Princetonian Junto

On the "Samaria's" last trip, where the official paper was a dull sheet called "The Link," a junto led by some energetic Princetonians decided to put out a rival. They infiltrated the mimeographing room one night when the "Link" staff was carousing, helped themselves to a couple of thousand pieces of mimeographing paper, and printed up a parody number called "The Missing Link."

The balmy summer nights were much too nice to spend below decks, so many evenings were taken up with quiet outdoor amusements. Lifeboats were rated excellent substitutes for the parlor sofa or the back seat of the family car, and it was rumored that some of the blanket rolls on the boat deck were cood.

Variety Shows

On the last night before reaching shore, passengers followed the old tradition of putting on ship's variety shows. The "Volendam" ended one trip with a skit called "North Atlantic," featuring the music of "South Pacific"; a "Scythia" production led with the verse:

"What the heck, we've left Quebec, But we're sort of new at Europe."

The sentiment of the last was appropriate. It was the way the students felt when the ships unloaded them in London, Amsterdam, or Le Havre. Everything was strange. They were no longer just individuals, to be judged on their own merits. To the cold eye of the people in the street, they were first and foremost specimen Americans.

Their immediate forerunners had been the G.I.'s; the most evident contribution of their culture to Europe seemed to be coca-cola, jeeps, and the Hollywood movie. They were met with the expectation that they turn out to be a combination of Babbitt and the Lone Ranger, bulging with money and utterly boorish. They discovered that the humble dollars in their wallets represented the solidest value in the world, the item which seemed to be the chief reason for Europe's respect for the U. S. They found themselves the target for postcard salesmen, black marketeers, hotel keepers, and souvenir hawkers all the way from Rotterdam to Barcelona.

A Real Hamburger

To some extent, the students met the expectation. Sometimes they were loud ties and talked in loud brash tones about how cheap everything was in Europe but how ridiculous the foreign ways of doing things were and how they would love to get back to good old New York for a real hamburger.

And sometimes they succeeded in looking extremely typical. The typical American college boy abroad in his tourist uniform looked something like this: He had a crew cut, khaki pants, and a seersucker coat with the green edge of a U. S. passport showing above the edge of his inside breast pocket. There was always a camera in a leather case slung Sam Brown belt style over one shoulder, and in his right hand he carried a guide book, open. Vendors of beads, lace, and leather goods, and certain attractive young business women could spot him a mile off.

The typical American girl was well-dressed, with new-look skirts (many European women have not converted), and page-boy hairdo. She carried her valuables in a handbag with an over- the-shoulder strap, a device unheard of abroad. Gentlemen on the street would stop to give her a long appreciative stare, a stare which began at her feet and worked its way leisurely all the way up to her bat.

The students did not always look typical, but wherever they went, they created a minor whirl. Some of them tangled with the ultra-polite. London Bobbies who had to remind them that British traffic really did run on the left-hand side of the road. Some penetrated the iron curtain and became small international incidents before AMG authorities got them released from jail.

One enterprising contingent from the banks of the Charles wangled a free ride into Berlin on a U. S. military train. Once in the city, they found that the U. S. Consul General was a Harvard man, and were soon living in luxury at the Consulate. They were taken on guided tours of the city, and after a pleasant stay, they got a free flight back to Tri-zone in an empty air-lift transport. Another Harvard undergraduate with a flair for the lurid spent a weekend with the Salvador Dalis in Spain.

Students got about in Europe by every conceivable means, from gondola to airliner. Bicycle is the fashion abroad: on maps, roads are even marked with little pointed things to show where the hills are and which way they go. Jeeps are cheap and rugged. A few stalwarts went about on motorcycles, which are fine except on cobblestones, where they shake you to jelly.