Despite the war, final exams, and spring's other distractions, one small group of zealots, the pinsters of Harry's Club (Saxe not Widener), hold to the good old days when pinball was threatening baseball as the national pastime. Today the summer soldiers have fallen by the way and only the devotees remain. Harry's Arcade Spa, located under the wing of Mother Advocate, is the mecca of this latter group, the boys that "care." A knot of them, mostly from Adams House, gather after almost every lunch and dinner to practice their pinmanship. They look with disdain upon the more vulgar pin parlors on Mt. Auburn Street; places where no one seems to care.

Harry Saxe, a Cambridge boy by birth, has run his Arcade Spa for two decades and claims to have waited on sons of Roosevelts, Morgans, and Rockefellers. He calls his two-steps-down shop "Arcade" because it is the only store nearby to run from one street to the next, Bow to Mt. Auburn; "Spa" because he sells just about everything to everybody.

To describe the delicate tones of this sport, an entire lexicon of terms has developed, based on local personalities and applicable imagery. General talk ranges from "pin cheat" (one who tilts the board) to the conventional club greeting: "How's your pinmanship?" Nickels are "legal tender" or "apaches"; quarters are "shingles." Scores are kept in "thous," and an especially unbeatable machine is a "Gottlieb masterpiece," named after the manufacturer.

Only to the uninitiated, the "icebergs," who let the balls roll undirected about the board, is pinball a game of luck. True pinsters all swear that skill alone controls the boards. Most of the pin language, however, suggests that fate does take a hand in the proceedings. For example, when a pinster triumphs and wins free games, "fees," spectators race about in a mystic trance shouting "Pinball," a call as rousing to Bow Street as Rheinhardt is to the Yard. But bewailing bad luck takes up much more space in the pinball dictionary. A streak of poor playing is described as "Gottlieb working overtime" or "Harry having his foot on the pedal." Even baseball contributed two terms: the "Merkle ball" which slides straight down with only one more bumper to light, and the "Owen ball" which the pinster cannot control. A "New man ball," on the other hand, is one that shoots arrowlike to "Harry's gulch," the demoniacal corner which traps the ball and sends it to the bottom without hitting any bumper. "Bound hands" is the general expression of futility when a skilled pinster really cares but remains unlucky. But skill or luck, Harry's Club has always been one place, however near the Advocate, which could never be regarded as Hahvahd.