You probably know that Alger Hiss is suing Whittaker Chambers for slander, and you probably don't know that he's doing it in Baltimore. He is, and here's why. Hiss' attorney is William L. Marbury, of the Harvard Corporation, and Baltimore is where he sees his clients.

Which ends this item, except for a couple of notes on Marbury's unique aspects.

He is the first member of the Corporation since 1917 or as who did not go to Harvard College, became to the Law School from the University of Virginia.

He is the first member of the Corporation over to be in a hurry; he dies here every two weeks for its meetings.

Which ends this item, except to mention to American History fans that he is related to Marbury of Marbury vs. Madison.

Which ends this item.

Go slow. This item is thickly settled.

Ordinarily I'm a devotee of both Wolcott Gibbs and Evelyn Waugh. So when I read Gibbs' delighted review of Waugh's "The Loved One" in the New Yorker last summer, I got hold of the book, clapped my hands for joy, and sat down for a good time. Now usually Waugh is excruciating and malevolent and vastly inventive. But not in "The Loved One." It is chiefly a one-joke book, and the joke isn't very good--it's about funeral parlor techniques--nor is its effect savage. So practically nothing of Waugh is there--little malevolence, less humor, and no inventiveness.

Looking back, it makes sense that Gibbs liked the book. Every now and then he goes off on a book or a play, liking it when nobody else can stomach a word of it, and it is usually a one-joke book or a one-joke play. A few years ago he liked a musical called "Park Avenue" which flopped. It was one long, dull joke about intermarriage and divorce in the Park Avenue set. But Gibbs raved about it, for what must be curious reasons. Whatever they are, those are the same reasons why he raved about "The Loved One."

Resume normal speed.

Arnold Horween and Eddie Casey are a couple of fellows who used to coach football here. Just before Dick Harlow. Put them together with Harlow, and you have more than twenty years' worth of Harvard coaches. You also have three men with nothing in common. Except that all three had miserable first seasons.

Horween came on in 1926. Later he turned out to be a good coach. But in 1926 you wouldn't have figured it. A college called Geneva won the opener, and Harvard went on to lose to everybody else except Dartmouth and Tufts.

Casey took over in 1931. Horween had built a terrifically strong squad in his last three years, so Casey could hardly help winning some games. As a matter of fact, he went into the Yale game undefeated. But even at that it was a bad season, because Harvard was sloppy and unspirited, and barely slipped by a lot of teams it should have slaughtered.

And that was the year Yale won the famous 3-0 upset. Harvard's Barry Wood took the opening kickoff and slipped it backwards to Jack Crickard, who slipped it forward for ninety-five yards. Yale was about to be immolated according to prescription. But Harvard never scored, and Albie Booth's fourth-quarter fieldgoal was a one-stroke decline and fall of the Horween empire. During the next three years Harvard ruined Bates and New Hampshire regularly. Period.

Harlow took over in 1935. He was plenty able, but the flotsam and jetsam he found on Soldier's Field were too much for anybody to get rid of in a year. So Harlow lost to Holy Cross, Dartmouth, Army, Princeton, and Yale in his first season.

That brings us up to tomorrow, and I stand here before you to declare that Art Valpey's first season will not be anything like Horween's or Casey's or Harlow's. This statement rests solidly on an uninformed, sentimental hunch. Besides that, you don't often draw four of a kind.