(John Powers was claimed by the Navy in June, but he will write his old column on those occasions when he is releases from his ship to come North.)

The Grass is Greener

Harvard coach John Yovicsin was making his first appearance before the masses Saturday afternoon, and Bill Veeck, who had once offered Yovicsin the chance to earn a little money in his spare time, was interested in letting him know that Suffolk Downs still cared for him. Veeck, a sports entrepreneur who has contributed such diversions as the exploding scoreboard to American society, had hired two single-engine planes to fly over the Stadium bearing long streamers with messages to Yovicsin as well as to the fans.

One was sort of an aerial billet-doux. "HI JOHN!" it read. "THINGS ARE EVEN BETTER AT SUFFOLK DOWNS." The offer offered free admission to any fan who admitted he had seen Harvard play Northeastern, and had a ticket stub to prove it.

And at the time, it seemed that Yovicsin would have been quite happy to reconsider a public relations job at a race track, in light of what his football team was doing, or not doing, on the field during the second quarter. Northeastern, which was considering moving up to a more difficult schedule when it agreed to a game with the Crimson a couple of years ago, was holding Harvard scoreless.

A lot of people were quite surprised, and a lot more were becoming disgusted. After all, here was a school that was playing before the largest audience in its history, and it wouldn't let the Crimson past midfield until the airplanes had gone home and the Harvard Band was polishing off the remains of its box lunches. If Bill Veeck was listening to the game on radio, he was loving it. Turn down Suffolk Downs, and it can be arranged that you lose for the second year in a row to a college that has a trolley line running through the middle of its campus.

As it turned out, a man by the name of Roderic W. Foster helped Yovicsin and the boys out of a potentially embarrassing situation. Foster did a little serious quarterbacking in the second half, driving Harvard to three touchdowns and picking up 78 yards by himself. He also punted, just to keep his hand in. So Harvard, picked up an acceptable 28-7 triumph over the locals, and Yovicsin surpasses Percy Haughton's record for most career victories as a Harvard coach. That's a little more satisfying than arranging Kasanof Bakery Day at Suffolk Downs, which would have been Yovicsin's other job. Veeck, you see, doesn't quite understand the necessity of keeping the romanticism alive in your life.

Pretty Damned Emotional

And Yovicsin, on the surface at least, appears to be a changed man. He gave his squad a fight talk before kickoff that looked pretty damned emotional from the stands. He was slapping players on the rump when they came off the field after doing nice things there. And he let Foster call his own game, which is something quite different from what had happened last year. Foster, who likes to improvise, was doing things that few Harvard quarterbacks have ever done, like running instead of punting, passing on second down, and picking up yardage from scrimmage. And Yovicsin did not seem to offer any violent physical objection, either.

All this is comforting, when one considers what Princeton and Dartmouth were doing to Rutgers and Massachusetts last weekend. In view of what Harvard has in the way of experienced material this year, Foster will have to do many strange and wonderful things if the Crimson wants to avoid scores like 41-24 and 51-20 this Fall.