The next day they put up four more signs and the price started sliding down to $8 and then $6. By April 12, there were twenty ticket signs on the freshman bulletin board. The price hit $4. Only five belonged to the real Conspirators. Four posters had been taken down by members of the Jubilee Committee, but they soon learned that the Conspiracy was out of hand.
Two days later, the chairman of the Jubilee Committee joined the Conspiracy when he announced that the famous moonlight boat ride planned for Friday night would be cancelled. Now there are times when you can get away with bringing in a group like the Lovin Spoonful and some times you can even make the Sunday Jubilee attraction a brunch at the Union, but the Jubilee boat ride is sacred. It is the symbol of all that Jubilee has ever meant--a long dull ride in the cold where there's nothing to do but drink and make-out.
After the CRIMSON announced that the boat ride had been cancelled, that ticket sales were at a new low, that here wasn't going to be any soul music or head music, but again--and I can only re-emphasize the importance of this to the Conspiracy--that the band was really going to be the Lovin Spoonful, the Freshman Council roundly condemned the CRIMSON for publishing the bad news without announcing the great new alternate plan.
The Jubilee chairman called up the reporter and explained to him what yellow journalism was and how that very expression applied to the way the CRIMSON had handled the affair. You have to use delicacy when you are dealing with The Big Social Event of The Freshman Year, he explained. Lots of guys are bringing their girls up all the way from out of town to show them what a big Harvard weekend is really like, he said, and here the CRIMSON goes on as if it wanted to kill the weekend altogether.
He demanded that another article appear lauding "the good features of the Weekend." Not to hurt his feelings, the second CRIMSON article on April 16 was taken word for word from an interview with him. There would be a gala affair Friday night at Carey Cage--where they used to hold the mixers on Dartmouth weekend so that when people threw up the vomit would mix with the dirt floor.
THE $1500 that would have gone to the boat ride would be spent instead on free Coca-Cola and Ginger Ale, free hors d'ourvres like potato chips and crackers, and a real live soul band--the name of which has become another of those wistful memories that are Harvard Jubilee legend.
After the Jubilee Committee took up the cause of the Conspiracy, the four Harvard freshmen found little need to continue their extravangant plan. After all, who were they compared to the whole committee of Jubilarians. There are as we all know corridors of power in the Harvard superstructure and having the chairman of the Jubilee Committee plotting for its demise in the very seat of power was far more effective than they could ever be.
They were simply outside agitators, a miserable rabble that could only focus attention on the problem. It took a man of genius, a whole committee working diligently to make Jubilee sound a little worse every week, to carry off the coup. The Conspirators gave up, convinced that soon the Jubilee Committee would cancel even the Lovin Spoonfuls and the Swingle Singers would fill in. But spring could not wait for the slow workings of an organized committee. And try as the Jubilee Committee might, May 2 came on Harvard before anyone was ready.
All the girls flew into Logan with their usual seven piece spring outfits. The boys bought their booze from McCarthy's and everybody got a little that weekend. Nobody liked the whole weekend, but after paying $19 to hear the Lovin Spoonful, no one is going to admit it.