvard students, and Epps ordered the 23-year-old Georgetown University graduate off campus after finding out about his charade. Staff members on the Review were in shock over the incident and said they never suspected the masquerade for a minute before Goodfader confessed.

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Scores of famous professors and academics have not been able to pull the trick.

Instead, it took the efforts of one of America's great writers--Eudora Welty--to catapsult a Harvard University Press publication onto the New York Times bestseller list for the first time in the scholarly press's history. One Writer's Beginnings, Welty's autobiographical account of her childhood, has dotted the list for 13 weeks this spring; the book was based on material from the author's presentations at the first William E. Massey lecture series at Harvard