Not that the place wasn't one oferuditeness and respectability. Once two Harvard professors were sipping a beer in the Kings Tavern and arguing about the Etruscan Wars.

Our bricklayer-artist, the one with the fluent daughter, listened in patience till his patience was gone. Ultimately he said to one of the professors:

"Excuse me, but he's quite right." The professor who was in error admitted it and drinks were had all around.

Eddie St. Louis, a very large man who once played in the backfield for the Pittsburgh Stealers so long ago that pro football was not a paying proposition-30 or 40 years ago-remembers many a convivial round in the Kings Tavern with Ed Lahey. Lahey was a member of the first Nieman Fellowship Class in 1938. Once in a while Tom LaVelle, one of the seven mules in the line ahead of Notre Dame's immortal Four Horsemen, would join them.

Nick Harris has moved the Kings Tavern, Men's Bar, right down into the basement. Henceforth, it will be called simply "Kings" and it will have queens too, youthful, longhaired lovely young things along with earnest and jolly bearded beer drinkers, an entirely new crowd and altogether foreign to the tastes of the old-timers.

But change, of course, is inevitable, and not wholly evil. Nick Harris is carrying with him the best commodity, after all, of his old place: the draft beer.

The Kings Tavern draft is known far and wide. It is so good that one of United Airlines' brochures urges visitors to be sure to visit Kings Tavern in Harvard Square and sample the draft beer, and newspapers from as far away as San Francisco have printed laudatory articles about the beer.

The secret is the stable temperature-between 38 and 40 degrees-and Nick's insistence that the lines be flushed clean at every changing of kegs.

"As I understand it, when beer hits extremes between hot and cold, it loses the flavor," Nick said. To circumvent temperature changes, all his kegs of beer are stored in a large freezer and the kegs are tapped there, with lines leading into the bar.

The kegs never leave the cooler. The lines are regularly flushed. People seem to like what comes out as a result.

So the new place has the same good cold draft, and the new clientele is contented, and it is only the old guys who grumble, as they crowd in now at Harvard Gardens or Whitney's and wish to God there was one place left on earth where they could get away from the old woman and swear a little and argue one more time about the Etruscan Wars.