When 384 members of the Class of 1929 registered for the fall term of 1925 they found Harvard like America was energetically building in an era of prosperity; three new dormitories in the Yard had been completed the spring before and a fourth--Strauss--was just off the drafting board. The walls of McKinlock were already standing beside the Charles, plans for Memorial Church were being drawn up, and the basement was laid for the new Fogg Museum.

Square merchants advertised raccoon coast for $350 and Harold Lloyd was frolicking in "The Freshman" a comedy about college and football life which few of the new class took very seriously. More important things lay in Harvard Stadium where the revised football team was expected to do great things.

These freshmen were honestly unconcerned about the war debt problems of France or the Locarno treaty and only occasionally did the world court issue make a determined appearance in their lives. As the fall term opened Cal Coolidge was well on his way to mediocrity while Red Grange and Paul Whiteman's jazz caught the undergraduates' enthusiasm.

Hardly had the Shenandoah dirigible crashed than '29 unbuttoned its collar in Hemenyway gym to register for its first term. Most found the special freshman welcoming day a big help in getting their bearings. As they wrote weeks later in their first assignment for English A, in a theme entitled "My Reactions--Favorable and Unfavorable--to My Reception at Harvard" that extra day without the upperclassman gave the class its first feeling of unity.

A promising football player commented that he missed the fan-fare he had expected on arrival and felt neglected until practice on Monday. While a prosaic southerner who expected to be beaten and scalped in the high tradition of southern universities found he could go to his room unmolested. And an independent scholar noted the air of partial aloofness, "a considerable and soothing reserve, a refreshing forbearance from prying into the affairs of others."

Expenses $900

He also wrote of "the somewhat warped impression of the University's activities which we receive at the freshman meeting--that football and literary work are the chief extra-curricular interests of the students; the annoyance of wandering in perilous search of cafeteria food during the four days between our required arrival and the opening of the freshman dining halls; the incompetence of the student advisory system which does not send our counsellors to interview us until we have already passed the uncertain stage of finding our way about in the bewilderment of our new life."

Aside from these few discomforts the '29ers landed on a college well trained to handle them. Dean Whitney '17 had just enlisted a group of recently-graduated proctors and had picked Elliott Perkins '23 as his first assistant dean. The CRIMSON added to their advice with its first "Confidential Guide to Freshman Courses," which covered about 40 courses normally open to the newcomers. The freshmen in financial trouble turned to Walter Daly '14 who announced average expenses would run between $900 and $1,200. All told, Harvard in the fall of 1925 greeted its new babes with open arms and rapidly installed them in the halls of Gore, Standish, George Smith, James Smith, Persis Smith, Little and Shepard.

John Philip Sousa's famous band was in Sanders during the second week of college and set merrily about creating the enthusiastic air which filled the Yard and Soldiers Field for the next nine months.

Over 175 candidates turned out on Monday afternoon for Coach Cambells first practice. By the Andover game the squad had been pruned to three teams and a number of stars began to twinkle ever so faintly: French (later captain), Putnam, Cunningham, and McGehee in the backfield; O Connell, Harrison, Wolfe, Churchill, Parkinson, Robinson, and Prior from end to end.

The score of that opener was 0-0 in a game a little open football. By the Yale battle two months later the team had crushed every opponent and the once optimistic supporters of the varsity eleven had turned to the freshmen as the leading lights of future Harvard football.

With all due respect to the above contingent, one must remind The Class of three singularly miserable individuals--Devinna, Garbose, and Spibtarn--who opened college in Stillman Infirmary. Poor Devinna: he was there until Oct. 28.

The healthy were jousting with their classmates in an opening day football rally during which the freshmen gathered at the Smith Hall quadrangle and marched en masse to the Stadium for the Rensselear Polytechnic game. This freshman cheering was a fixture for the next two games, characterizing the intense feeling which football stirred up in the undergraduates.

Controversy reached a high point with the column of W. O. McGeehan in the Boston Globe. He wrote to the effect that given a chance the graduates and undergraduates of Harvard would gladly trade President Lowell, President Emeritus Eliot, and three heads of departments for a good running backfield and no questions asked.

The CRIMSON, which felt it was in close contact with the situation, replied that Harvard "wouldn't exchange one item of its academic prestige for the best All-American football team in history and a herd of newspaper propagandists in the bargain." Even during the fall of 1925 the opinion was still widely held around Cambridge that Stadium was an accessory of the College and not the College of the Stadium.