(The author, a third year student at the Law School, is studying the problems of redistricting Boston neighborhoods under a grant from the Ford Foundation.)

City Councillor Al Vellucci, pain in the ass of the Harvard Corporation and joy in the hearts of his East Cambridge constituents, just added one more insult to the fourteen years of verbal injury he has inflicted on the University's self-promoted image.

Monday night he asked the City Council to change the name of Harvard Square to Christopher Columbus Square. "What the hell," he says, grinning broadly, "that guy Harvard never did anything for Cambridge except give the city six lousy books on Protestant theology--and THAT place. We can certainly do better by the discoverer of our great nation." Columbus, Vellucci, and East Cambridge are all Italian.

To those familiar with the Councillor's rhetoric and style this new proposal will come as no surprise. In the past he has suggested turning the Lampoon building into a public urinal ("Well, that's what it looks like isn't it"), the Yard into a dog pound ("We'll put ropes around all of those trees, see, and let 'em sit"), and the area under the Yard into a public parking lot. ("Only thing the land is good for, see. Personally I hope that when they build it the whole place sinks.") In the future he promises more of what he calls "my patented agitations."

And it is these that have shaped his reputation in the University community as two parts buffoon and one part bastard. Self-possessed Charles P. Whitlock, Assistant to the President for Civic Relations, smiles and shakes his head at the mention of Vellucci's name, while CRIMSON editors jump at the chance to make him appear a beast that never was on land or sea before. It was page one news last spring when Vellucci sat stony-faced through a young girl's tear-laden hour-long plea that her dog would be strangled if a proposed leash law was passed.

But on his own turf Vellucci projects himself in a completely different way. In East Cambridge he is universally known, always liked, often loved, sometimes revered--and even more.

Of Vellucci one non-resident businessman says, "He's so popular down here that I think he's going to be canonized when he finally dies--by all seven churches he now regularly attends." There is constant praise for his good works, for his favors to both young and old in the neighborhood, for the vast improvements that he has brought to the area during his regime, for the fact that he is a "real gen'leman" (with the dropped "t" of the local patois). At Don's Lunch the manager-waitress whose books Vellucci carried to the local Thorndike School when both were students there can only say, "He is our boy, a real prince, oh I lose my head when I start talking about him--he's so wonderful--and can't say anything."

Will that bastard-saint, the real Al Vellucci, please stand up, wave the life wand and let the dumb speak?

II

We are at the Cambridge Economic Opportunity Committee's Housing Convention and for all of the promise of its conception it has been a bush-league affair from its beginning two hours ago.

Over 500 Cambridge residents, seated in eight caucuses under signs identifying the various neighborhoods, have come together to present their solutions to the increasingly aggravated housing shortage that plagues the whole city. It is an exercise in grass-roots democracy. The resolutions they have been offering represent three months of local organizing in the eight areas of the city and a genuine effort to put some muscle into community power.

But the whole scene at St. Mary's Hall has deprived the proceedings of any emotional content and thus far they have been flat, frivolous, and boring for everyone here.

With red, white, and blue streamers hanging from the ceiling and crayoned quotations from every President since Lincoln on the wall, the transformed gymnasium looks like an uneasy hybrid NSA convention and junior high school prom. The keynote speeches by Mayor Walter Sullivan and Congressman Tip O'Neill have been irrelevant, the first by way of saying nothing at all, the second by way of two very long, very old Irish jokes and a passing reference to the Congressman's concern for the Cambridge situation. Both have long since departed. The Convention has descended into the introduction--hamstrung by a parliamentary procedure no one understands--of an endless series of remarkably similar caucus resolutions written in obscure legal language. Kids running through the hall have voted both Yea and Nay on all motions and followed their dogs out the huge front doors.

Vellucci -- with an easy, dignified, and slightly plump grace that complements his sharp features and shock of graying hair, a distinctly Italian Cary Grant--has been here with the East Cambridge caucus from the beginning. And with the eight elderly ladies with pill-box hats, skirts that fall well below the knee, and Norman Rockwell faces who make up the majority of it, he has sat calmly through the agenda thus far, oblivious to the formal proceedings, talking quietly to the many people who come up to him, and smiling continuously at women all over the room.

Changes