My early introduction to Harvard Stadium came while I was garbed in the overly starched white jackets of Harold O. Zimman Concessionaires.

I use to hop on the MTA Saturday mornings with a junior high school friend and bop into Harvard. The Square was a lot cooler then, more wierd people to stare at, more radical literature to pick up etc.-- maybe it's just that everything's a lot cooler in the eighth grade. After making the rounds we'd head down Boylston St. to Carey Cage. By 11 a.m. there would be about 40 kids gathered around waiting for the guy to come out and dole out the concession jobs. (It was a lot like the dockside scene from On the Waterfront.) There was a real hierarchy, in the concession business, with the game programs the executive jobs, popcorn your basic white collar affair, and pennants serving as the low man on the totem pole.

I was tall and usually managed to grab one of the coveted popcorn positions. My friend and I would take our first tray, stroll over to section one, eat popcorn, read the Black Panther--Stop the War Machine--Dump Johnson literature we had picked up earlier in the morning, and wait for the fans to arrive.

There was a cardinal rule to successful "popcorneering"--sell only on the visitors' side of the stadium. One can sell just as much, the walk back to Carey Cage is shorter, but foremost you didn't have to put up with those "funny" wiseass Harvard guys.

Those creeps never had the correct change and always wanted to break a $10 bill to impress their decked-out dates. They could never buy anything without a cryptic comment on how bad it was and they always sat in the aisles giving "go play in the traffic kid" stares when I tried to get by.

Around the start of the fourth quarter I would sit down with my empty rack and watch the game begin. That was the best thing about Ivy football--nothing of consequence ever seems to happen before the fourth quarter. So while everyone in the stadium had spent three quarters sitting around eating popcorn I had earned the tidy sum of $8 and hadn't missed a thing. Very enterprising.

I finally hung up my popcorn rack and starched jacket in the tenth grade but at opening game freshman year I remember identifying more closely with my white coated cohorts than the tweed and topsider crowd which had plagued my wonder years.

But last Saturday there I was mixing it up with the same crowd that had been the nemesis of my junior high school autumns. We were making cryptic comments about all the prep alumni who were on hand, cracking the usual F. Scott jokes which go over so well at Princeton games and stumbling over the words of Fair Harvard.

And I began wondering while parading "Down the Street" with the band, if that awareness which had kept me in the visitors' sections of Harvard Stadium for three years had been lost or perhaps this was just the college scene.