"What about the veterans?" I ask him.

And he tells me that they have quite a few. He says they are lucky because most are married and don't have the same pressures on them that unmarried students do. That's what he said.

The first few hours go along okay, and we make a lot of talk, making ourselves politely offensive.

Then I get down to business and ask him about pranks, and hold my breath. I put it to him this way: "Mr. Gerber, there are not so many veterans, at colleges these days, and you have many young freshmen, what do they consider the collegiate fun?"

Wear Porkies

So Gerber tells me that the freshmen have to wear funny green porkies and then they have a crazy fight with the sophomores, and if the freshmen win, they don't have to wear the little hats any more. But the freshmen had tough luck this year. They lost to the sophomores. Seniors wear single breasted green coats with their class numbers sewn over the breast. The whole outfit looks something like the band at the New Ritz uses.

Then another guy, named Larry Bellows, joined our conference, and he's the Editor of the Jack-O-Lantern, which he claims is the best slick in the biz. 'What do you think of the Lampoon?" we ask him, trying not to show any enthusiasm.

The guy turns up his nose fast, and says, "Look, they're has beens. The only people we consider competition is the Yale Record."

All the time I'm remembering that the Editor wants to run a story on pranks.

"How about some snake bite?" asks Larry. A nice guy, because snake bite turns out to be White Horse Scotch. We all sit around, and I tell the boys a few sexy stories, and they sit on the edge of their chairs, because they have it rough up in Hanover. There just aren't any broads to play with. This talk about how good I am with the broads makes me a real fine guy, although they can't go for the ruptured duck I wear, it is easy to see.

Reveal Plans

Then as I tell them how much I like Hanover and Dartmouth, and how much fun it would be to go to Harvard with them, and wear a green tie, and cheer for the Big Green, they start to tell me what their plans for pranks are. This is what I'm waiting for.

The next morning the photographer got up at four to take pictures of a bunch of the outing club boys going to fight fires. This we did to show that NAPS doesn't nap. Later we made an appointment to see a Dean, but we never kept it.

Up there is Dartmouth, when the bell rings for classes ending, it plays everything from Mr. Five by Five to the Ave Maria. I heard them both. Those students are all as big and as tough-looking as ham-and-egger pugs, and they go in for checkered shirts, and G.I. fatigue pants.

It got under my skin the way the Dartmouths kept saying what fruits the Harvards are.

In the daylight, too, that grey suit looked worse. "Oh, you, sharpy," someone yelled. I don't like it, but I've got to keep cool, or they might find out I'm from Harvard, and that wouldn't be good. Now that we know what the pranks are and have pictures and everything.