The Harvard-Yale game this fall is going to be televised in glorious color, but at present it appears that one will do best by journeying to the grimy city of New Haven and leaving toys like color television to people who are interested in abstract art and not football. This conclusion is based on a careful viewing of the first commercial showing of color TV in Boston--Saturday's Army-Dartmouth football game.

The picture that came over was indubitably in color, but who was colored what was always difficult to tell. The screen seemed to take on a hue corresponding to whatever color was predominant in the picture, and so for most of the time all the players had a greenish tings because of the Michie Stadium turf. In closeups, however, the colors did not run together but appeared almost unnaturally brilliant.

A Different Game

Sometime during the second quarter of the Army game, the Notre Dame-SMU contest started to come over the black-and-white receiver. Gradually, despite the fact that the sound for the regular set was not turned on, the crowd's attention began to drift away from the Army game.

The reasons for the shift were many. The black-and-white screen was much larger than the color one, which is restricted in its size by the necessity for the whirling disc. The color was not particularly good, and somehow black-and-white seemed perfectly natural for a football game--perhaps because of many years of newsreels.

The big reason, however, was the difference in the quality of play between the two games. Army and Dartmouth played like two fair college teams. Notre Dame and especially Southern Methodist--which won, 27 to 20--looked like two strong professional teams. They ran their plays off quickly and efficiently, tackling fiercely, and blocking with a minimum of pushing and shoving.

The Jordan Marsh exhibition proved two things. One was that football as it is played in the great reaches where amateurism is mostly a word is a far superior game to that practiced by such schools as Dartmouth, Army, and, of course, Harvard. The other was that color television at present is only a novelty, and not half so easy to watch as good old black-and-white.