The Boston Herald

Richard Hapgood is the power behind the typewriter on which the Boston Herald's news is daily pounded out. He prepared for Harvard at Andover, and graduated from the University in the class of 1925. His dignity makes up for what it loses in not being paraded through the Herald sport columns on a "by-line" by the fact that he has an office of notorious hospitality in the Cambridge Savings Bank Building. If the mere possession of an office with all rent paid is not sufficient to prove Dick a thoroughly good correspondent, let it be mentioned that he possesses a Ford which has served as official conveyance of the press this fall.

Hapgood's jovial plumpness is kept from developing into uncomfortable obesity by at least weekly workouts on the Charles in a single shell. When this turbulent river is frozen over, Dick, versatile athlete that he is, turns to fancy skating. He is a member of the Boston Skating Club and those who have seen him perform in the Boston Arena say that he cuts a mean figure "S".

He is a capable correspondent, and it is seldom that anything interesting or uninteresting can take place around Cambridge without its finding its way into the columns of the Herald via Hapgood. His pleasant easy-going style is famous for taking a longer space to say nothing than the style of any other one of the similarly accomplished Harvard correspondents. On some mornings when the official spokesman of the H.A.A. has been especially vague and Hapgood's football story has been exceptionally long. Dick has been known to break down and tearfully confess that, long as the story was, it had been cut mercilessly by the Herald copy editors.

The Boston Post

Readers of the great breakfast-table paper of New England find their Harvard news pour le sport under the line "By Roger Birtwell." Mr. Birtwell is one of the most unmistakable of the correspondents who frequent the Soldiers Field Locker Building, Harvard Square, and the Cambridge Savings Bank Building.

He appears as a long man shrouded in a tight-fitting overcoat. At one time, he affected iron hats, or derbies, under which his benevolent spectacles gave an effect of incongruity. Of late, he has reverted to soft hats, less like the headgear of the proverbial hotel detectives.

According to his own statement, he "attended Exeter for four years", and entered Harvard with the Class of 1922. He did not graduate, not because he loved Harvard less, but because he loved journalism more, and preferred writing about Harvard sport to sitting in the stone seats in the Stadium.

Although he has been covering Harvard sportdom for only five years, he possessses an encyclopaedic knowledge of Soldiers Field doings within the memory of man. With very little encourage- ment he will give the scores and details of Harvard football games between any two given points in the past 20 years. His brothers in the fraternity of the press turn to him as to Volume XXII of the Britannica.

Mr. Birtwell's style affects the colorful and dramatic. By deft combinations of his typewriter keys he can invest an incident of seeming insignificance with an ours of mystery, a glamor of confidential secrecy, or a cloak of magnificent magnitude. At times he adopts, and very successfully, the attitude of an author of "Things I Shouldn't Tell". The fact that he never does tell them only renders his writings more interesting to the reader.

An inexhaustible fund of stories, suited to all climes, ages, and moods, makes him one of the most congenial of the Cambridge newspapermen. It is not so much the stories which he tells, as those which he might tell, which renders him a popular speaker in any gathering of the Fourth Estate. His popularity with the fraternity is increased by his ability to be, on occasion, a very good listener.

When a person has something to say, the bespectacled scribe can generally be relied upon to extract the important features of the matter. Perhaps it is his glasses, or his ingratiating air, or his professed fondness for aesthetics, which gives him the faculty of getting statements on vital issues where others have failed lamentably. With a minimum of apparent effort, he covers as much ground as any of his fellow football recorders.

The Boston Transcript

The Transcript is so much a Boston and Harvard tradition that it is only with deepest reverence that this article is approached. One cannot lightly review the Bible or Shakespeare, and the Transcript is probably read a good deal more widely among Harvard men than either of these other classics.

Writing football, and Harvard sports in general, for this paper, is Mr. George Carens. Here again reverence and great humility is needed. It is no simple ordinary task to sit down and write of a newspaperman who has lunch with William T. Tilden 2nd "Big Bill", Mr. Carens would call him, just like that who drops into Mower Hall, and engages in pillow fights with the first-string half back of the University eleven, who wakes up Mr. Bingham at midnight, who knows just what the Harvard stroke told the cox at the 3 3-4 mile mark, and who talks with Tad Jones before Fishwich has even finished dressing. Such a man, it is obvious, is no scribe, no more athletic back. He is an artist, an author, a man with important contacts.