Wolfing on its banks and wherrying on its waters are the sole sports Harvard men associate with the Charles River. Swimming is generally done once every four years in the Indoor Athletic Building for a distance of 50 yards.

But the Metropolitan District Commissioner has left the rosewater bather out of his calculations this summer with the announcement that over a dozen beaches are now open on the Charles River from the Boston Basin to Populatic Pond 25 miles upstream. More accessible than Revere or Nantasket, Magazine Beach and Gerry's Landing are designed for early morning dips.

Some Come Naturally

Some of these are naturally silted from the swamp above Mount Auburn cemetary; with others the ground glass bottom has been imported by generations of volunteer fireman's picnics. Their popularity is attested by statistics. Police pull far more bodies from the river's alluvial bed than from its verdant bush.

Don't dive out the window, however. Last spring five Harvard men clad in checkered shorts and examination blue books jumped off the John Weeks Memorial Bridge. They were arrested for disturbing the peace. No Collegian, since Henry Wadsworth Longfellow meditated aqueous suicide from the same point as a professor of Modern Languages here in the 1860's, had ever considered river bathing.

Still it looked like a dirty way to go. And investigation by City Engineer William Jackson in 1893 vindicated the bard. Jackson's maps show 406 pollution entries into the Charles River varying from what he termed "slight" cesspool overflow to waste liquors from a gas works, "an abominable nuisance."

Developments later proved that the 406 sewage potions were combining to form a miraculous elixir. A love-sick Cambridge maiden unrequited in her passion drank a fifth of iodine and then flung herself into the Charles River to wind things up.

Miracle of Charles

Swallowing a large dose of a salubrious river finds, she quickly recovered enough strength to attract a rescuer in a passing lobster-put poacher returning from the day's rounds.

Today the Charles River cannot be advertised as a competitor for Poland Springs. Newton's municipal sewage has all been diverted, malarial mosquitoes of the genus anapholes have all been removed, and the Brighton abbatoir makes mucilage out of the hoofs. The only attraction left to the natator and nature student are colonies of algae and orange peels.