The American Legion was marching down Mass. Ave. on the night of Oct. 7, 1938, its members proudly clenching their rifles. Behind them was the Junior Legionnaires brass band. And in between were Harvard freshmen, pouring out of the Yard in increasing numbers, and -- witnesses later insisted--snake-dancing, goose-stepping and firing off the Nazi salute as the Legion marched by.

The band members stopped playing in confusion. The front of the line of march left them there and made it to Central Square, pursued by freshmen all the way. At that point, four of the freshmen were seized by their collars and charged with disrupting a public assembly.

The Class of '42, less than a month old, was front page news.

Swallowing Goldfish

For more than a week, Lothrop Withington's freshmen friends had been calling him a fool, a liar and worse. Well, he could swallow a live goldfish if he wanted to, and that was all there was to it. $10 said he couldn't.

So he practiced. By the morning of March 4, there were only two fish left in his aquarium: a two-incher and a four-incher. The two-incher was downed during the day. At 6:30 that evening, before a large crowd at the Union, he swallowed the four-incher. The crowd cheered. The Boston press heard. The wire services picked it up. Goldfish swallowing spread.

The Class of '42 remained front page news.

Now, because it's more than 25 years later and the kind faces under white hats are descending upon Cambridge, it's the front page news, the goose stepping and the goldfish swallowing, that come back to mind. You pass the reunioners, and you think, if you think about such things, "There goes part of the Old Harvard--swept up finally, just as the Old Harvard was, in World War II." If, thinking that, you smile at them as they pass, they smile back, aware of what you're thinking and realizing just how wrong you are.

The College which the Class of '42 entered was a place full of subtle pressures that members of the Class of '67 might find intolerable. Many freshmen fought and begged to get into a House, because it was considered desirable to do so, but getting in as a freshman could be rough; and there were 260 more applicants every year than there were places. Two out of three undergraduates crammed for their courses at the tutoring services on Mass. Ave. Most offered canned answers for exams in the well-known courses and were willing to "edit" (which sometimes meant ghostwrite) papers.

The election of senior class officers was one of the year's major events; the CRIMSON's coverage lasted for days, culminating in a tally of the vote for every candidate. Lower ranking faculty-members lived with a protracted system for getting tenure that kept them even less secure than they are now.

'Rise of Social Realism'

Yet the Senior Album distributed at the end of the Class' freshman year claimed that Harvard had just gone through a major internal upheaval, "the rise of social realism," lasting, conveniently enough, from 1935 to 1939. The class and intellectual leadership of the Beacon Street man was no more, the Album said; it had shifted to the scholarship holder from the West and Middle West.

This was probably better prophecy than analysis. But the Album had gotten hold of something. The freshman Class of '42 couldn't help but feel itself at the tail end of a dimly understood upheaval. If only a few things were substantially changed that year, everything, suddenly, was under scrutiny and attack; the reports and the headlines almost tripped over each other.

Tutoring Schools

On April 18, the CRIMSON, in an issue that still makes editors who come across it shiver with pride, announced that it would no longer accept advertising from the tutoring schools and called for a crackdown on "the racket."