A pewter beer stein with a clear crystal bottom, left on "Copey's" door mat 35 years ago this month, came home to 14 Plympton Street yesterday.
On March 12, 1914, at the height of a party, two CRIMSON editors filled the mug--originally the property of Albert V. de Roode '04--with punch, and bore the libation across the Yard to the Hollis Hall apartment of Professor Charles Townsend Copeland '82.
As one of the pair tells it, a 3 a.m. awakening found Copey even more irascible than he was in class. "Boys, go away," he growled. The crestfallen postulants departed, but they left the stein on his doorstep "as a mute offering of respect and friendship."
At this point the pewter vanishes into the mists of time. Through two World Wars and the Great Depression its whereabouts remained a mystery.
Yesterday a little brown package arrived at the CRIMSON from John P. Brown '14, one of the two perpetrators. He supplied the stein's biography as far as Copey's door mat, but he preserved in secrecy the rest of the saga.
The jug still holds (see cut) a full Imperial pint.
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